aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, May 25, 2007

Tolerance vs. Equality & Justice

Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire sits on my bedside table. A small book, it’s a long read. In the first chapter she observes that once the call was for “liberty and justice for all.” Now, instead of calling for “equality,” we call for “tolerance.”

Marc Fisher brings us an example of how this plays out. A cashier at the University of Maryland’s College Park campus food co-op was offended by a student’s t-shirt. Said she, “I won’t ring you up.” The response was a model of modern tolerance:

The collective, which rents space from the university, announced last week that it would serve any customer who was not physically or verbally abusive, but that any worker who was offended by a customer’s politics could discreetly slip away and find another clerk to serve the patron.

Imagine that at the lunch counter. We could have black waiters wait on black patrons, or gay on gay, or Christian on Christian, Jew on Jew and so on. No more need to negotiate, instead this ideal has us living in our separate equality. The logical extension of our tolerant accommodation.

[T]he students seem blind to the core rationale for freedom of speech, the idea that a marketplace of ideas is only worthwhile when it is truly, wholly unfettered.

Gretchen Metzelaars, director of Maryland’s student union, met with the collective “trying to help them come to the conclusion that they must abide by the university’s human rights code,” which prohibits discrimination based on age, sex, race and, yes, political beliefs.

Despite hours of conversation, “it became apparent that they were not coming to the right conclusion,” Metzelaars said. “So we delivered it to them.” This week, she told the collective that if it discriminates again, it will have 60 days to vacate the premises.

“They can’t see that this is discrimination,” she told me. “They’re more committed to their righteousness than they are to the rights of other people. The fact is, you have to serve everyone.”

In the end the students still don’t get it. I’m not sure that most of us do. The move towards tolerance means a shift away from equality and justice. That shift brings with it the assumption that differences cannot be negotiated. Instead they can only be tolerated.

But the flip side of the tolerance coin is the legitimation of intolerance for those incapable of exercising tolerance. (James Dobson, Osama bin Laden, PETA, and ACT-UP spring to my mind.) And we miss the opportunity to make a more just and equal society for all.

SEE ALSO: The Limits of Tolerance and Tolerance as Intolerance.