Liberalism (Malik Speaking)
						MAIN PATH: Fred
				Fred

I don't want to rain on your parade, but for African Americans liberalism and liberal society have always been a sham.

We've endured slavery and Jim Crow and decades of discrimination. Liberal saints like Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Jefferson spoke eloquently against slavery, but didn't even free his slaves when he died. That capsulizes what liberalism has been for us. Go back further, to John Locke. He spoke of natural rights, but he owned stock in the Africa Company that sold slaves. The bottom line is that none of the elements of liberalism that we've mentioned were applied to black people in America until very recently.

This is why I say that the basic principles of our social philosophy should be rethought and reformulated with the participation of those who have been excluded in the past. We need to reopen the basic questions:

• What is a private actor?
• How much power should private actors possess?
• What kind of substantive or social equality will be guaranteed to all?
• What kind of freedom of expression will be guaranteed?
• To what extent should the government be 'neutral' with regard to such poisonous political ideas as racism and white supremacy?
• What harm will people have the right to inflict on others?

These are the kinds of questions we have got to get at in a national dialogue that involves people who have never participated before: blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, poor people, and others. One of the reasons we need to restrict hate speech is so that we can have that dialogue instead of silencing the very people who should participate.

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