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Everywhere And Nowhere: The Many Layers of 'Cancel Culture'

Associated Press

   NEW YORK - So you've probably read a lot about "cancel culture." Or
   know about a new poll that shows a plurality of Americans disapproving
   of it. Or you may have heard about a letter in Harper's Magazine
   condemning censorship and intolerance.
   But can you say exactly what "cancel culture" is? Some takes:
   -- "It seems like a buzzword that creates more confusion than clarity,"
   says the author and journalist George Packer, who went on to call it "a
   mechanism where a chorus of voices, amplified on social media, tries to
   silence a point of view that they find offensive by trying to damage or
   destroy the reputation of the person who has given offense."
   -- "I don't think it's real. But there are reasonable people who
   believe in it," says the author, educator and sociologist Tressie
   McMillan Cottom. "From my perspective, accountability has always
   existed. But some people are being held accountable in ways that are
   new to them. We didn't talk about 'cancel culture' when someone was
   charged with a crime and had to stay in jail because they couldn't
   afford the bail."
   -- "'Cancel culture' tacitly attempts to disable the ability of a
   person with whom you disagree to ever again be taken seriously as a
   writer/editor/speaker/activist/intellectual, or in the extreme, to be
   hired or employed in their field of work," says Letty Cottin Pogrebin,
   the author, activist and founding editor of Ms. magazine.
   -- "It means different things to different people," says Ben Wizner,
   director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
   In tweets, online letters, opinion pieces and books, conservatives,
   centrists and liberals continue to denounce what they call growing
   intolerance for opposing viewpoints and the needless ruining of lives
   and careers. A Politico/Morning Consult poll released last week shows
   44% of Americans disapprove of it, 32% approve and the remaining 24%
   had no opinion or didn't know what it was.
   For some, "cancel culture" is the coming of the thought police. For
   others, it contains important chances to be heard that didn't exist
   before.
   Recent examples of unpopular "cancellations" include the owner of a
   chain of food stores in Minneapolis whose business faced eviction and
   calls for boycotts because of racist social media posts by his
   then-teenage daughter, and a data analyst fired by the progressive firm
   Civis Analytics after he tweeted a study finding that nonviolent
   protests increase support for Democratic candidates and violent
   protests decrease it. Civis Analytics has denied he was fired for the
   tweet.
   "These incidents damage the lives of innocent people without achieving
   any noble purpose," Yascha Mounk wrote in The Atlantic last month.
   Mounk himself has been criticized for alleging that "an astonishing
   number of academics and journalists proudly proclaim that it is time to
   abandon values like due process and free speech."
   Debates can be circular and confusing, with those objecting to
   intolerance sometimes openly uncomfortable with those who don't share
   their views. A few weeks ago, more than 100 artists and thinkers
   endorsed a letter co-written by Packer and published by Harper's. It
   warned against a "new set of moral attitudes and political commitments
   that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of
   differences in favor of ideological conformity."
   The letter drew signatories from many backgrounds and political points
   of view, ranging from the far-left Noam Chomsky to the conservative
   David Frum, and was a starting point for contradiction.
   The writer and trans activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, who signed the
   letter, quickly disowned it because she "did not know who else" had
   attached their names. Although endorsers included Salman Rushdie, who
   in 1989 was forced into hiding over death threats from Iranian Islamic
   leaders because of his novel "The Satanic Verses," numerous online
   critics dismissed the letter as a product of elitists who knew nothing
   about censorship.
   One of the organizers of the letter, the writer Thomas Chatterton
   Williams, later announced on Twitter that he had thrown a guest out of
   his home over criticisms of letter-supporter Bari Weiss, the New York
   Times columnist who recently quit over what she called a Twitter-driven
   culture of political correctness. Another endorser, "Harry Potter"
   author J.K. Rowling, threatened legal action against a British news
   site that suggested she was transphobic after referring to
   controversial tweets that she has written in recent months.
   "The only speech these powerful people seem to care about is their
   own," the author and feminist Jessica Valenti wrote in response to the
   Harper's letter. "('Cancel culture' ) is certainly not about free
   speech: After all, an arrested journalist is never referred to as
   'canceled,' nor is a woman who has been frozen out of an industry after
   complaining about sexual harassment. 'Canceled' is a label we all
   understand to mean a powerful person who's been held to account."
   "Cancel culture" is hard to define, in part because there is nothing
   confined about it -- no single cause, no single ideology, no single
   fate for those allegedly canceled.

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