Political correctness: how the right invented

a phantom enemy | US politics | The

Guardian
Moira Weigel

Nathalie Lees Illustration: Nathalie Lees

For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting nemesis has been a favourite tactic of the
right – and Donald Trump’s victory is its greatest triumph

Wed 30 Nov 2016 17.00 AEDT

Last modified on Thu 26 Nov 2020 01.37 AEDT

Three weeks ago, around a quarter of the American population elected a demagogue with no
prior experience in public service to the presidency. In the eyes of many of his supporters,
this lack of preparation was not a liability, but a strength. Donald Trump had run as a
candidate whose primary qualification was that he was not “a politician”. Depicting yourself
as a “maverick” or an “outsider” crusading against a corrupt Washington establishment is the
oldest trick in American politics – but Trump took things further. He broke countless
unspoken rules regarding what public figures can or cannot do and say.

Every demagogue needs an enemy. Trump’s was the ruling elite, and his charge was that they
were not only failing to solve the greatest problems facing Americans, they were trying to
stop anyone from even talking about those problems. “The special interests, the arrogant
media, and the political insiders, don’t want me to talk about the crime that is happening in
our country,” Trump said in one late September speech. “They want me to just go along with
the same failed policies that have caused so much needless suffering.”

Trump claimed that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were willing to let ordinary
Americans suffer because their first priority was political correctness. “They have put
political correctness above common sense, above your safety, and above all else,” Trump
declared after a Muslim gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. “I refuse to
be politically correct.” What liberals might have seen as language changing to reflect an
increasingly diverse society – in which citizens attempt to avoid giving needless offence to
one another – Trump saw a conspiracy.

Throughout an erratic campaign, Trump consistently blasted political correctness, blaming it

for an extraordinary range of ills and using the phrase to deflect any and every criticism.
During the first debate of the Republican primaries, Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked
Trump how he would answer the charge that he was “part of the war on women”.

“You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals’,”
Kelly pointed out. “You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty
picture to see her on her knees …”

“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” Trump answered, to
audience applause. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, I don’t frankly have time for
total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.”

Trump used the same defence when critics raised questions about his statements on
immigration. In June 2015, after Trump referred to Mexicans as “rapists”, NBC, the network
that aired his reality show The Apprentice, announced that it was ending its relationship with
him. Trump’s team retorted that, “NBC is weak, and like everybody else is trying to be
politically correct.”

In August 2016, after saying that the US district judge Gonzalo Curiel of San Diego was unfit
to preside over the lawsuit against Trump Universities because he was Mexican American
and therefore likely to be biased against him, Trump told CBS News that this was “common
sense”. He continued: “We have to stop being so politically correct in this country.” During
the second presidential debate, Trump answered a question about his proposed “ban on
Muslims” by stating: “We could be very politically correct, but whether we like it or not,
there is a problem.”

Trump and his followers never defined 'political correctness”, or specified who was
enforcing it. They did not have to

Every time Trump said something “outrageous” commentators suggested he had finally
crossed a line and that his campaign was now doomed. But time and again, Trump supporters
made it clear that they liked him because he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. Fans
praised the way Trump talked much more often than they mentioned his policy proposals. He
tells it like it is, they said. He speaks his mind. He is not politically correct.

Trump and his followers never defined “political correctness”, or specified who was
enforcing it. They did not have to. The phrase conjured powerful forces determined to
suppress inconvenient truths by policing language.

There is an obvious contradiction involved in complaining at length, to an audience of

hundreds of millions of people, that you are being silenced. But this idea – that there is a set
of powerful, unnamed actors, who are trying to control everything you do, right down to the
words you use – is trending globally right now. Britain’s rightwing tabloids issue frequent
denunciations of “political correctness gone mad” and rail against the smug hypocrisy of the
“metropolitan elite”. In Germany, conservative journalists and politicians are making similar
complaints: after the assaults on women in Cologne last New Year’s Eve, for instance, the
chief of police Rainer Wendt said that leftists pressuring officers to be politisch korrekt had
prevented them from doing their jobs. In France, Marine Le Pen of the Front National has
condemned more traditional conservatives as “paralysed by their fear of confronting political
correctness”.

Trump’s incessant repetition of the phrase has led many writers since the election to argue
that the secret to his victory was a backlash against excessive “political correctness”. Some
have argued that Hillary Clinton failed because she was too invested in that close relative of
political correctness, “identity politics”. But upon closer examination, “political correctness”
becomes an impossibly slippery concept. The term is what Ancient Greek rhetoricians would
have called an “exonym”: a term for another group, which signals that the speaker does not
belong to it. Nobody ever describes themselves as “politically correct”. The phrase is only
ever an accusation.

If you say that something is technically correct, you are suggesting that it is wrong – the
adverb before “correct” implies a “but”. However, to say that a statement is politically correct
hints at something more insidious. Namely, that the speaker is acting in bad faith. He or she
has ulterior motives, and is hiding the truth in order to advance an agenda or to signal moral
superiority. To say that someone is being “politically correct” discredits them twice. First,
they are wrong. Second, and more damningly, they know it.

If you go looking for the origins of the phrase, it becomes clear that there is no neat history of
political correctness. There have only been campaigns againstsomething called “political
correctness”. For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting enemy has been a favourite
tactic of the right. Opposition to political correctness has proved itself a highly effective form
of crypto-politics. It transforms the political landscape by acting as if it is not political at all.
Trump is the deftest practitioner of this strategy yet.

Most Americans had never heard the phrase “politically correct” before 1990, when a wave
of stories began to appear in newspapers and magazines. One of the first and most influential
was published in October 1990 by the New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein, who
warned – under the headline “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct” – that the
country’s universities were threatened by “a growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a
pressure to conform”.

Bernstein had recently returned from Berkeley, where he had been reporting on student
activism. He wrote that there was an “unofficial ideology of the university”, according to
which “a cluster of opinions about race, ecology, feminism, culture and foreign policy defines
a kind of ‘correct’ attitude toward the problems of the world”. For instance, “Biodegradable
garbage bags get the PC seal of approval. Exxon does not.”

Bernstein’s alarming dispatch in America’s paper of record set off a chain reaction, as one
mainstream publication after another rushed to denounce this new trend. The following
month, the Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz decried the “brave new world
of ideological zealotry” at American universities. In December, the cover of Newsweek –
with a circulation of more than 3 million – featured the headline “THOUGHT POLICE” and
yet another ominous warning: “There’s a ‘politically correct’ way to talk about race, sex and
ideas. Is this the New Enlightenment – or the New McCarthyism?” A similar story graced the
cover of New York magazine in January 1991 – inside, the magazine proclaimed that “The
New Fascists” were taking over universities. In April, Time magazine reported on “a new
intolerance” that was on the rise across campuses nationwide.

If you search ProQuest, a digital database of US magazines and newspapers, you find that the
phrase “politically correct” rarely appeared before 1990. That year, it turned up more than
700 times. In 1991, there are more than 2,500 instances. In 1992, it appeared more than 2,800
times. Like Indiana Jones movies, these pieces called up enemies from a melange of old
wars: they compared the “thought police” spreading terror on university campuses to fascists,
Stalinists, McCarthyites, “Hitler Youth”, Christian fundamentalists, Maoists and Marxists.

Many of these articles recycled the same stories of campus controversies from a handful of
elite universities, often exaggerated or stripped of context. The New York magazine cover
story opened with an account of a Harvard history professor, Stephan Thernstrom, being
attacked by overzealous students who felt he had been racially insensitive: “Whenever he
walked through the campus that spring, down Harvard’s brick paths, under the arched gates,
past the fluttering elms, he found it hard not to imagine the pointing fingers, the whispers.
Racist. There goes the racist. It was hellish, this persecution.”

In an interview that appeared soon afterwards in The Nation, Thernstrom said the harassment
described in the New York article had never happened. There had been one editorial in the
Harvard Crimson student newspaper criticising his decision to read extensively from the
diaries of plantation owners in his lectures. But the description of his harried state was pure
“artistic licence”. No matter: the image of college students conducting witch hunts stuck.
When Richard Bernstein published a book based on his New York Times reporting on
political correctness, he called it Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for
America’s Future – a title alluding to the Jacobins of the French Revolution. In the book he
compared American college campuses to France during the Reign of Terror, during which
tens of thousands of people were executed within months.

None of the stories that introduced the menace of political correctness could pinpoint where
or when it had begun. Nor were they very precise when they explained the origins of the
phrase itself. Journalists frequently mentioned the Soviets – Bernstein observed that the
phrase “smacks of Stalinist orthodoxy”– but there is no exact equivalent in Russian. (The
closest would be “ideinost”, which translates as “ideological correctness”. But that word has
nothing to do with disadvantaged people or minorities.) The intellectual historian LD Burnett
has found scattered examples of doctrines or people being described as “politically correct”
in American communist publications from the 1930s – usually, she says, in a tone of
mockery.

The phrase came into more widespread use in American leftist circles in the 1960s and 1970s
– most likely as an ironic borrowing from Mao, who delivered a famous speech in 1957 that
was translated into English with the title “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among
the People”.

Until the late 1980s, 'political correctness' was used exclusively within the left, and almost
always ironically

Ruth Perry, a literature professor at MIT who was active in the feminist and civil rights
movements, says that many radicals were reading the Little Red Book in the late 1960s and
1970s, and surmises that her friends may have picked up the adjective “correct” there. But
they didn’t use it in the way Mao did. “Politically correct” became a kind of in-joke among
American leftists – something you called a fellow leftist when you thought he or she was
being self-righteous. “The term was always used ironically,” Perry says, “always calling
attention to possible dogmatism.”

In 1970, the African-American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara, used the phrase in an
essay about strains on gender relations within her community. No matter how “politically
correct” her male friends thought they were being, she wrote many of them were failing to
recognise the plight of black women.

