Forget the ‘Civility Code.’ Hate speech should be booed — even at SLO City Council meetings
In this season of holy days, charity and New Year’s resolutions, we invest in the idea that we can be redeemed.
Who better to remind us of that than Walter Murray, ending the 1850s as one of the most odious men in California history and beginning the 1870s, just after he founded The Tribune, as one of its more enlightened?
This change of heart blossomed forth from the mud slung in political free-for-alls, and I find it impossible to imagine Murray examining his conscience under the prissy constrictions of our county’s new Code of Civility. I thought of Murray when, at SLO City Council’s early December meeting, perennial mayoral candidate Don Hedrick got up to rant the latest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about George Soros and, I’m ashamed to confess, I failed to boo.
Booing is forbidden at council meetings. Only expressions of approval are allowed, namely silently raising hands — an awkwardly fascist gesture. Perhaps, for disapproval, this gesture could be modified by raising the index finger, signifying, “The speaker’s ideas are so abhorrent I need permission to run to the toilet.” In more extreme cases of disapprobation, the council could permit us to raise the neighboring finger and turn our palm away from the speaker.
‘Incivility pledge’
But there are ideas so dangerous or ridiculous they demand an immediate verbal response. I shall not, to quote the county’s Civility Pledge, “make an honest effort to understand” anti-Semitic conspiracies by “listening to understand, not listening to find fault.” I shall not “invite and consider” expressions of racial hatred, allowing them to be “expressed, opposed, and clarified in a constructive manner.” And I shall certainly not “work to propose a course of action of mutual benefit” to myself and bigots. That’s my personal Incivility Pledge.
The problem with Jew-bashing, gay-bashing, Muslim-bashing, racism, misogyny, etc., is it seeks to silence a minority by dehumanizing its humans. To listen with a tolerant smile is to be complicit in the agenda of silencing, victimizing, expelling and exterminating people.
Walter Murray, in 1852, bought the Sonora Herald and, according to a later and approving account by his then business partner, “engineered” the expulsion of all Chinese from Tuolumne County in the course of a week, the beginning of the long history of pogroms and legislation known as the Driving Out.
In 1858 he used the San Francisco Evening Bulletin to promote the San Luis Obispo Vigilance Committee, setting up the virtuous American against, in his words, the “worst Californians and Mexicans” and “the unwashed greaser.” The result: seven dead by hanging, four by shooting. The next year Murray was elected to the State Assembly on the Vigilance ticket but caucused with the pro-slavery Democrats.
No ‘racial utopia’
Then something happened. By 1861, Murray switched to the pro-compromise Unionists, later to the anti-slavery Republicans. After his election to the Assembly in 1859, he never mentioned his vigilance committee in print again, and in an 1870 Tribune editorial he inveighed against all vigilante committees: “The public mind looks with horror upon such occurrences, and deems the community that suffers them as lost to all sense of decency and right.”
The same year, Murray’s Tribune reported on San Luis Obispo’s first assault against a Chinese person, adding “citizens of all shades of politics interfered,” the assailant was sentenced to 20 days, and “when he gets out we would advise him to return to San Francisco.” Of “misbegotten knaves” throwing rocks at the Chinese laundry, the Tribune recommended “such fellows ought to be [im]pounded, as they serve lost canines in New York City; and if not claimed in three days’ time, they should be drowned in the Arroyo de San Luis Obispo, at the expense and under the supervision of the Town Trustees.”
San Luis Obispo didn’t turn into a racial utopia, but at least we didn’t perpetrate the murders and expulsions of other communities of our state and county. Murray’s unrestrained language against bigotry had much to do with that, just as his language two decades before had started the Driving Out. Fascists will never restrain their own words and ideas; kumbayas of the white but polite will not solve our ills. Only by listening to his critics and facing his own fascism with clarity and vehemence did Murray come to plant a seed of tolerance in our community, 150 years ago, with The Tribune.
When I was in the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe in the early ‘90s, I walked every day by a graffito on an abandoned factory: “Cigany do plynu”: “Gypsies to the gas chambers.”
Why didn’t I paint it out? Pure social cowardice. But I witnessed Soros’s Open Society Institute bravely nurture the rebirth of civic society through everything from funding Gypsy schools to providing photocopiers to spread ideas and learning. It thus earned the enmity of the region’s authoritarians, who targeted Soros with the old tropes of Jewish world control straight from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a century-old Russian forgery. From Putin to Donald Trump, who bizarrely accused Soros of organizing the migrant caravans, to Donald Hedrick, who thinks Soros is messing with our voting machines.
This Christmas and Hanukkah, let’s remember that anti-Semites deserve one form of civility: the belief that, when we address their hateful prejudice as uncivilly as it deserves, they have the humanity to change.
James Papp is an architectural historian, co-owner of heritage tourism company SLO Walkabout, and member and former chair of the city of San Luis Obispo’s Cultural Heritage Committee. He writes an occasional column for The Tribune.
This story was originally published December 16, 2019 at 11:02 AM.
