Recommended Citation
Jeremiah Chin, Antimatters: The Curious Case of Confederate Monuments, 103 B.U. L. REV. 311 (2023), https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-articles/1090
Publication Title
Boston University Law Review
Keywords
First Amendment, free speech, confederate monuments, government speech, hate speech
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Confederate monuments sit at a crossroads of speech frameworks as contested government speech, as concrete edifices of hate speech, and as key protest sites. The interplay of state law and speech doctrines in states like Alabama and Florida has cemented monuments as physical representations of government speech that municipal governments cannot speak on. To understand the confounding ways that doctrinal principles take on inverse implications, this Article draws on the concept of antimatter in physics—matter that has the same mass and properties of ordinary matter but with the opposite charge—to analyze doctrinal intersections of constitutional law that are made to appear doctrinally neutral or generally applicable but are contextually charged with the full force of white supremacy.
Physicists refer to the observable material that makes up the known universe as matter but have theorized and identified corresponding material that has the same mass but the opposite properties, known as antimatter. Although physicists are certain that antimatter exists, its nature makes its presence difficult to articulate, and represents an asymmetry in the visible universe due to our limitations in perceiving the phenomena. Thus, a limited perception prevents people from understanding antimatters, and, theoretically, may be due to antimatter having a different relationship to time itself—antimatter travels backwards, or at least in a different direction in time than the known, observable universe.
Framing the practical contradictions created by the doctrinal intersections, I argue that state legislation has turned Confederate monuments into antimatters—all the properties of speech, but obfuscated by state legislation, becoming intangible legal phenomena that are in transit back in time. Governments no longer need to express explicit support of white supremacy. By providing special protection for these Confederate monuments, states demonstrate allegiance to the ideology the statues represent. Theorizing antimatters thus reframes the doctrines of constitutional law by focusing on phenomena rendered intangible by rhetorics of neutrality and objectivity to contextualize the operation of power and belonging in the law—like Confederate monuments that regulate time and place in the name of white supremacy under the protection of neutral, doctrinal applications.