Until the late 1980s, “political correctness” was used exclusively within the left, and almost
always ironically as a critique of excessive orthodoxy. In fact, some of the first people to
organise against “political correctness” were a group of feminists who called themselves the
Lesbian Sex Mafia. In 1982, they held a “Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex” at a theatre
in New York’s East Village – a rally against fellow feminists who had condemned
pornography and BDSM. Over 400 women attended, many of them wearing leather and
collars, brandishing nipple clamps and dildos. The writer and activist Mirtha Quintanales
summed up the mood when she told the audience, “We need to have dialogues about S&M
issues, not about what is ‘politically correct, politically incorrect’.”

By the end of the 1980s, Jeff Chang, the journalist and hip-hop critic, who has written
extensively on race and social justice, recalls that the activists he knew then in the Bay Area
used the phrase “in a jokey way – a way for one sectarian to dismiss another sectarian’s line”.

But soon enough, the term was rebranded by the right, who turned its meaning inside out. All
of a sudden, instead of being a phrase that leftists used to check dogmatic tendencies within
their movement, “political correctness” became a talking point for neoconservatives. They
said that PC constituted a leftwing political programme that was seizing control of American
universities and cultural institutions – and they were determined to stop it.
The right had been waging a campaign against liberal academics for more than a decade.
Starting in the mid-1970s, a handful of conservative donors had funded the creation of dozens
of new thinktanks and “training institutes” offering programmes in everything from
“leadership” to broadcast journalism to direct-mail fundraising. They had endowed
fellowships for conservative graduate students, postdoctoral positions and professorships at
prestigious universities. Their stated goal was to challenge what they saw as the dominance
of liberalism and attack left-leaning tendencies within the academy.

Starting in the late 1980s, this well-funded conservative movement entered the mainstream
with a series of improbable bestsellers that took aim at American higher education. The first,
by the University of Chicago philosophy professor Allan Bloom, came out in 1987. For
hundreds of pages, The Closing of the American Mind argued that colleges were embracing a
shallow “cultural relativism” and abandoning long-established disciplines and standards in an
attempt to appear liberal and to pander to their students. It sold more than 500,000 copies and
inspired numerous imitations.

In April 1990, Roger Kimball, an editor at the conservative journal, The New Criterion,
published Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education. Like Bloom,
Kimball argued that an “assault on the canon” was taking place and that a “politics of
victimhood” had paralysed universities. As evidence, he cited the existence of departments
such as African American studies and women’s studies. He scornfully quoted the titles of
papers he had heard at academic conferences, such as “Jane Austen and the Masturbating
Girl” or “The Lesbian Phallus: Does Heterosexuality Exist?”

In June 1991, the young Dinesh D’Souza followed Bloom and Kimball with Illiberal
Education: the Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. Whereas Bloom had bemoaned the rise
of relativism and Kimball had attacked what he called “liberal fascism”, and what he
considered frivolous lines of scholarly inquiry, D’Souza argued that admissions policies that
took race into consideration were producing a “new segregation on campus” and “an attack
on academic standards”. The Atlantic printed a 12,000 word excerpt as its June cover story.
To coincide with the release, Forbes ran another article by D’Souza with the title: “Visigoths
in Tweed.”

These books did not emphasise the phrase “political correctness”, and only D’Souza used the
phrase directly. But all three came to be regularly cited in the flood of anti-PC articles that
appeared in venues such as the New York Times and Newsweek. When they did, the authors
were cited as neutral authorities. Countless articles uncritically repeated their arguments.

In some respects, these books and articles were responding to genuine changes taking place
within academia. It is true that scholars had become increasingly sceptical about whether it
was possible to talk about timeless, universal truths that lay beyond language and
representation. European theorists who became influential in US humanities departments
during the 1970s and 1980s argued that individual experience was shaped by systems of
which the individual might not be aware – and particularly by language. Michel Foucault, for
instance, argued that all knowledge expressed historically specific forms of power. Jacques
Derrida, a frequent target of conservative critics, practised what he called “deconstruction”,
rereading the classics of philosophy in order to show that even the most seemingly innocent
and straightforward categories were riven with internal contradictions. The value of ideals
such as “humanity” or “liberty” could not be taken for granted.

It was also true that many universities were creating new “studies departments”, which
interrogated the experiences, and emphasised the cultural contributions of groups that had
previously been excluded from the academy and from the canon: queer people, people of
colour and women. This was not so strange. These departments reflected new social realities.
The demographics of college students were changing, because the demographics of the
United States were changing. By 1990, only two-thirds of Americans under 18 were white. In
California, the freshman classes at many public universities were “majority minority”, or
more than 50% non-white. Changes to undergraduate curriculums reflected changes in the
student population.

The responses that the conservative bestsellers offered to the changes they described were
disproportionate and often misleading. For instance, Bloom complained at length about the
“militancy” of African American students at Cornell University, where he had taught in the
1960s. He never mentioned what students demanding the creation of African American
studies were responding to: the biggest protest at Cornell took place in 1969 after a cross
burning on campus, an open KKK threat. (An arsonist burned down the Africana Studies
Center, founded in response to these protests, in 1970.)

More than any particular obfuscation or omission, the most misleading aspect of these books
was the way they claimed that only their adversaries were “political”. Bloom, Kimball, and
D’Souza claimed that they wanted to “preserve the humanistic tradition”, as if their academic
foes were vandalising a canon that had been enshrined since time immemorial. But canons
and curriculums have always been in flux; even in white Anglo-America there has never been
any one stable tradition. Moby Dick was dismissed as Herman Melville’s worst book until
the mid-1920s. Many universities had only begun offering literature courses in “living”
languages a decade or so before that.

In truth, these crusaders against political correctness were every bit as political as their
opponents. As Jane Mayer documents in her book, Dark Money: the Hidden History of the
Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Bloom and D’Souza were funded by
networks of conservative donors – particularly the Koch, Olin and Scaife families – who had
spent the 1980s building programmes that they hoped would create a new “counter-
intelligentsia”. (The New Criterion, where Kimball worked, was also funded by the Olin and
Scaife Foundations.) In his 1978 book A Time for Truth, William Simon, the president of the
Olin Foundation, had called on conservatives to fund intellectuals who shared their views:
“They must be given grants, grants, and more grants in exchange for books, books, and more
books.”

These skirmishes over syllabuses were part of a broader political programme – and they
became instrumental to forging a new alliance for conservative politics in America, between
white working-class voters and small business owners, and politicians with corporate agendas
that held very little benefit for those people.

By making fun of professors who spoke in language that most people considered
incomprehensible (“The Lesbian Phallus”), wealthy Ivy League graduates could pose as anti-
elite. By mocking courses on writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, they made a
racial appeal to white people who felt as if they were losing their country. As the 1990s wore
on, because multiculturalism was associated with globalisation – the force that was taking
away so many jobs traditionally held by white working-class people – attacking it allowed
conservatives to displace responsibility for the hardship that many of their constituents were
facing. It was not the slashing of social services, lowered taxes, union busting or outsourcing
that was the cause of their problems. It was those foreign “others”.

PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a
wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them.
“Political correctness” became a term used to drum into the public imagination the idea that
there was a deep divide between the “ordinary people” and the “liberal elite”, who sought to
control the speech and thoughts of regular folk. Opposition to political correctness also
became a way to rebrand racism in ways that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-
rights era.

Soon, Republican politicians were echoing on the national stage the message that had been
product-tested in the academy. In May 1991, President George HW Bush gave a
commencement speech at the University of Michigan. In it, he identified political correctness
as a major danger to America. “Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we
find free speech under assault throughout the United States,” Bush said. “The notion of
political correctness has ignited controversy across the land,” but, he warned, “In their own
Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behaviour crush diversity in the name of
diversity.”
Illustration: Nathalie Lees

After 2001, debates about political correctness faded from public view, replaced by
arguments about Islam and terrorism. But in the final years of the Obama presidency,
political correctness made a comeback. Or rather, anti-political-correctness did.

As Black Lives Matter and movements against sexual violence gained strength, a spate of
thinkpieces attacked the participants in these movements, criticising and trivialising them by
saying that they were obsessed with policing speech. Once again, the conversation initially
focused on universities, but the buzzwords were new. Rather than “difference” and
“multiculturalism”, Americans in 2012 and 2013 started hearing about “trigger warnings”,
“safe spaces”, “microaggressions”, “privilege” and “cultural appropriation”.

This time, students received more scorn than professors. If the first round of anti-political-
correctness evoked the spectres of totalitarian regimes, the more recent revival has appealed
to the commonplace that millennials are spoiled narcissists, who want to prevent anyone
expressing opinions that they happen to find offensive.

In January 2015, the writer Jonathan Chait published one of the first new, high-profile anti-
PC thinkpieces in New York magazine. “Not a Very PC Thing to Say” followed the blueprint
provided by the anti-PC thinkpieces that the New York Times, Newsweek, and indeed New
York magazine had published in the early 1990s. Like the New York article from 1991, it
began with an anecdote set on campus that supposedly demonstrated that political correctness
had run amok, and then extrapolated from this incident to a broad generalisation. In 1991,
John Taylor wrote: “The new fundamentalism has concocted a rationale for dismissing all
dissent.” In 2015, Jonathan Chait claimed that there were once again “angry mobs out to
crush opposing ideas”.

Chait warned that the dangers of PC had become greater than ever before. Political
correctness was no longer confined to universities – now, he argued, it had taken over social
media and thus “attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond
that of the old”. (As evidence of the “hegemonic” influence enjoyed by unnamed actors on
the left, Chait cited two female journalists saying that they had been criticised by leftists on
Twitter.)

Chait’s article launched a spate of replies about campus and social media “cry bullies”. On
the cover of their September 2015 issue, the Atlantic published an article by Jonathan Haidt
and Greg Lukianoff. The title, “The Coddling Of the American Mind”, nodded to the
godfather of anti-PC, Allan Bloom. (Lukianoff is the head of the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education, another organisation funded by the Olin and Scaife families.) “In the
name of emotional wellbeing, college students are increasingly demanding protection from
words and ideas they don’t like,” the article announced. It was shared over 500,000 times.

The climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the anti-political-
correctness stories to spread

These pieces committed many of the same fallacies that their predecessors from the 1990s
had. They cherry-picked anecdotes and caricatured the subjects of their criticism. They
complained that other people were creating and enforcing speech codes, while at the same
time attempting to enforce their own speech codes. Their writers designated themselves the
arbiters of what conversations or political demands deserved to be taken seriously, and which
did not. They contradicted themselves in the same way: their authors continually complained,
in highly visible publications, that they were being silenced.

The climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the anti-political-
correctness (and anti-anti-political correctness) stories to spread even further and faster than
they had in the 1990s. Anti-PC and anti-anti-PC stories come cheap: because they concern
identity, they are something that any writer can have a take on, based on his or her
experiences, whether or not he or she has the time or resources to report. They are also
perfect clickbait. They inspire outrage, or outrage at the outrage of others.

Meanwhile, a strange convergence was taking place. While Chait and his fellow liberals
decried political correctness, Donald Trump and his followers were doing the same thing.
Chait said that leftists were “perverting liberalism” and appointed himself the defender of a
liberal centre; Trump said that liberal media had the system “rigged”.
The anti-PC liberals were so focused on leftists on Twitter that for months they gravely
underestimated the seriousness of the real threat to liberal discourse. It was not coming from
women, people of colour, or queer people organising for their civil rights, on campus or
elsewhere. It was coming from @realdonaldtrump, neo-Nazis, and far-right websites such as
Breitbart.

The original critics of PC were academics or shadow-academics, Ivy League graduates who
went around in bow ties quoting Plato and Matthew Arnold. It is hard to imagine Trump
quoting Plato or Matthew Arnold, much less carping about the titles of conference papers by
literature academics. During his campaign, the network of donors who funded decades of
anti-PC activity – the Kochs, the Olins, the Scaifes – shunned Trump, citing concerns about
the populist promises he was making. Trump came from a different milieu: not Yale or the
University of Chicago, but reality television. And he was picking different fights, targeting
the media and political establishment, rather than academia.

As a candidate, Trump inaugurated a new phase of anti-political-correctness. What was

remarkable was just how many different ways Trump deployed this tactic to his advantage,
both exploiting the tried-and-tested methods of the early 1990s and adding his own
innovations.

First, by talking incessantly about political correctness, Trump established the myth that he
had dishonest and powerful enemies who wanted to prevent him from taking on the difficult
challenges facing the nation. By claiming that he was being silenced, he created a drama in
which he could play the hero. The notion that Trump was both persecuted and heroic was
crucial to his emotional appeal. It allowed people who were struggling economically or angry
about the way society was changing to see themselves in him, battling against a rigged
system that made them feel powerless and devalued. At the same time, Trump’s swagger
promised that they were strong and entitled to glory. They were great and would be great
again.

Second, Trump did not simply criticise the idea of political correctness – he actually said and
did the kind of outrageous things that PC culture supposedly prohibited. The first wave of
conservative critics of political correctness claimed they were defending the status quo, but
Trump’s mission was to destroy it. In 1991, when George HW Bush warned that political
correctness was a threat to free speech, he did not choose to exercise his free speech rights by
publicly mocking a man with a disability or characterising Mexican immigrants as rapists.
Trump did. Having elevated the powers of PC to mythic status, the draft-dodging billionaire,
son of a slumlord, taunted the parents of a fallen soldier and claimed that his cruelty and
malice was, in fact, courage.

This willingness to be more outrageous than any previous candidate ensured non-stop media
coverage, which in turn helped Trump attract supporters who agreed with what he was
saying. We should not underestimate how many Trump supporters held views that were
sexist, racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, and were thrilled to feel that he had given them
permission to say so. It’s an old trick: the powerful encourage the less powerful to vent their
rage against those who might have been their allies, and to delude themselves into thinking
that they have been liberated. It costs the powerful nothing; it pays frightful dividends.
Trump drew upon a classic element of anti-political-correctness by implying that while his
opponents were operating according to a political agenda, he simply wanted to do what was
sensible. He made numerous controversial policy proposals: deporting millions of
undocumented immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the US, introducing stop-and-
frisk policies that have been ruled unconstitutional. But by responding to critics with the
accusation that they were simply being politically correct, Trump attempted to place these
proposals beyond the realm of politics altogether. Something political is something that
reasonable people might disagree about. By using the adjective as a put-down, Trump
pretended that he was acting on truths so obvious that they lay beyond dispute. “That’s just
common sense.”

The most alarming part of this approach is what it implies about Trump’s attitude to politics
more broadly. His contempt for political correctness looks a lot like contempt for politics
itself. He does not talk about diplomacy; he talks about “deals”. Debate and disagreement are
central to politics, yet Trump has made clear that he has no time for these distractions. To
play the anti-political-correctness card in response to a legitimate question about policy is to
shut down discussion in much the same way that opponents of political correctness have long
accused liberals and leftists of doing. It is a way of sidestepping debate by declaring that the
topic is so trivial or so contrary to common sense that it is pointless to discuss it. The impulse
is authoritarian. And by presenting himself as the champion of common sense, Trump gives
himself permission to bypass politics altogether.

Now that he is president-elect, it is unclear whether Trump meant many of the things he said
during his campaign. But, so far, he is fulfilling his pledge to fight political correctness. Last
week, he told the New York Times that he was trying to build an administration filled with
the “best people”, though “Not necessarily people that will be the most politically correct
people, because that hasn’t been working.”

Trump has also continued to cry PC in response to criticism. When an interviewer

from Politico asked a Trump transition team member why Trump was appointing so many
lobbyists and political insiders, despite having pledged to “drain the swamp” of them, the
source said that “one of the most refreshing parts of … the whole Trump style is that he does
not care about political correctness.” Apparently it would have been politically correct to hold
him to his campaign promises.

As Trump prepares to enter the White House, many pundits have concluded that “political
correctness” fuelled the populist backlash sweeping Europe and the US. The leaders of that
backlash may say so. But the truth is the opposite: those leaders understood the power that
anti-political-correctness has to rally a class of voters, largely white, who are disaffected with
the status quo and resentful of shifting cultural and social norms. They were not reacting to
the tyranny of political correctness, nor were they returning America to a previous phase of
its history. They were not taking anything back. They were wielding anti-political-correctness
as a weapon, using it to forge a new political landscape and a frightening future.

The opponents of political correctness always said they were crusaders against
authoritarianism. In fact, anti-PC has paved the way for the populist authoritarianism now
spreading everywhere. Trump is anti-political correctness gone mad.

 Main illustration: Nathalie Lees

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(modern)
So You’re Still Being Publicly Shamed
09.04.2020

Ronson is right to identify the bad incentives built into the design of social media platforms
as a contributing factor in generating this culture of mutual surveillance and hair-trigger
denunciation. Stacey MacNaught / Flickr

The excesses of what’s now called “cancel culture” are usually associated by mainstream and
right-wing media with progressives and the Left. But one of the most striking stories about
online mob justice in Jon Ronson’s 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed  is about a
public shaming dished out by ultrapatriotic conservatives.

Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie worked with adults with learning disabilities for a
nonprofit called Living Independently Forever (LIFE). They seem to have been very good at
their job. Jamie started a jewelry club that Ronson said was a “hit” with some of her clients.
They convinced LIFE to buy a karaoke system and took the clients bowling. The pair was
popular with both the clients and their parents.

When they weren’t at work, they liked to take jokey pictures of each other irreverently doing
things like smoking in front of “No Smoking” signs. They’d post the pictures on Facebook
for a few “likes” from friends. Like most social media users, they didn’t pay much attention
to their privacy settings.

In October 2012, they were part of a LIFE field trip to Washington, DC. During their off-
hours, Jamie and Lindsey went to Arlington National Cemetery. Jamie took a picture of
Lindsey silently pretending to yell and flip off her friend next to a sign that said, “Silence and
Respect.”
The two could be accused, at worst, of making a joke in poor taste. Even those most gravely
offended by such a picture probably wouldn’t say they think Lindsey deserved to have her
life ruined over it. But that’s exactly what happened.

No one outside their circle of friends seems to have noticed the picture for four weeks. Then,
one day in mid-November, random strangers started calling her a fat feminist and a whore,
and talking about how she should be exiled from the country or sent to prison. A “Fire
Lindsey Stone” Facebook group popped up. Twelve thousand people liked the page.

That Wednesday night, the mob got its wish. Lindsey wasn’t even allowed to enter the
building the next morning to empty out her desk. Her boss made her meet him in the parking
lot. “Literally overnight,” she told Ronson, “everything I knew and loved was gone.”

She didn’t get another job for a year. She didn’t go out on dates because of her certainty that
men would google her. She suffered from depression and insomnia.

Reading Ronson’s account of Stone’s experience eight years after it happened and five years
after the publication of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, most of this feels depressingly
current. The culture war preoccupations of the moment have shifted a bit since then, but
the shape of the incident feels like the sort of thing that happens across the ideological
spectrum twenty times a day in 2020.

Ronson takes several stories of people who found themselves the subject of mass
condemnation online as a jumping-off point for a general investigation of the phenomenon of
public shaming. He looks at laws in nineteenth-century Massachusetts that sentenced people
to time in the stocks or public whippings for minor offenses. He interviews Houston
congressman and former judge Ted Poe about his history of handing out creative
punishments that hearken back to that history, making public shame a key part of convicts’
sentences. He attends a seminar by Brad Blanton intended to help people outgrow shame by
teaching them “radical honesty.”

But his main concern is with online public shamings — why they happen, how they work,
and whether there’s any way for their recipients to get past them and rebuild their reputations.

