Over the past week I’ve been thinking a lot about a question a reader emailed me a few months ago.
To paraphrase, he asked: How would you feel if a bunch of U-T readers got together and demanded you were fired for something you wrote?
That question was in a response to a column I wrote encouraging people to retire the phrase “cancel culture.”
My thinking was, and remains, that when exercised appropriately cancelling someone is about ability. It is a legitimate way to punch back at someone — typically a public figure — who is powerful and caused harm, while it also s people who have been victimized.
At the same time, I said there are fair concerns to be raised about how cancelling could potentially limit public discourse and the healthy sharing of different perspectives — if it goes too far and leaves private citizens fearful, for instance. But we can’t get into the nuance of that conversation if people keep using the catch-all term “cancel culture” instead of saying what they mean.
While the reader who emailed that question disagreed with my assessment, I don’t think he meant the question as a threat or in a mean-spirited way. We had exchanged a couple of emails, and my response to him, more or less, was “Readers have no obligation to my work; and if I ever did something harmful, racist, bigoted, etc. they are well within their rights to voice their displeasure.”
I hadn’t thought about that exchange much since then, until this past week, in light of two incidents involving other journalists.
Last week it came to light that Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur “genius grant” winner, was hired at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but not given the same designation of tenure that others holding her position as a Knight chair have historically been given. This tenure denial came despite her receiving enthusiastic from the school’s faculty and dean.
Reporting from multiple outlets suggests the issue originated with the university’s board of trustees. Students and faculty at UNC have alleged that the trustees are playing politics with Hannah-Jones’s typically tenured position because prominent conservatives — among them former President Donald Trump — have waged a war against Hannah-Jones for years.
She led the New York Times Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project, which highlighted the role of slavery in American history, much to the ire of conservatives.
Last week the Associated Press also caused controversy in journalism circles after the news service abruptly fired Emily Wilder, a 22-year-old reporter in Arizona who had recently been targeted and harassed by a mob of right-wing commentators because of her pro-Palestinian activism in college.
Wilder, who is Jewish and began her job with the AP just three weeks prior, did not cover Palestine, Israel or the Middle East in her role at the AP. Officially, the AP said they fired her because she violated a social media policy, although she has said the AP has not told her which social media entries got her into trouble.
These incidents dovetail with a variety of issues from “cancel culture” — from the hypocrisy many conservative free speech advocates display, to the war conservative activists have waged on academia, and the ways news organizations have failed to protect journalists from online harassment.
The reason these incidents strike such a chord with me is they made me think differently about that reader’s question. In retrospect I realize we were having two different conversations — one about ability for behavior that causes real harm and another about tolerance for differing opinions.
In some ways it’s summed up by a question I think we should all ask ourselves any time there is an attempt to cancel someone: Do we want to see someone cancelled because they caused genuine harm, or do we want them punished because they expressed a view we disagree with?
I think the reader’s anxiety, one shared by a significant chunk of the U.S. population, has a lot more to do with the second half of that question.
A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from July found that 56 percent of Americans think cancel culture is a “very big” or “somewhat big problem” in the U.S. When YouGov issued a follow up open-ended poll trying to get insight into why people feel this way, a significant portion of the answers had to do with how respondents felt it negatively impacted free speech and the open exchange of ideas.
“It takes freedom of speech away from Americans that don’t agree with the masses on social media,” one YouGov respondent said. “It prevents difficult conversations from being had, mainly because there are those that don’t want to hear logic and reason.”
I think what happened to Hannah-Jones and Wilder last week are clear examples of this in action. It wasn’t about holding them able for anything “harmful” that they did, it was about punishing two women because one produced work that made folks uncomfortable and the other expressed an opinion that some simply disagreed with.
I’m not sure how we solve this problem. How do we make sure that folks are “cancelled” because of genuinely harmful actions rather than because they said something disagreeable — and maybe controversial — but not actually harmful?
There are too many bad actors out there of all political stripes who are more interested in the latter. And obviously there is debate that can be had about what’s the line between a harmful view and a simply controversial or divergent one.
Still, maybe a good place to start is by embracing a culture of openness and ability with ourselves as individuals.
We need to be open to having conversations with folks we disagree with, and we need to simultaneously holding people able for harmful or hateful actions they might engage in. We can’t do that honestly, though, unless we hold ourselves able as well.
We should ask ourselves that question about why we want someone cancelled each and every time an incident comes up. And if our reaction is driven by us disagreeing with what they said rather than what harm they did, we need to check ourselves and maybe log off of Twitter.
