As a proud graduate of Teachers College Columbia University, I’m surprised and outraged by the recent hate crime on campus. As the media have been reporting, someone placed a noose on the office door of an African American faculty member. CNN has been covering the story all day, and local New York City media, including the Columbia Spectator, covered the student protest held in response to the incident.

As a graduate, I feel confident that the school community will rally in support of the targeted professor. However, I recall incidents of racial bias at Columbia as far back as the 1980s, when I was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College, and we members of Harambe, the SLC Black students organization, traveled to Columbia to protest on-campus bias and express our solidarity with other students of color.

It’s always disheartening when these incidents occur, but especially when they happen on college campuses, as was the case at the University of Maryland several weeks ago (see my earlier blog). In a free and open society, undergraduate and graduate students, especially, should engage in public discourse. We must claim a culture of open expression here in the US if we want these hateful expressions of suppressed anger to cease. That means, we have to allow the issue or idea that makes our blood boil to be openly discussed – and challenged. As difficult as it may be sometimes, free and open discourse is the only way to sustain a civil society. It is, in fact, our duty, as citizens in a participatory democracy, to encourage open debate.

This focus on free and open discourse might seem like a digression from the primary issue at hand – the expression of hate, specifically racism against African Americans – that continues to plague this country. (400 years? As I asked in my first Jena 6 blog, what time is it?)

I believe, however, that American free speech requires a basic level of training. Folk need to be schooled in appropriate forms of expression, like a rally or teach-in or blog entry, and to know their history enough to distinguish these acts of free speech from criminal acts of bias, like hanging a noose.