The phrase “cancel culture” doesn’t seem to have been coined until a few years ago, but
everything that it now refers to is there in the incidents described in Ronson’s book. Even the
now-all-too-familiar spectacle of cancelers insisting, mid-cancelation, that no one is ever
really canceled was present in the pile-on against Lindsay Stone.

In between comments calling Lindsey the c-word and hoping for her death, and the relatively
tame ones like, “Send the dumb feminist to prison,” Ronson quotes this intervention: “HER
FUTURE ISN’T RUINED! Stop trying to make her into a martyr. In 6 months no one except
those who actually know her will remember this.” Of course, this turned out to be wrong.

Jon Ronson and ContraPoints

The only uses of the words “cancel” and “canceling” in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed are
in sentences about canceled Google Alerts and canceled gym memberships. Even the
predecessor phrase “callout culture” doesn’t appear anywhere in the book. But it should be
seen, alongside the late Mark Fisher’s 2013 essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” as a key text
for thoughtful left-wing critics of the punitive set of practices that make up what we now call
“cancel culture.”

For example, in left YouTube star Natalie Wynn’s immensely popular 2019 video
“Canceling,” she quotes one of the most memorable passages from Ronson’s book:

[I]t didn’t seem to cross any of our minds whether whichever person we had just shamed was
OK or in ruins. I suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone
strikes, nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. The
snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche.

Some leftists are understandably irritated by this kind of critique. While online
mobbings do sometimes lead to suicides, that’s quite rare. It’s easy to tell people complaining
of cancellations to just log off and stop being so sensitive.

But there are some problems with this response. For one, there is a serious tension between
the defenders of cancel culture who sternly talk about “accountability” and the need for
“consequences” for reactionary behavior, while at the same time insisting that cancelation is
just “criticism.” If angry denunciations from thousands of strangers didn’t have an adverse
psychological effect on the average human being that ordinary criticism did not, then
“criticism” couldn’t add up to any substantive “consequence” for bad behavior.

In many of the stories in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, the consequences aren’t just
emotional. In the airport on her way to Cape Town, Justine Sacco sarcastically tweeted that
she wouldn’t get AIDS in Africa because she was white. It was an awkwardly worded joke
that she thought was mocking racism. But before she’d landed in South Africa, her
tweet went so viral that thousands of people were describing it to millions of people as “a
racist tweet.”

Sacco came from a family of supporters of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s
anti-apartheid party, and she was flying to South Africa to visit her relatives. But no one who
saw the tweet and instantly reacted knew any of that. In fact, when people realized that she
was South African, rumors spread that Sacco — the daughter of a single mother who worked
as a flight attendant and took a second job to pay the bills — was the heiress to a multibillion-
dollar fortune from diamond mines. She did have a good middle-class job at this point in her
life, but she lost it as soon as the tweet exploded.

This was only the beginning of the “consequences” she experienced. Gawkerransacked her
old tweets. New York Post reporters started following her to the gym. She had to leave the
United States to be around people who didn’t know her from the tweet.

We’re constantly told that complaints about cancel culture are a matter of rich and powerful

celebrities complaining about being justly criticized. But Justine Sacco wasn’t any sort of
celebrity before her cancelation. The intended audience of that joke was made up of exactly
170 people who followed her on Twitter. Nor was she powerful or especially rich. Neither is
Lindsey Stone.

Neither was “Hank,” a tech developer whose real name Ronson doesn’t use because it never
became public. He was, however, fired after another tech developer overheard a joke he told
a friend sitting next to him at a conference that he continues to insist was innocent but the
other developer said was sexist. (It involved the phrase “big dongles,” a double-entendre use
of tech jargon I’m not going to pretend to understand.) She took his picture without telling
him what she was doing and posted it on Twitter, along with a description of the joke.

In a cruel twist, she herself was soon targeted for retaliatory cancelation by misogynistic
“men’s rights” bloggers. “Hank” managed to quickly get another job. The other developer
wasn’t so lucky.

Writing About Writing About Public Shaming

Ronson is very good at narrating these incidents. His writing is powerful and understated, and
he has a knack for picking the details that add layers of irony or moral complexity to a story.
Rereading So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, my biggest frustration is that he’s so good at it
that he often does it even in parts of the book where he should be doing something else.

In chapters where he could have developed a larger argument about where cancel culture (or
“denunciation culture,” or “public-shaming culture,” or whatever we want to call it) comes
from and what should be done about it, he instead applies his considerable narrative talents to
describing his own journey to answer those questions. The effect is that it often feels less like
a book about public shaming than a book about Ronson writing a book about public shaming.

That said, several insights come up in the course of his journey that add up to the raw
ingredients of an analysis that steers clear of both the right-wing hysteria about cancel culture
— which hypes it up as a force of evil emerging from somewhere within the dark hearts of
the cultural Marxists who have stealthily grabbed hold of the levers of power in our culture
— and the “cancel culture doesn’t exist” denialism of too much of the Left.

A popular view about online (and offline) mob psychology postulates a kind of “group
madness” that takes away the free will of individual participants. This received apparent
scientific support in the twentieth century from the (now thoroughly debunked) Stanford
Prison Experiment, but the real father of the theory was nineteenth-century crank Gustave Le
Bon.

The chapter on Le Bon is one of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’s best. Le Bon was a literal
skull measurer who “wanted to demonstrate that businessmen and aristocrats had bigger
brains than everyone else and were less likely to succumb to mass hysteria.” (I’ll leave any
comparison between this thesis and the IQ fixations of contemporary right-wing culture
warriors as an exercise for the reader.) He used skulls at the Anthropological Society of Paris
for research, filling them with buckshot and counting the number of pieces it took to fill each
skull in order to measure volume.

The major impetus for his work on “the madness of crowds” was his hysterical reaction to
the Paris Commune of 1871. He could only make sense of ordinary workers, artisans, and
National Guardsmen taking over the city government and reorganizing it on radically
democratic lines by telling himself that the proles had simply lost their minds.

A more grounded explanation of the psychology of online pile-ons is suggested by a passage

near the end of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, in which Ronson compares the incentive
structures built into social media platforms with the “Your Speed” signs tested in California
in the early 2000s. The signs, which are now common around the country, automatically tell
drivers how fast they’re going and place that number next to the posted speed limit.

There’s no reason in principle why these signs should work. Every car has a built-in
speedometer, and regular low-tech signs have always told drivers the speed limit, so the Your
Speed signs don’t give us any information we wouldn’t otherwise have. Nor does the sign
come with any kind of enforcement mechanism.

Yet according to numerous studies, the signs do work. That’s because instant feedback loops
are effective.

In the case of Your Speed signs, that’s a good thing. Seeing your speed come down until it
matches the posted limit is a small psychological reward that slows everyone down and thus
reduces accidents, injuries, and deaths on the road. But the instant feedback loops built into
social media platforms, designed by the near-monopolistic corporations that own them to be
as addictive they can make them, reward our worst impulses.

The Case of Wendell Potter

A small recent example: Wendell Potter is a former health insurance executive who’s spent
the last decade since he left the industry relentlessly crusading for single-payer health care.
He is to the insurance industry what Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked
the Pentagon Papers, was to the American war machine.

His current good works involve constantly talking about how much damage he did in his
previous career. This tweet from late June was typical:

A writer with 15,000 Twitter followers tweeted out screenshots of Potter’s thread with the
caption, “This utter piece of shit actually admitted it.” This tweet racked up more than 75,000
likes and almost 40,000 retweets before enough people had told the writer who Potter was
that he was moved to delete it.

It would have taken no more than three seconds for the writer to find out on his own who
Potter was before composing this condemnation. All he would have had to do was click on
Potter’s name at the top of the tweet and glance at Potter’s bio, which includes
“Whistleblower and reformed insurance propagandist,” and Potter’s status as the president of
multiple Medicare for All advocacy organizations, or googled Potter’s name.

The writer didn’t bother taking a few seconds finding out the most basic information about
the man whose name he was about to drag through the mud because the incentives built into
platforms like Twitter reward denouncing first and researching later (or not at all). Don’t
stop. Don’t think. Just denounce — and bask in the instant validation coming your way from
tens of thousands of strangers.

Going Beyond Ronson’s Analysis

I’ve argued elsewhere that this phenomenon produces particularly toxic and
counterproductive results when it intersects with a kind of moralism that’s become common
on the contemporary left. This is both a symptom of our powerlessness and one of several
factors that contribute to its perpetuation. But it’s also important to note that cancel culture is
hardly unique to the Left.

You can see it in the actions of conservatives who whip up online outrage to try to get
baristas fired for saying “Fuck Trump” as much as in the antics of the student at Emerson
College who recently reported the adjunct professor who taught her queer studies class to the
dean (and to all of Twitter) for reacting in a calm and thoughtful (but apparently
insufficiently apologetic) way to her query about the number of black authors on the syllabus.
Cancel culture is a general disease of twenty-first-century capitalism that infects the entire
political spectrum.

Ronson is right to identify the bad incentives built into the design of social media platforms
as a contributing factor in generating this culture of mutual surveillance and hair-trigger
denunciation. We can go beyond Ronson’s analysis by identifying several other factors, like
the heightened level of social atomization and alienation that’s part and parcel of life under
neoliberalism. If you don’t feel connected to other human beings in the rest of your life,
you’re that much more likely to seek their approval at the expense of others through
participating in denunciation games online.

The retreat of various social movements, especially organized labor, which can act as
counterweights to the entrenched power of those on top of society, contributes to making all
the people on the bottom justifiably feel powerless. Campaigns of online harassment can
make their participants feel powerful, especially when the targets end up facing
“consequences” like being deplatformed or fired from their jobs.

Instead of ceding the issue to the Right by denying that cancel culture exists, the Left should
advance its own analysis of the issue. Where the latter-day Gustave Le Bons at publications
like Quillette treat it as something that springs from egalitarian political impulses, like Athena
springing from the head of Zeus, we can explain how it results from the ugly realities of
neoliberalized capitalism.

