Silencing (Fred Speaking)
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• There is a black student newspaper on campus.
• There is a black student internet site.
• There is a black theme area in at least one of the dorms.
• There are several black student organizations that are highly political.
• There are political rallies on campus that involve lots of black students.
• After these recent incidents of graffiti and name calling there have been many letters from black students published in the Daily.
• The Daily has several black writers on staff who often discuss the concerns of black students.

My point is simply that when these things are true, you cannot just blithely say that black students are "silenced" by racism on campus. My own opinion is that the typical response among black students to something like the graffiti incident is to get mad and talk plenty. The subject has been brought up in several of my political science classes.

Off campus, in society at large, we also need evidence of the silencing you talk about. If blacks are silenced by racist speech, we ought to find big differences in the political behavior of blacks and whites in similar social situations. For example, we might ask whether poor blacks vote a lot less than poor whites? If so, can we link it in some way with racist language? If not, how can you say that blacks are being silenced?

Talk about silencing is just rhetoric until you back it up with evidence. Without plenty of evidence, you can't use such a claim as a rationale for a speech code.

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