LaRouche posters spark charges of hate speech

Shields for Congress campaign spotlights college speech policy

By Greg Zeman
The Guardsman

Summer Shields for Congress campaign staff operate an information booth at Ocean campus on Feb. 2. Some materials displayed by the campaign stirred controversy among City College faculty and staff. RAMSEY EL-QARE / THE GUARDSMAN
Summer Shields for Congress campaign staff operate an information booth at Ocean campus on Feb. 2. Some materials displayed by the campaign stirred controversy among City College faculty and staff. RAMSEY EL-QARE / THE GUARDSMAN

Campaign materials printed by the LaRouche Political Action Committee and distributed at an on-campus information booth by the Summer Shields for Congress campaign have inspired controversy at City College.

Shields is a self-proclaimed “LaRouche Democrat” running in the 8th Congressional District for the seat currently held by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Joelle Wright of the LPAC said Shields receives political support from the committee and that they endorse him as a candidate.

One particularly incendiary poster depicts President Obama drawn as a parrot with the words “Obama is a cracker” emblazoned across the bottom. Shields insisted the meaning of the poster is purely political and not at all related to race.

“He’s a puppet. He’s not his own man,” Shields said of Obama. “This man is working on behalf of an entity that is against a large portion of this population, and that is the recognition coming out across the board inside the United States.”

While Shields did not say explicitly that Obama is a cracker, he did say, “I consider him a parrot.” When pressed to explain why the word “cracker” was used instead of “parrot” on his campaign materials, Shields said, “You know what it is? It’s Obama saying, ‘I’m a cracker! I’m a cracker!’”

Delante Bess, an LPAC activist and Shields campaign organizer, was less equivocal in his explanation of the controversial image.

“If you really want to get into the history of it, you look at slaves and slave masters,” Bess said. “Masters used a house slave to whip into shape the other slaves — to put them into order. It was a way of controlling those slaves.”

Bess added that he views Obama as a puppet.

Shields’ campaign staff, while operating an information booth on Feb. 2, refused to comment on the image or any other aspect of the campaign, claiming they did not “give interviews.” They directed questions to the Web site, but did not specify whether they meant the Shields for Congress Web site or the LPAC site.

Shields said as a general policy, lower-level staff do not speak with reporters. Both Shields and Bess maintained that the policy was nothing more than a “delegation of responsibility.”

But some City College students, like Marquis, who declined to give his last name, also tried to get answers from the booth staff and received none.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of weird for a white person to call a black person a cracker?” Marquis asked the campaign staff, who looked at him and said nothing.

“Leave it to a white person to make a hierarchy of blackness,” Marquis said.

City College trustee Chris Jackson is not happy about the posters, but said there is little that can be done about them. Under City College’s current policy, outside groups only need to sign a form to distribute materials on campus.

“There really is no policy to kick people off the campus for doing hate speech. We had a policy that would actually remove these people, but we were sued by the Jews for Jesus,” Jackson said, referring to Jews for Jesus v. Fotch, which decided City College’s current free speech policy.

“I did not vote for that, not even to settle, because I thought it really sent the message to everybody: come one come all. Do what you want on campus, if you get kicked off, then sue. It’s kind of like inviting all the agitators to our campus to do the most outrageous thing possible to get a payday,” Jackson added.

Shields claimed the controversial posters, including a picture of Obama with a moustache added to resemble Adolf Hitler, are useful tools in building a political base for “The LaRouche Plan,” a massive, New Deal-like economic map for America.

The grand scope of the plan includes a youth-based workforce, like the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the construction of a magnetically-levitated super-train from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego, the southern tip of South America.

“We have the potential to put in place policies we never imagined, and it’s typified by the rail-link,” Shields said, adding that other economies like those of Russia, India and China were reshaping the world. “The U.S could be playing a crucial role in that, and if I have my way with the campaign, we will be.”

The general stance of the campaign on the posters is that they are protected free-speech and intended to be humorous.

“You provoke irony to get the population to move,” Bess said. “If you want to communicate the highest, profound, insightful conceptions to human beings, they are more willing to assimilate ideas when you use comedy.”

Jackson isn’t laughing. “We cannot kick them off, we can only ask them to sign the form — which calls into question: Why would anybody ever sign a form when there is no penalty for not doing it?”