And where right-wing culture warriors can only endlessly denounce this culture of hair-
trigger denunciation, the Left can provide real solutions. If social media platforms were taken
into public ownership, the profit incentives to always look for ways to make them more
addictive would disappear, and we could make collective, democratic decisions about what
those platforms should look like that take into account our common good. If we rebuild the
labor movement and put an end to the semifeudal power of bosses in most American
workplaces, “doxing” would lose at least part of its sting. And far fewer people will misdirect
their political energies into scolding strangers on the internet if we build a powerful and
appealing movement to change the real world.

While Ronson seems to be a good progressive who might be sympathetic to at least some of
these ideas, neither these nor any other solutions are proposed in his book. Apart from a few
insightful points like the one about Your Speed signs, he also doesn’t come to very many
firm conclusions about what causes the phenomenon in the first place.

Even so, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is still worth reading. In the five years since the
book was published, with the exception of arguments advanced by people like Natalie Wynn,
discussions of canceling have rarely gone beyond the usual tedious back and forth between
the obnoxious and often overblown complaints of the Right and knee-jerk defensiveness from
progressives. Ronson has given us a thoughtful and well-researched exploration of a subject
that makes many writers on all sides of this debate too angry to say anything with analytic
depth. That’s an immensely valuable contribution.
Don't worry about 'rewriting history': it's
literally what we historians do
Charlotte Lydia Riley

This article is more than 11 months old

People have always reinterpreted and re-evaluated the past. Every time a statue comes down,
we learn a little more

The former site of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The
Guardian
Thu 11 Jun 2020 02.55 AEST

Last modified on Fri 12 Jun 2020 21.13 AEST

People are suddenly very concerned about the perils of rewriting history. We must be
vigilant, apparently, to the possibility that great swaths of the past will be forgotten or, worse,
“erased”. We must remain alert to the risk that our history will be “whitewashed” – as if there
were enough whitewash in the world – with the difficult, complex bits disappeared.
Meanwhile, unaware of all the controversy he has caused, Edward Colston’s statue lies
peacefully at the bottom of Bristol harbour.

Historians are not too worried at the threat posed by “rewriting history”. This is because
rewriting history is our occupation, our professional endeavour. We are constantly engaged in
a process of re-evaluating the past and reinterpreting stories that we thought we knew.
Despite what Leopold von Ranke – one of the pioneers of modern historical research – said,
history is not only about finding out “how it actually happened”, but also about how we think
about the past and our relationship to it. The past may be dead but history is alive, and it is
constructed in the present.

The other important thing to hold on to in this debate is that statues do not do a particularly
effective job of documenting the past or educating people about it. Much has been written
recently about British “imperial nostalgia”, and the idea that as a nation we yearn for the
empire that, for many of us, ended before we were born. But this country’s relationship to its
imperial history is built more on erasure and forgetting than on remembering – it is a series of
silences from the past. The number of monuments to men who enslaved other humans or who
killed hundreds of unarmed civilians or who performed other horrific crimes in the service of
empire, or the woman who presided over them, stands in contrastto the number of critically
engaged conversations we have about empire’s crimes. Every time a statue comes down, we
learn a little more.

Some people would have it that the British are just too polite to talk about the dark side of
imperialism. But it isn’t shame about the past that prevents us from having these
conversations. For the British to be ashamed of their imperial history, they would have to
know about it, and to understand both the worst excesses of imperial violence and the simple
daily injustice of imperial rule.

But many British people don’t know about this, and mostly they don’t care to find out.
Instead, as a nation, we exonerate the actions of people in the past by claiming that it was
simply a different time, with different values, forgetting that many brave people at the time
protested against these atrocities, and resisted, and worked tirelessly so that they might be
uncovered or condemned.

The outcry about the removal of the statue shows that some people in Britain are
uncomfortable with any critique of Britain’s past. But they want it both ways: to be free of
guilt for historical sins, but to be proud of what they see as historical achievements. The most
obvious example of this is the way that the British are comfortable talking about the slave
trade only through Britain’s much-lauded part in ending the slave trade. But the men whose
statues are being pulled down were not abolitionists but enslavers: owning up to their crimes
is much more difficult for many British people than simply walking past them in the street.
And for other British people, having to see these statues every day, sitting in lecture theatres
and concert halls named after these men, is a daily act of violence that has become
unbearable. 

Many of these statues, and concert halls, and lecture theatres, were built and named either in
the late Victorian period, or in the dying days of empire in the middle of the 20th century.
This isn’t a coincidence. Empire was continually constructed as a political and cultural
project at home both while the colonies and their populations were being subjugated overseas
and when those colonies fought back and took their independence. Empire did not just
“happen” to the British – the empire was not gained in a fit of absence of mind – and
imperialism was a cultural project as much as a political, military or economic endeavour,
one that had to be constantly rejuvenated. These statues do not provide a neutral narration of
this country’s history, they are political monuments to anxieties about Britain’s status at the
times that they were erected.

The claim that removing the statue is “whitewashing” history is a pretence that these statues
were somehow part of a nuanced conversation about Britain’s imperial past. But they
weren’t, not least because we have statues to slave owners, but no statue to the victims of the
slave trade or other victims of imperial violence. Since 2007, there has been a Museum of
Slavery in Liverpool, but there is no Museum of Empire – although our museums are full of
plundered treasures from Britain’s former imperial possessions – and there is no national
memorial to the victims of the slave trade. If you want to talk about whitewashing history,
perhaps start here.

As our ideas about the world change, it is natural that so too does our attitude to the heroes
and victories that our ancestors chose to commemorate. When those heroes were anything but
heroic, leaving their statues standing is an insult to the modern values we claim to hold. This
isn’t a sinister erasure of history: this is re-evaluating our history based on new evidence and
ideas. This is historiography. And if the criticism is that bringing down Colston means we
might have to pull down some more statues, then sure: bring it on. This historian approves.

Charlotte Lydia Riley is a historian of contemporary Britain at the University of Southampton

© 2021 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
(modern)
The Ongoing Outcry Against the
Ghostbusters Remake
David Sims
May 19, 2016

A subset of fans are protesting the new movie ahead of its July release—with many
speciously insisting their complaints have nothing to do with its female leads.

Sony

Paul Feig first made his mark in Hollywood by creating the TV series Freaks &
Geeks, a one-season wonder that became a cult hit long after its cancellation. He’s
since become one of the biggest names in comedy film, directing blockbuster hits
like Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Spy, often successfully blending high-octane
action with broad humor. So he was a logical choice to reboot
the Ghostbusters franchise with an all-female cast, not just because of his track
record as a director, but also because he knew the headaches that awaited him.
Speaking to the Daily News last year, he put it succinctly: “Geek culture is home to
some of the biggest assholes I’ve ever met in my life.”

Feig’s Ghostbusters isn’t out until July 15, but since the project was announced in
2014 as a reboot of the hit 1984 film, starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig,
Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon, a vocal minority of movie fans have come up
with specious reasons to criticize it. Hollywood does too many reboots; the sacred
legacy of the original film is under threat; the jokes in the trailer aren’t funny
enough. Things reached a fever pitch yesterday when James Rolfe, host of the
popular “Cinemassacre” YouTube channel with over 2 million
subscribers, announced that he wouldn’t even deign to watch the film. His
reasoning dances around the simple fact that has set this innocuous-seeming movie
apart from its fellow blockbusters this summer—that it’s a tentpole genre film
starring women.

The Ghostbusters trailer is currently the most “disliked” movie preview on

YouTube; some 800,000 fans have clicked the thumbs-down button, indicating an
organized campaign against the film (for comparison, the Captain America: Civil
War trailer has only 12,000 dislikes). Its comments thread is filled with fans
defending their down-votes as being “on merit alone,” as if a major Hollywood
studio film has never had shaky advertising before. Rolfe’s justification for
skipping the movie focuses mostly on the arrogance of remaking a classic. “This
isn’t just any franchise, this is Ghostbusters,” he intones, invoking the memory of
the original film’s deceased star Harold Ramis.

Here are just some of the major franchises Hollywood has rebooted in the last
decade: Batman. Superman. Spider-Man. James Bond. Star Wars. Planet of the
Apes. Halloween. Friday the 13th. The Evil Dead. The Thing. Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles. Robocop. Every Disney animated classic, starting
with Cinderella and continuing with The Jungle Book this year. The list could go
on endlessly, even without counting TV spinoffs. All have some provoked fan
consternation, but final judgment is usually withheld until after the movie hits
theaters. Ghostbusters, by contrast, has become a rallying cause for a swathe of
fans who are beginning to resemble a movement not unlike the Gamergate
nightmare that continues to plague the world of video games.

The vitriol directed at Ghostbusters seems to come in two forms: angry screeds in

comments sections and people’s Twitter mentions, and videos like Rolfe’s, which
try to justify the pushback as an idealistic defense of the original franchise’s
legacy. Others look to dismiss the female cast as some sort of reverse-sexism, a
“marketing gimmick” that diminishes the stars by turning them into tokens. “What
offends me about this film isn’t that there’s women in it. Or even that the women
are the protagonists. It’s that it’s going backwards 30 years in time and calling
itself progressive,” one Cinemassacre commenter wrote. “I think the biggest reason
this film will suck is they tried to shoehorn in a PC ideology instead of just telling
a good story,” said another. Even the presumptive Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump joined the pile-on last year, the substance of his criticism
amounting to “What’s going on!?”

Embedded in all of these preemptive and logically flimsy complaints is an obvious

subtext: that the issue of appearance matters more than actual quality, and that the
idea of a female cast taking up the mantle of a very male film series is just
somehow wrong. The 1984 Ghostbusters is indeed a memorable touchstone of the
era, an endlessly rewatchable sci-fi comedy that similar films should strive to
imitate. Its 1989 sequel, however, is not worth defending, and efforts to make a
third film sputtered out over creative differences and star Bill Murray’s outspoken
disinterest in every script he was presented with. In short, it’s exactly the kind of
franchise film studios look to revive: a well-remembered product that for one
reason or another has fallen dormant.

