African Americans Can Only Be Black.

Free Republic: According to the Omaha World-Herald, several students at Westside High School were punished after they “plastered the school on Monday” — Martin Luther King Day — “with posters advocating that a white student from South Africa receive the `Distinguished African American Student Award’ next year.” The posters featured a picture of junior Trevor Richards, whose family moved to Omaha from Johannesburg in 1998, smiling and giving a thumbs-up.

School officials tore the posters down, apparently in response to complaints from a few black students, and denounced them as “inappropriate and insensitive.” Trevor was suspended for two days, according to his mother, and two of his friends were also penalized for helping to put the posters up. A fourth student, the World-Herald reported, “was punished for circulating a petition Tuesday morning in support of the boys. The petition criticized the practice of recognizing only black student achievement with the award.”

The students were punished, in other words, for expressing an opinion — that it is wrong to create an award for which only black students can qualify. That is hardly an outlandish point of view. There are 1,843 students at Westside High, of whom fewer than 70 are black. Why should 96.2 percent of the student body be barred from a school honor on the basis of their race? Isn’t that just the sort of offensive racial thinking that Dr. King condemned?

A message is not “inappropriate and insensitive” merely because some people complain about it — not even if those people aren’t white, and not even if the message is politically incorrect. The real outrage at Westside High last week was that four students were disciplined for exercising a freedom guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Other students may not have liked what they had to say. That didn’t entitle them to suppress their speech.

The First Amendment says nothing about a right not to be offended. The risk of finding someone else’s speech offensive is the price each of us pays for our own free speech. Free people don’t run to court — or to the principal — when they encounter a message they don’t like. They answer it with one of their own. [What Do You Think? Comment on this Post!]