Civil Rights Are Not the Answer to Corporate Censorship

zerothposition (56)in #libertarian • 5 years ago (edited)

On May 3, Human Events published an article by Will Chamberlain titled “Platform Access is a Civil Right”. In it, he compares the de-platforming of political dissidents to the struggles of African-Americans with discrimination before the Civil Rights Act. He then lays out a proposal for defining platform access as a protected civil right which can only be lost through abusing said right to engage in illegal behavior. While Chamberlain's article does recognize that a problem exists which must be solved by using power to stop corporate censorship, his proposed solution cedes ground to leftists while violating property rights and freedom of association. Let us explore Chamberlain's proposal, critique it as needed, and offer a solution that is superior in both substance and political strategy.

The Civil Rights Era

Chamberlain quotes a story from one of Lyndon Johnson's African-American assistants from his time in the Senate in the 1950s, as told in Robert A. Caro's Master of the Senate:

“It's tough enough to get all the way from Washington to Texas. We drive for hours and hours. We get hungry. But there's no place on the road we can stop and go in and eat. We drive some more. It gets pretty hot. We want to wash up. But the only bathroom we're allowed in is usually miles off the main highway. We keep goin' 'til night comes – 'til we get so tired we can't stay awake anymore. We're ready to pull in. But it takes another hour or so to find a place to sleep. You see, what I'm saying is that a colored man's got enough trouble getting across the South on his own, without having a dog along.”

This convinced Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act while he was President in 1964. Chamberlain writes of this story,

“And it should change the view of any holdout radical libertarian who still thinks that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unjust. Because you know what? Private property rights are great. But that does not mean that we, as a society, had to let private restaurant owners and private hotel managers turn away customers because they were black. We didn't have to accept a world in which black people had to defecate on the side of the road because they weren't allowed to use a privately-owned restroom. We, as a society, do not have to allow private companies to violate Americans' civil rights.”

This is a fractally wrong view of the situation. Prior to the Civil Rights Era, Jim Crow laws forced many business owners not to serve customers or hire employees whom they would have served or hired otherwise. This was the true violation of property rights; business owners should be free to associate with black people and to let them use the same facilities as white people if they choose to use their private property in that manner. Indeed, there is little reason to believe that a market would produce such absurd inefficiencies as doubled, separate facilities for whites and non-whites unless it was forced to do so. Racial zoning ordinances were also used to create black ghettos where none previously existed, as occurred in Baltimore in 1910.[1] But the Civil Rights Act did more than remedy this government failure; it produced a new set of problems by replacing forced segregation not with free association, but with forced integration.

Furthermore, racism in the mid-20th century did not exist ex nihilo; it was manufactured in government schools. The racists who held positions of power in politics and business in the 1950s and 60s would have been schoolchildren in the 1910s and 20s. Let us consider an example of what they were taught:

“The Races of Man. -- At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”[2]

With this sort of content being taught to children in public schools, it is no wonder that a large number of them would grow up to be racists. Also note that the decision in the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which desegregated government schools, was a reversal of the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, which upheld “separate but equal.”

Read the entire article at ZerothPosition.com

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