Unlike many Hollywood reboots, Feig’s revival actually offers something different
from what came before it. The prospect of a large-scale genre film starring only
women (with men such as Thor’s Chris Hemsworth in supporting roles) was
shocking enough that it prompted the announcement of an all-
male Ghostbusters remake starring Channing Tatum last year. It seemed the film
was intended as a kind of counter-balance to Feig’s film, but the idea was
eventually scrapped because of its sheer irrelevance, as was any talk of a
“Ghostbusterscinematic universe.” It’s impossible to know what Cinemassacre
would’ve made of a Ghostbusters sequel starring Channing Tatum rather than
Melissa McCarthy, but it’s likely there wouldn’t have been quite as much vitriol.

Rolfe’s video currently has more than 530,000 views on YouTube; it’s the latest
and loudest addition to an outcry that’s been growing for more than a year, from
the initial casting news to every new trailer and clip from the film premiering
online. The film’s cast has largely ignored the toxicity online, but Feig has
remained steadfast in trying to call out, debate, and refute criticism on his Twitter.
When The Verge’s Emily Yoshida visited the film’s set last year, she asked him
why he bothered to engage with such single-minded trolling. He saidhe simply
didn’t want to give in.

“It’s the same thing that the women went through with Gamergate,” he said. “They
were just getting hammered, and everyone says ‘Well, why don’t you just go
offline?’ But it’s like getting chased out of your neighborhood ... I don’t want to
get chased off the Internet.” For all the hate, Ghostbusters can’t be chased out of
theaters; for all the YouTube dislikes, the film is tracking to be one of July’s
biggest openers in a summer clogged with reboots and sequels. Fans will surely
debate the film’s quality for years to come, but for a sad subset, that question has
already been settled.

When a publisher's staff become book

burners, culture itself is cancelled
November 28, 2020 — 12.05am
This was published 5 months ago

Opinion
The staff revolt at Penguin Random House in Canada over plans to release a new book from
psychologist Jordan Peterson marks the latest chapter in the “cancel culture” saga.
Specifically, it is part of a growing sub-genre of controversy wherein cancel culture appears
as a push for workplace safety.

At an emotional town hall meeting Penguin staff called on the publishing giant to dump
Peterson, the University of Toronto’s self-styled “Professor Against Political Correctness”.

In March, Hachette Book Group cancelled Woody Allen’s memoir after workers walked off
the job in professed solidarity with survivors of sexual assault and the stable’s author Ronan
Farrow. Some months later staff at Hachette UK objected to being asked to work on J.K.
Rowling’s new children’s story,  The Ickabog,  citing the author’s views on transgender
issues. I could go on – and I will, later.

0:56

Jordan Peterson criticises idea of 'oppressed patriarchy'

Controversial Canadian Psychologist and Author, Dr Jordan Peterson is appalled that society have come to believe there
should be a battleground between ethnicity or gender identities. 

To be clear, I’m infinitely relieved when publishers cancel books from snake-oil merchants,
anti-vaxxers, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, celebrity chefs who have rightly
become unpalatable to the cultural mainstream. This is not what we’re talking about when we
talk about cancel culture. We’re talking about cases where the pushback against the allegedly
dubious work or author is so over-the-top that  it has become the story.
On that score I confess I’ve never been moved to read Peterson’s books or join the millions
tuning in to his YouTube channel because he sounded thoroughly unremarkable – more
notable for his following than his intellectual offering, which includes pep-talks for the lads
to make their beds and man-up. His most famous transgression was an objection to gender
pronouns on free speech grounds.

Peterson rails against the “post-modern neo-Marxist” cabal running our cultural institutions;
his florid and trigger-happy detractors do their best to prove him right. It is Peterson’s
enemies who’ve made him into a blockbuster. At the Penguin town hall, one employee
told Vice, people were “crying” about Peterson’s impact on their lives. Penguin Canada’s
diversity and inclusion committee reportedly received at least 70 anonymous staff messages
attacking the decision to publish Peterson, with only “a couple” in favour.

J.K. Rowling’s views on trans issues – and their intersection with feminism – are distilled in a
blogpost of nearly 4000 thoughtful and empathetic words, but this hasn’t stopped her
opponents reducing them to a bumper sticker on Twitter.

As to Woody Allen, he’s a cultural icon and formidable creep who shacked up with the
pseudo step-daughter he’s known since age 11. This much we know. Otherwise we have
allegations he molested his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow. He has denied the accusations
and wasn’t charged after two investigations decades ago. I’m in no position to adjudicate the
allegations. Presumably I run foul of some campaigners for sexual assault survivors in even
suggesting the allegations need adjudicating.

I’m all for industrial democracy wherein the workers get their say about company
management. And I’ll suppress the curmudgeonly voice within, grumbling the woke
millennials ought to be grateful they even have a job amid the sequel to The Great
Depression. Although perhaps their real problem isn’t lack of gratitude but the opposite: the
workers seem so enmeshed with the company brand they’re shocked when it fails to reflect
their worldview.

Publishing a work does not, of course, equate with endorsing it or the author’s every brain
fart. But as one Penguin employee put it, he was opposed to publishing Peterson’s book
“regardless of the content”.

In this realm some ideas aren’t simply distressing or enraging or worthy of dismemberment
with rational argument, but their very expression is a breach of occupational health and
safety. Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, this month announced he was leaving his own
publication because he felt restrained from challenging the prevailing “young-college-
graduate bubble” sensibility. Earlier this year, after Yglesias signed the Harper’s
letter objecting to cancel culture, one of his transgender colleagues, Emily VanDerWerff,
told Vox editors his signature made her feel “less safe” at Vox.

I understand how vulnerability causes hyper-vigilance. I accept, for instance, that the black
journalists at the New York Times genuinely believed Senator Tom Cotton’s flawed and
inflammatory “Send In the Troops” column had put them “in danger”.

But while the Times incident took place against the febrile backdrop of the Black Lives
Matter protests, this doesn’t shift the reality that the claim Cotton’s piece had put black
journalists “in danger” had no supporting evidence. The only worker patently unsafe after the
column’s publication was the op-ed editor James Bennet, forced into falling on his sword.

Unconscious bias runs deep; exposing it, a painful and necessary task. Yet I can’t help see in
these skirmishes a basic mismatch between employee temperament and the imperatives of
industries that feed on a robust contest of ideas. It’s a situation akin to vegans working at
meatworks.

A common retort in these scenarios is that Peterson, Allen et al have plenty of avenues to
broadcast their work, even if Penguin or Hachette turn them away. This is a cop-out. Each
“cancellation” has a chilling effect on intellectual discourse. Each incident further polarises
the public, as dissenters get cast out in the name of “diversity” and “inclusion”.

So I find myself in the perverse position of looking to bosses in the hope they’ll exercise
managerial prerogative and stare down their staff. So far the managers at Penguin are passing
round the tissue box but holding the line on Peterson.

Hachette UK told staff they’re free to express their views but not free to refuse to work on
Rowling’s novels. “Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of publishing,” the company said.

Rarely has a statement of the bleeding obvious sounded so brave.

From our partners

Is ‘The Cat in the Hat’ Racist?

By Stephen Sawchuk — October 04, 2017  6 min read

Katherine Pavie's first grade class at Madison Elementary School in Woodford, Va., participates in a read-a-long to
Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat," on March 3, 2015.
Dave Ellis/The Free Lance-Star via AP

A recent spat over Dr. Seuss’ place in the children’s literature canon has
highlighted an uncomfortable truism about the books that children experience in
their earliest school days: Some of the most classic and beloved titles, from The
Wizard of Oz on down, draw on racist tropes and images.

The Oompa-Loompas in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, at least

in its original version, were depicted as African pygmies who were happy to be
working for cocoa beans at said chocolate factory. The eponymous Cat in the Hat,
a new scholarly book argues, draws from the antics and costumes of minstrel
shows.
This topic entered the mainstream again late last month, when first lady Melania
Trump sent 10 Dr. Seuss books to a school in each state. In a response posted
online, a librarian in Cambridge, Mass., Liz Phipps Soeiro, said she would not
keep them, calling the choice of books a “cliché” and criticizing his illustrations
in If I Ran the Zoo, among others, as “steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures,
and harmful stereotypes.”

She also took aim at the Trump administration’s support for school choice
programs. Trump’s spokeswoman shot back that the “divisive” letter was
unfortunate.

Hundreds of articles about the dust-up followed, some defending the librarian’s
decision and others criticizing her rejection of the books as churlish. But from a
curricular perspective, the episode thrusts into the limelight a difficult question:
What should teachers and parents do about the culturally insensitive imagery and
text in some beloved classics—including the dog-eared favorites that still sit on
their shelves?

A Complex History
The career of Dr. Seuss, whose full name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, is complex
and not easily summarized. As a political cartoonist, he excoriated Jim Crow laws
—but also drew racist cartoons depicting Japanese-Americans as the enemy. Some
of his early books suffer from similar caricatures. If I Ran the Zoo contains
stereotypical images of Africans and at one point references “helpers who all wear
their eyes at a slant.” (The book was not in the collection provided by Mrs.
Trump.)

It can be hard to square such depictions with some of Seuss’ other tales, which
were often liberal on sociopolitical subjects. The Sneeches argues against prejudice
based on physical characteristics; The Lorax is an unsubtle environmental lament;
and The Butter Battle Book allegorizes the nuclear arms race.

The Cat In the Hat lies somewhere in the middle. Although less explicitly racist,
the main character owes a debt to blackface vaudeville, and was based on a black
woman who worked as an elevator operator, said Philip Nel, a professor of English
as Kansas State University.

And while the cat brings liveliness to two children on a dreary day, he is also
clearly marked as not belonging in their white household.

