December 26, 1994 Contact: Francine Tyler (408/459-2495)
CONFERENCE ON "SURVIVOR STORIES" AND THEIR ROLE IN LEGISLATION WILL TAKE PLACE JANUARY 13 AND 14 AT UC SANTA CRUZ
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SANTA CRUZ, CAWhen does regulating "hate speech" against past victims of human rights abuse conflict with the principles underlying the First Amendment? How does the American history of slavery affect the meaning of recent efforts to honor the Confederate flag?
These are two of the questions that will be discussed at "Constitutions and Survivor Stories," a conference taking place January 13 and 14 at the Oakes Learning Center on the University of California, Santa Cruz, campus.
Free and open to the public, the conference will examine how stories told by survivors of persecution, bigotry, satanic abuse, drug abuse, and other traumatic experiences give voice to some political agendas and silence others. Featured speakers will include prominent legal scholars from across the nation and humanists and social scientists from the University of California system.
"We sometimes think of this country as having been spared the burdens of history that make it so difficult for liberalism to thrive anywhere," said Robert Meister, a UCSC professor of politics and co-organizer of the event with UCSC associate professor of women's studies Wendy Brown. "Yet many of the most interesting aspects of our liberal Constitution are rooted in our history of political and social upheavaland in the respects in which many Americans see themselves as survivors of historical persecution."
A continuing challenge for our Constitution has been to preserve the memory of these experiences so that negative historical patterns will not be repeated, Meister said. The scheduling of the conference on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, birthday weekend is appropriate for that reason, he said. "His entire life was about how to heal the wound of slavery without forgetting it," Meister explained.
The conference is one of a statewide series on censorship, sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies and the Legal Studies Program at UCSC in conjunction with the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. more
Conferences are taking place at Stanford University, the University of Southern California, Cal Tech, the Huntington Library, and all the University of California campuses through the winter and spring, Meister said. The series will culminate in an event at the Getty Center in December 1995 involving representatives from all the conferences.
The following is a description of the UCSC conference's program:
The Harm of Hate Speech and the Moral Logic of Survivorship Will the Constitution allow the U.S. to regulate hate speech? That's the subject of discussion in the first segment of the conference, taking place Friday, January 13, from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m.
"The argument in favor of regulation is that hate speech can affect the people at whom it's aimed in such a way that it creates an unequal workplace or learning environment," said Richard Wasserstrom, professor emeritus of philosophy at UCSC. "There's been some discussion of whether campuses should regulate hate speech in some way, and whether it is constitutional to discipline people for using racial epithets in some contexts," he added.
Wasserstrom will take part in a roundtable discussion with two other UCSC professors: Associate Professor Wendy Brown and Professor Andrei Markovits, chairperson of the Politics Board.
Preceding the roundtable will be presentations by Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley; Eugene Volokh, acting professor of law at UCLA; and Jeremy Elkins of the Legal Studies Program at UCSC.
The Commemoration and Reenactment of Abuse In the second segment of the conference, taking place Friday from 7 to 9:30 p.m., two of the most important and original scholars of American constitutional history will discuss the so-called "Confederate flag controversy," which pits Southerners' claims to pride in the South against the claims of descendants of slaves.
Debating the issue will be professors Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas's Law School and Akhil Reed Amar of Yale University's Law School. James Forman, Jr., the author of Driving Dixie Down: Removing the Confederate Flag from Southern State Capitols, will comment.
Memory, Suffering, and Repetition The third session, taking place Saturday, January 14 from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., will discuss the political and legal debate about free speech and censorship in the context of memory, awareness, and identity. more
Hayden White, university professor emeritus and professor emeritus of history of consciousness at UCSC, will discuss how rewriting and repeating history functions as part of political discourse. Professor Guyora Binder of SUNY at Buffalo's Law School will talk about the ways in which the imagery of slavery has entered into the idea of emancipation in America's legal and social history. Finally, Susan Harding, a professor of anthropology and acting dean of the Division of Social Sciences at UCSC, will discuss the ways in which recovered memories of satanic abuse have become a unifying feature in religious movements made up of self-professed survivors of such experiences.
The commentator for this panel will be Helene Moglen, professor of literature at UCSC.
Political Foundations and Survivor Stories The fourth session of the conference will take place Saturday from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. and relate the themes of memory and repetition to the political order.
Frances Olsen, a professor of law at UCLA, will argue that U.S. courts tend to condone the suppression of antireligious speech on the grounds that the U.S. was settled by survivors of religious persecution.
Craig Reinarman, an associate professor of sociology at UCSC, will argue that because society hears little from people who use illegal drugs without negative effects, it has a warped vision of the effect these drugs have on people.
"We know that the vast majority of drinkers aren't alcoholics, because we hear stories from people who drink responsibly," said Reinarman. However, in the case of illegal drugs, because they're not legal, he said, "the only people we hear from are recovered addicts, and we legislate based on the worst-case scenario."
Meister, the conference co-organizer, will sum up the conference, demonstrating links between American constitutional history and that of other countries. The commentator for this segment will be Professor Daniel Ortiz of the University of Virginia's Law School.
For more information on attending the conference, call UCSC's Center for Cultural Studies at (408) 459-4899. ### (This release is also available on UC NewsWire, the University of California's electronic news service. To access by modem, dial 1-209-244-6971.)
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