Listening to talking heads on both the left and the right, you’d think that America is facing a freedom of speech crisis. But the crisis isn’t what it’s made out to be. The Jonathan Chaits and Frank Brunis and Sean Hannitys of the world are not lacking in a freedom to speak, nor are the white conservatives on college campuses they seem so worried about. It’s women and people of color who struggle the most finding a platform – but there is a conspicuous lack of concern about that by free speech crusaders.

When Bill O’Reilly and the late Roger Ailes were paid tens of millions of dollars for stepping down from their jobs – far more than the settlements that the women they were accused of sexually harassing received – they weren’t being silenced. And Bill Maher getting deserved blowback for saying “house nigga” doesn’t make him struggle to speak freely.

Those of us who are routinely called “bitch”, “faggot” or “nigger” on the regular –and who are threatened with violence and death – have a much harder time accessing the right of “free speech”. Just look at what happened to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Princeton professor and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, last week.

Taylor is a rising public intellectual, and the students of Hampshire College asked her to be their commencement speaker. She gave a forceful, riveting address in which she correctly said that Donald Trump had “fulfilled the campaign promises of a campaign organized and built upon racism, corporatism and militarism”. While it was excellent, it wasn’t really a matter of national news. But Fox News decided it was and whipped up hysteria around her.

Not long after a “Fox story and video were published”, Taylor wrote, “my work email was inundated with vile and violent statements. I have been repeatedly called ‘nigger,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘cunt,’ ‘dyke,’ ‘she-male,’ and ‘coon’ – a clear reminder that racial violence is closely aligned with gender and sexual violence. I have been threatened with lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum put in my head.” She had to cancel talks in Seattle and San Diego.

Considering recent news that Trump’s Twitter account seems to be cultivating millions of bots to act as an army of propaganda trolls, what happened to Taylor is no surprise and seems to come from a playbook I know well.

Last year the Guardian commissioned a report which analyzed the comments left on thousands of writers’ stories (the majority written by white men) over a 10-year period. It found that none of the 10 writers targeted with most abuse were white men: they were all either women and/or people of color.

The uncompensated cost of being the target of such viciousness takes a toll. Indeed, I went through my Facebook inbox of unsolicited messages over the weekend. They included messages such as “Trump will fuck your mother”, that I was a “fuckin nigger piece of shit”, and that I was a “satanic cunt” who should “look everywhere on the street”.

That wasn’t the first time that I’d been physically threatened by an internet message. I’ve not yet had to cancel a live event from such threats, but I realize in this gun-soaked country someone like me will get shot in public eventually. Cases like Gabby Giffords in Arizona or Jo Cox in England show just how real the danger of extremist gunmen is.

Kim Weaver of Iowa isn’t going to risk it. The Democrat was planning to run against Congressman Steve King, one of the most xenophobic bigots in the House of Representatives (which is no easy place to stand out for racism).

But over the weekend she dropped out, saying she had “received very alarming acts of intimidation, including death threats” and that, if she were to quit her job to campaign full time, “recent legislation on health insurance” and “the possibility of seeking a new job after the election” if she lost would result in “too much of a risk for me in not being able to secure health insurance”.

The threats coming against Weaver, Taylor, my colleagues Jessica Valenti and Lindy West and myself are not coming out of a vacuum. They are happening in a society where violence against women is so rewarded, the NFL will hire men who beat women before they’ll hire a man who kneeled against protest during the national anthem.

They are happening in a country where the majority of white voters elected a man who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” without consent. They are happening in a country where, as Business Insider put it, “Trump has unleashed a white crime wave” against people of color from Maryland to Kansas to Oregon.

They are happening in a country where Confederate monuments are removed at night (for the safety of those removing them) but where pro-Confederate forces feel safe to carrying torches. They are happening in a country where an academic philosophy journal will publish a Black Lives Matter symposium without any black philosophers.

And they are happening in a country where black children are shot by the police, where the greatest basketball player of all time has a racial slur painted on his home, and where a noose was found at the nation’s newest black history museum.

“The threat of violence, whether it is implied or acted on, is intended to intimidate and to silence,” Taylor wrote. I’d add that the intent of ignoring such threats is also to intimidate and silence (ie, I never saw Ann Coulter, Hannity or Chait wring their hands over Taylor’s “free speech”, and Bruni actually published a column arguing against calling out campus racism the same week Taylor was kept from visiting a campus because of violent racist threats.)

Women, writers of color and politicians standing up to racism and sexism are threatened every day to this end in a blatant attempt to suppress our speech. Sometimes it works.

As James Baldwin says near the end of I Am Not Your Negro: “You talk about making it as a writer by yourself [but] you have to be able to turn off all the antenna with which you live, because once you turn your back on this society you may die. You may die. And it’s very hard to sit at a typewriter and concentrate on that if you are afraid of the world around you.”



For Taylor, Weaver and those of us who get emailed threats of violence, we have a much higher price to pay for “free” speech. That price may be death – and I am sick of the Trumps of the world for fanning these flames, and of the Brunis and Chaits pretending like they have it worse than the rest of us.