“It’s actually kind of ordinary and that’s part of the point—racism is ordinary, it’s
not aberrant, it’s not strange—and that’s why Seuss is useful to think about,” said
Nel, whose book-length study Was The Cat In the Hat Black?, was released in
August. “He is an example of how even progressive, anti-racist people can act in
ways that are racist. I don’t think he’s intentionally recycling stereotypes in his
book from the ‘50s, but the imagination is influenced by the culture in which it
grows, and it doesn’t necessarily filter out the racism bits during artistic creation.”

Critics of such analyses wonder if they say more about adults’ baggage than kids’
books. To echo those who have pushed back at the critical attention on Seuss—
the mayor of Springfield, Mass., Geisel’s hometown, among them—isn’t the Cat in
the Hat, well, just a cat in a hat?

Even those who acknowledge some of the troubling features in his book question
the recent focus on his work.

“So Seuss had issues. But so did a vast array of other authors, including pretty
much anyone writing before, say, 1930,” one Washington Post columnist wrote.

But Nel counters that the images are powerful ones, a reminder of racism’s
capacity to adapt. “I think children notice on levels that they may not be able to
articulate,” he said. “The persistence of blackface minstrelry, even in subtle ways,
has a normalizing effect.”

It’s tempting to think that only the subtler examples of racism persist in children’s
literature. But according to Michelle H. Martin, the Beverly Cleary professor for
children and youth services at the information school at the University of
Washington in Seattle, versions of Little Black Sambo, first published in 1899 and
long since in the public domain, have been brought out as recently as 2004, though
they are sometimes sanitized.

Meanwhile, despite some advances, the children’s literature market remains

dominated by white authors and depictions of white characters, according to
annual data collected by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, a research
library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s school of education.

In 2016, just 22 percent of the roughly 3,400 books reviewed by the center featured
nonwhite characters, and only 13 percent were written by people of color—even
though more than half of the United States’ school-age population are children of
color.

The spotlight on Seuss could bring some uncomfortable attention for organizations
long tied to his work, among them the National Education Association. The
nation’s largest teachers’ union has since 1997 celebrated Read Across America,
an initiative centered on Geisel’s birthday each year. And an associated symbol,
the Cat in the Hat’s red-and-white-striped stovepipe hat, has been sported by
everyone from the NEA president to Barack and Michelle Obama.

In recent years, the NEA has broadened its focus from Seuss, highlighting more
diverse children’s books and expanding resources aimed at older children. And
while it has gotten more queries and some criticism about Seuss as the author’s
background has become more widespread, those changes have been priorities for
some time, said Steven Grant, an NEA spokesman and manager of Read Across
America.

“I think there will always be a place for Seuss books—they are in every classroom
and library in America—and in some cases, they’re effective for younger readers,”
he said. “That said, it’s not to the exclusion of all the other great books that are out
there.”

A Tough Balance
The harder question concerns teachers whose classrooms are stocked with the older
books. The tendency is to avoid them altogether or to keep only those that don’t
have objectionable content (Green Eggs and Ham, anyone?) But scholars like Nel
and Martin argue there’s another way to do it: Embrace the history in effective
ways.

Martin said she’s talked about one of the modern rewrites of the Sambo story,
Anne Isaac’s Pancakes for Supper, with her 5-year-old niece. (The book reworks
the story as an American tall tale with a female protagonist.)
“The fact that it is still part of our culture—why are we still rewriting the story? Of
what value is it?” she said. “Anne Isaac’s story is a delightful story, and if you
didn’t know that it’s derived from a little black Sambo story, it would stand on its
own, but that’s part of the argument we’re making—bring that history out. Ask
kids what they think. They might say, ‘This is an awesome story,’ but they should
be informed while reading.”

Martin, who has also been a teacher-educator, also believes that programs
preparing teachers need to engage with similar questions and help teachers locate
more diverse books, some of which have been published by smaller, independent
presses. “If the teachers don’t have training in cultural sensitivityand diverse
children’s books, they have a disconnect going into the classroom—and they have
a disadvantage. And they don’t know it,” she said.

And adults of all professions should be open to taking a hard look at their favorite
children’s books, and embrace the discomfort it may bring.

“I don’t think nostalgia is a defense. Affection is not a defense,” Nel said. “What
you have to do is take a deep breath, step back, and realize that the culture in which
these books live and in which these books were written is a racist culture and a
sexist culture.”

Dr. Seuss Books Can Be Racist, But Students

Keep Reading Them
Jessica YarmoskyFebruary 26, 20197:00 AM ET
LA Johnson/NPR

This week, millions of students and teachers are taking part in Read Across
America, a national literacy program celebrated annually around the birthday of
Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. For over 20 years, teachers and
students have donned costumes — often the Cat in the Hat's iconic red and

white striped hat — and devoured books like Green Eggs and Ham.

But some of Seuss' classics have been criticized for the way they portray people of
color. In And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example, a character
described as Chinese has two lines for eyes, carries chopsticks and a bowl of rice,
and wears traditional Japanese-style shoes. In If I Ran the Zoo, two men said to be
from Africa are shown shirtless, shoeless and wearing grass skirts as they carry an
exotic animal. Outside of his books, the author's personal legacy has come into
question, too — Seuss wrote an entire minstrel show in high school and performed
as the main character in full blackface.

In light of this, the National Education Association rebranded Read Across

America in 2017, backing away from Seuss' books and Seuss-themed activities. It
introduced a new theme of "celebrating a nation of diverse readers." Its website
now highlights works by and about people of color.
But in many schools and libraries, the week is still synonymous with all things
Seuss. Classrooms are decorated in colorful red and blue fish and children dress up
as their favorite iconic characters, like Thing 1 and Thing 2, dreaming of the places
they'll go.

That tension between Seuss and Seuss-free classrooms is emblematic of a bigger

debate playing out across the country — should we continue to teach classic books
that may be problematic, or eschew them in favor of works that more positively
represent people of color?

Part of the reason this debate is so complicated is the staying power of classic
books. Think back to the works lining your school bookshelves. In Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, the N-word appears more than 200 times. But for generations,
people have argued that the book is vital to understanding race relations in
America in the late 1800s. And the trope of Jews as greedy and money-hungry is
pretty clear in The Merchant of Venice. Yet Shakespeare is hailed for his keen
understanding of human nature that continues to be relevant today.

Jaya Saxena, a writer whose work examines inclusivity in young adult literature, is
in favor of revamping the canon. But she understands why teachers might continue
to teach it. She says when she was in high school, her teachers used the classics to
teach literary devices and styles of writing, not necessarily to prioritize certain
narratives or worldviews. The Merchant of Venice, for example, is a prime
example of allegory.

"The point was, here's what this book does well," Saxena says. "Maybe they
weren't everybody's favorite books, but they were good examples of ... the craft of
writing."

And when planning lessons from year to year, it's easier for teachers to prioritize
books they're already familiar with. But when these books include offensive
stereotypes, teachers have to decide whether to continue teaching them and how.

"Not engaging [with problematic texts] at all runs too great a risk of not learning or
understanding where the problems lie," says Larissa Pahomov, who teaches
English at a high school in Philadelphia. "I believe there is a way to look at
material that is stereotypical [and] racist and identify it for what it is, and then
hopefully, in doing so, neutralize its effect."

When Pahomov read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with her seniors last fall,
she was careful to teach students how to read the work through a critical lens that
took the author's background into account. In class discussions, she made sure to
emphasize that context to her students as they examined the work.
"What resources did he draw from to write this book, and this character? What has
been the Native American reaction to this book specifically? What was the reaction
of the psychiatric treatment community? How do we look at it now? What's the
treatment of women? There were so many angles to discussing it," she says.

Pahomov notes that because her students are teenagers, having these conversations
is possible. But books geared toward younger kids? Those discussions can get a lot
more complicated.

Which brings us back to Dr. Seuss.

In a study published earlier this month in Research on Diversity in Youth

Literature, researchers Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens found that only 2
percent of the human characters in Seuss' books were people of color. And all of
those characters, they say, were "depicted through racist caricatures."

Those caricatures have a potent effect, even at an early age. Research showsthat

even at the age of 3, children begin to form racial biases, and by the age of 7, those
biases become fixed.

"One of the reasons for that is the images and experiences that they're exposed to
regarding marginalized groups and people of color," Stephens says. "And so
[Seuss' books] being mainstream, and being spread out all over the world, has large
implications."

If kids open books and "the images they see [of themselves] are distorted, negative
[or] laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the
society in which they are a part," Rudine Sims Bishop, a scholar of children's
literature, wrote in a 1990 article.

But when they see themselves represented in a positive way, it can have a similarly
powerful effect.

That's one of the reasons first-grade teacher Emily Petersen says she won't be
reading Dr. Seuss with her students this week, or ever.

"If I'm looking at a 6-year-old and choosing what story [I'm] going to teach them
how to read through, I'm definitely going to choose the one that affirms and
celebrates identities in a new way," she says.

For other teachers who want to help students affirm their identities, the NEA is
offering grants and resources to help schools highlight literary works by and about
people of color. 
But the forces that have kept Dr. Seuss on the bookshelf for decades are strong.
Often, schools plan their Read Across America events months in advance.
Costumes, books and activities from previous years are ready to go. It can be
difficult for teachers to deviate from these plans, especially when they have
celebrated in the same way year after year after year. And with over 650 million of
his books in circulation worldwide, just like his infamous cat, it looks like Dr.
Seuss will keep coming back.

Thumbs up, thumbs down: The cycles of

'cancel culture'
Melanie KembreyJuly 11, 2020 — 11.20pm

This was published 10 months ago

There's a scene in Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator where the emperor's son, Commodus,
considers whether he will let General Maximus Decimus Meridius live or die. As Commodus
(Joaquin Phoenix) wavers between lifting or dropping his thumb, the camera pans around the
Colosseum. The crowd is on its feet, chanting "live". With reluctance, the thumb is raised:
Maximus (Russell Crowe) is saved. The crowd roars as orchestral music soars.

