“I understand that the reporting is not finished on the final two episodes.
The interviewer’s next question was about the podcast Reply All, which had reported on allegations of unjust workplace dynamics at the magazine Bon Appétit but canceled the series before it was finished, because similar accusations arose against Reply All’s own host.
Either there are no consequences, or people lose their jobs, or other sort of sweeping grand gestures that don’t actually solve the problem at hand.” Yet in the next breath, Gay seems to acknowledge that punishments are not being meted out fairly: “The problem is that we haven’t figured out what consequences should be,” she says. I like to think of it as consequence culture, where when you make a mistake-and we all do, by the way-there should be consequences.” To illustrate how greater specificity could keep the two sides of the debate from talking past each other, consider a 2021 Mother Jones article with the headline “ Roxane Gay Says Cancel Culture Does Not Exist.” Indeed, that’s precisely what Gay, a best-selling feminist author, tells her interviewer: Cancel culture, she says, “is this boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior and when their faves experience consequences. If everyone were more specific, people who come down on opposite sides of the abstract, 30,000-foot debate over cancel culture might find some agreement about concrete cases. And they reserve the most extreme extralegal punishments, such as public shaming, shunning, or depriving people of their livelihood, for extreme cases. They frown on arbitrary or excessive sanctions. But fair societies also levy such sanctions in ways that the average citizen understands and accepts. Inevitably, fair societies impose social sanctions on some bad behaviors.
In my view, Margaret Atwood, Cornel West, Deirdre McCloskey, and my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams-among many other authors who signed the controversial 2020 Harper’s Magazine letter on free expression-were right to lament waning “norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”.politics that condemns others too often and leaves too little room for forgiving them. Like former President Barack Obama, I fret about a puritanical streak in U.S.Although I dislike the term cancel culture because of its vagueness and potential for misinterpretation, I tend to think that “cancel culture” is a problem, by which I mean: Likewise, people who laud “accountability culture” or dismiss cancel culture as a myth should be told: Be more specific about what you consider fair punishment, unless you’re literally saying that everyone fired or stigmatized for speech was treated justly.Ĭonor Friedersdorf: The threat to free speech, beyond ‘cancel culture’īefore going any further, I’ll lay my cards on the table.
They should be told: Be more specific, unless you’re literally saying that no one should ever be fired or stigmatized for anything they say or do. People who complain about “cancel culture” should always clarify what they oppose.
Using any one term to frame such varied controversies hides the actual lines of disagreement. One faction invokes the term cancel culture as shorthand for a range of complaints: for instance, that figures such as the political analyst David Shor and Emmanuel Cafferty, a California utility-company worker, lost their jobs after innocent acts that provoked unreasonable offense in others that universities have unjustly punished hundreds of scholars for protected speech in recent years or that so many Americans are self-censoring that deliberative democracy is threatened.Īnother faction dismisses complaints about cancel culture and reframes the status quo as “ accountability culture.” This shorthand encompasses what many regard as long-overdue consequences for figures such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, two entertainment-industry giants credibly accused by multiple women of sexual assault, and the former NBA owner Donald Sterling, who was pushed out of the league after recordings of his racist comments surfaced. The majority of Americans who insist that “cancel culture” is a problem and the minority who counter that it is a fraud, a myth, or a moral panic are too often talking past one another.