Tolkkinen: Let’s stop canceling each other for voicing our opinions

ST. JOSEPH, MINN. – When Emma Lamatsch was a high school junior in Arden Hills, she was carpooling with two other girls when they spotted a police officer.

One friend, who was biracial, said the country should get rid of all cops.

Lamatsch, who is white, objected, asking what the country would look like with no cops. To her, it seemed like it wouldn’t be safe.

Her friend called her racist, and the driver agreed, Lamatsch, now a college freshman, recalled.

“I felt so attacked, and shut down immediately,” Lamatsch told me. The episode ended her friendship with the girls.

How many friendships, like theirs, have been lost in America? We disagree bitterly about so many things, even what is factual truth, and end up walking away from best friends, co-workers, cousins, even parents.

It gets worse when someone tries to interfere with our rights. Someone trying to ban books, or prevent a woman’s right to abortion, prevent agricultural producers from farming a certain way, or forcing us to start driving electric vehicles. (For the record, I want an EV.)

Maybe listening to each other can help us disagree without our relationships ending up on the trash heap, and maybe even change our minds.

That’s the premise behind a new initiative at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph and nearby St. John’s University. Called “Disagreeing Better,” it aims to encourage people to voice opinions without fear, and to disagree respectfully. This past week, they hosted a variety of activities, including a Wednesday night debate on cancel culture that Lamatsch attended along with dozens of other students from St. Ben’s, St. John’s, and the University of St. Thomas, affectionately called Bennies, Johnnies, and Tommies for short.

The debate wasn’t a campaign-style debate, and there were no winners and losers. Instead, it emphasized “a collective search for truth,” according to debate chair Bernie Armada, featuring several speakers who gave their opinion then took questions from the audience. The point was for participants to speak honestly about their views and debate ideas instead of launching personal attacks.

The Disagreeing Better initiative is based on ideas from Braver Angels, a nonprofit organization that formed after the 2016 election to reduce political polarization. It wants people to state their views without fear; it holds that nobody is not worth talking to.

In the debate format, speakers and audience members don’t address each other directly. Instead, they address the debate chair and speak of each other in the third person just like they do in Congress. (“Mr. Speaker, would the lady from Alaska yield …”)

While some students found the format stilted, it shifted attention away from the person speaking and toward the person’s ideas, reducing the chance of anybody feeling personally attacked. More importantly, it provided a few extra beats between the exchange of ideas, giving people time to think and reflect.

In this space, it would be OK to say that America should get rid of police departments. It would also be OK to argue that police departments are necessary to keep social order.

Communication in the United States needs all the help it can get these days, and the cancel culture topic meshed well with the overall theme of disagreeing better. Interestingly, the three students who defended the idea that cancel culture is inhibiting free speech in our country were all from the Bahamas. One of them said he had been reprimanded for using terms common in his native culture.

“Cancel culture creates a climate where people are afraid to express their opinions, stifling debates, especially if they hold views that deviate from the popular or progressive perspective,” said senior Canaan Cooper. “Even today, in this very room, I can guarantee there might be some of you out there who are afraid to voice your own concerns.”

He’s right. People who hold unpopular beliefs or offend others get pilloried in society or lose their jobs, whether it’s Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling who has criticized the transgender community, or Erika López Prater, the adjunct art professor who who lost her job at Hamline University last year after a Muslim student complained that she showed images of the Prophet Muhammad.

We can all learn a lot more about each other if we can speak without fear. I hope the current generation of Bennies, Johnnies and Tommies lead us into that future.

One postscript: A common misconception that arose among students as well as faculty was the belief that hate speech is illegal in the United States. The belief went uncorrected during the event, and because it was so unquestioningly believed to be true, I do want to point out that hate speech is completely legal in the United States and protected by the Constitution. Hate crimes are different; crimes committed because of the victim’s protected class, like race, religion or sexual orientation, can carry an extra penalty.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated where Emma Lamatsch attended high school, which was in Arden Hills.