Hate Speech / Free Speech

Carla Peperzak spent her late teens and early 20s fighting Nazi Germany’s genocide in Holland. She’s now fighting hate by preaching respect and empathy in classrooms and lecture halls.

Cherie Buckner-Webb isn’t just Idaho’s only African-American state legislator – she’s the first and only. When she goes to events in other states, “I say I live in Boise, Idaho, and I don’t know who’s more alarmed – black folks or white folks,” she said with a laugh. “It doesn’t bother me, but it’s my goal to change it.”

Several speakers were featured Thursday at the Peaceful Communities Roundtable forum. Their subject: criminal justice reform.

Gonzaga students can share their experiences of being a person of color on a predominantly white campus in a private setting called the fishbowl.

In December 2016, the national spotlight fell on a Whitefish resident and influential racist named Richard Spencer. The town became the target of an anti-Semitic “troll storm” in which the Rostons and their neighbors received threats and had their home addresses shared online. At the time, there were only three Jewish families in the resort town of 7,000 people.

She grew up amid the church bombings in Birmingham, Alabama, of the 1960s – and went on to study at the Sorbonne. She was fired by the University of California system – then became a distinguished professor emerita at UC-Santa Cruz. She was an outspoken communist and radical opponent of racism who spent months on the FBI’s Most Wanted List (for charges of which she was ultimately acquitted).

Red or blue. Donkey or elephant. Liberal or conservative. For Dan Garrity and his broadcast journalism students, politics is looking awfully binary these days. Like two sports teams pitted against each other, the TV news reporter turned Gonzaga professor said the United States is as divided as he can remember – with lines drawn, and little effort to empathize with ideas on the other side.