The chalkboard incident that made me stop assuming intent

Back in 2018 I was a junior at Ohio State and someone wrote a pretty harsh slogan about a campus policy on the main quad chalkboard. A group of students scrubbed it off within 20 minutes and posted about it online, calling it hate speech. I was ready to jump in and argue that erasing it was censorship, but then I talked to a girl who was actually targeted by the message. She told me, "You don't get to decide how scared I feel." That moment flipped something for me, I still believe in open expression but I finally got that context matters more than the principle. Has anyone else had a campus moment where they changed their whole stance after hearing the other side?

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gracelane28d ago

There was a piece in the Atlantic a while back about the whole "counterspeech vs. no platform" debate on campuses. The writer talked about how the ACLU even wrestles with this stuff now. Their old stance was pure free speech absolutism, but they started looking at how speech actually lands on different people. The part that stuck with me was this idea that a principle on paper and a principle in real life are two different things. Hearing the girl say "you don't get to decide how scared I feel" is the real life version. Reading about it in a magazine is one thing. Living it is another.

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