It's a scene that speaks to some of the strains of our contemporary climate: the sense of the
masses directly influencing traditional institutions of authority, of "cancellation" being in the
mere flick of a wrist, and of the ethics of seeing choices about a life and livelihood served up
for mass consumption.

Two separate but in many ways similar statements, signed by some of Australia's and the
world's most significant cultural leaders and published last week, have intensified the debate
about these subjects, which are often lumped together under the catch-all phrase "cancel
culture".

While neither letter specifically mentions "cancel culture", they share an interest in questions
of free speech, censorship and how and who chooses when the thumb turns up or down.

Eliza Scanlen on the set of Mukbang.Harri Sharp

In Australia, cultural heavyweights published a statement in response to the controversy

surrounding debut director Eliza Scanlen's Sydney Film Festival prize-winning Mukbang, a
short film about a schoolgirl binge-eating food online as part of a trend that has been popular
in South Korea for the past decade.

On Twitter, actor and writer Michelle Law accused the film of being culturally insensitive
and reflecting a "white supremacist" tendency in the Australian film industry due to its
exploration of Mukbang and a now-deleted scene that showed a drawing of the white
schoolgirl protagonist violently attacking a black schoolboy.

In response, the 27 signatories – including Indigenous filmmakers Warwick Thornton, Rachel

Perkins, Ivan Sen and Darren Dale, writer Andrew Bovell and Hollywood star Joel Edgerton
and his director brother Nash – argued that "something is dangerously askew in the way that
we are talking about race in the arts in this country, we feel that it is time we spoke up."

"The current focus on public shaming and 'burning down' the industry is misguided and
ahistorical. Even if it started as an attempt at genuine critique, in the divisive and polarising
world of social media, it has quickly descended into online bullying," the statement read.

While acknowledging structural racism within the arts industry, author Christos Tsiolkas said
one of the key reasons he signed the letter was because he was alarmed by the "ugliness of
the rhetoric at the moment" and the "annihilation" of an individual's dignity.

"I feel sympathy with a lot of the people on Twitter. I don’t believe censoring and shaming is
the way forward. I think it has been incredibly destructive historically and my fear now is
people get caught up in their bubbles and they must be sick of it," Tsiolkas said. "Everyone is
throwing stones and no one is taking a moment to think."

One of the filmmakers involved in writing the statement, who asked not to be named,
described the Sydney Film Festival as a beloved institution and said a video call involving
industry leaders was held as the debate about Mukbang unfolded online. There was a shared
sentiment, the filmmaker said, that figures who should be allies in the campaign for greater
diversity were “eating each other in a very public way”.

The question of whether to include white arts leaders as signatories was a topic of
considerable discussion, but the group came to the conclusion that "this is an issue for our
whole industry, and white people have to be part of that discussion".

“There was a lot of talk about trying not to make it inflammatory, to keep it cool-headed,” the
filmmaker said. “We didn’t want to inflame things further – but of course that’s not what
happened.”

On the same day the letter was published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 153
prominent writers, activists and academics across the political spectrum, including J.K.
Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, released a letter in Harper's
Magazine. 

The Harper's letter was a broader rallying cry for "justice and open debate", arguing that the
"exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more
constricted". But as with the Sydney Film Festival letter, it took aim at "the swift and severe
retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought" and the "vogue for
public shaming and ostracism".

Both letters copped swift and severe criticism for being paternalistic, out of touch,
overblown, hypocritical and complicit with structures of racism. The signatories, it was
pointed out, were well-resourced figures of cultural authority who had easy access to major
news outlets and no real risk of being "cancelled".

Arab Australian poet Omar Sakr said it never surprised him when people "with a great deal of
access can't see the problem, or think things are going swell".
"It felt wrong to me that a collection of older, for the most part, established figures in the arts
would, under the banner of the SMH and to an audience of millions, publicly try to shut down
an argument put forward by one, or a small group of people, on Twitter of all places."

While the media "indulged in the fantasy of free speech debate", Sakr said other key voices
and issues were denied. These included discussions about the need for greater diversity in
media, including at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, which has been criticised for
appointing five freelance cultural critics, all of whom were white (two of whom resigned in
protest over the lack of cultural diversity among the five critics). Michelle Law was among
those who were critical of the appointments.

Sakr also said the media attention given to the letters revealed how legacy outlets attempted
to control the terms of debate, highlighting how on the flipside Australian media outlets
would not publish a statement, signed by more than 700 academics and writers, against
Israel's planned annexation of the West Bank.

Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad, founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and

author of The Lebs, said the Sydney Film Festival letter was a "distraction which derail our
attempts to hold white people and white institutions, including the institution that published
the letter, accountable for their role in systemic and structural racism".

The swift backlash to the letters was followed by some swift mea culpas. One signatory to
the Harper's letter, author Jennifer Finney Boylan, made a complete U-turn, issuing an
apology for signing the statement.

While those arts leaders who signed the Sydney Film Festival letter said they didn't intend to
fan the flames of "cancel culture", they were prepared for criticism.

“One of the reasons there are so many names on that list is that people were afraid of being
attacked individually,” said the filmmaker who didn't want to be identified. “It’s so easy to
take down one person and destroy them, their ‘politically correct’ credentials. People are
scared, totally scared.”

In a story published on the website Reason, another signatory to the Harper'sletter, journalist

Jesse Singal, criticised the heated response, saying: "there was no sane connection between
the text of the letter and such a reaction".

The Macquarie Dictionary crowned "cancel culture" its 2019 word of the year –describing it
as "the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support
from a public figure" – but it is a slippery term that persistently refuses a stable definition.

"The label 'cancel culture' turns attention to these discussions and debates but frames them as
problematic, and I think that really is not particularly helpful," University of NSW Associate
Professor Tanja Dreher, a media and communications academic, said.

"It is an overly simplistic term and a little alarmist. There are lots of really interesting
discussions and debates taking place, and to simplify them all in that term 'cancel culture'
actually hides more than reveals."
J.K. Rowling, who has clashed with critics on social media for her posts on gender and sex,
signed the Harper's letter.AP

University of Sydney cultural studies expert Dr Benjamin Nickl said contemporary "cancel
culture" had developed over several years, although protests, boycotts, public shaming and
erasure had a long history.

Nickl said the current strain was a media and youth culture phenomenon often related to
clicktivism, social media warriors, hashtaggers and keyboard courage. And while debates
about the phenomenon have ebbed and flowed, he said he thought it had reached a new point
in its evolution.

Nickl said the rapid "cancellations" of public figures had offered individuals a "glimpse of
power that people can have to overturn the authority", and he said the criticism of the open
letters had the potential to "initiate a profound change in the perception of cultural
institutionalisation and the canon".

"However, cancel culture won’t change much if it’s just performative and replaces Caesar’s
thumbs up or down during the Romans’ bread-and-games pastime sport. That was to see even
the emperor, a massive authority, decide at least in part swayed by the large audience mob’s
and people’s opinion," Nickl said.

Dreher said generational difference also contributed to the nature of contemporary "cancel
culture", as the conversations played out in different ways on social media and in legacy
media outlets.

"In some recent cases what we are seeing is commentators who have some platform – and
that is derived from a long-term involvement in media and cultural institutions – in
conversation with a generation of advocates and activists and practitioners who have really
developed in the social media environment and are very adept at using the affordances of
social media for discussion, debate and activism, and so in a sense we've got different models
of how to have these discussions and debates and sometimes they are rubbing up against each
other," Dreher said.
But to attempt to unpack "cancel culture" is in many ways an unwitting reinforcement of the
phrase. Dreher said the concept has become a stuck point and pushing the discussion beyond
the frame is necessary.

"We really need to think that if we set aside the cancel culture debate what other
conversations could we have? What would we be talking about?"

From our partners

What to Know About Children's Author

Roald Dahl's Controversial Legacy
To many, Roald Dahl is the genius behind some of the world’s most beloved
children’s books, including Matilda, James and the Giant Peach and The BFG.
But since his death in 1990, a dark side of the author’s personal life has raised
questions about his life’s work and legacy.

Dahl’s collection of fantastical children’s stories have brought joy to millions of

readers for decades, and continue to inspire new adaptations and reboots. In
January, Warner Bros. announced that it had set a release date of March 17, 2023
for Wonka, a movie prequel to Dahl’s 1964 book Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory that will center on “a young Willy Wonka and his adventures prior to
opening the world’s most famous chocolate factory.”

Netflix, which reportedly paid the Roald Dahl Story Company at least $1 billion in

2018 for the rights to 16 of the author’s works, also has two animated seriesbased
on the world and characters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in development.
Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok, Jojo Rabbit) is writing, directing and executive
producing both shows. Of course, this isn’t the first time one of Dahl’s books has
been adapted for the screen. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has twice
previously been made into a movie—once in 1971, with Gene Wilderstarring as
the titular candy man in the much-beloved Willy Wonka and the Chocolate
Factory, and again in 2005, with Johnny Depp taking up the Wonka mantle
for Tim Burton’s take on the classic. Big-screen versions of The Witches(1990 and
2020), James and the Giant Peach (1996), Matilda (1996), Fantastic Mr.
Fox (2009) and The BFG (2016) have also found success.

Despite Dahl publicly admitting he was anti-Semitic in an interview shortly before

his death at age 74, in addition to a number of reports of his alleged misogyny and
racism, for a long time it seemed that the immense popularity of his books, and
their accompanying adaptations, overshadowed concerns regarding his reputed
prejudices.

In recent years, some have sought to shine a brighter light on the troubling nature
of Dahl’s personal views. In 2018, The Guardian reported that the British Royal
Mint had rejected a proposal to mark the 100th anniversary of Dahl’s birth with a
commemorative coin due to the fact that he was “associated with anti-Semitism
and not regarded as an author of the highest reputation.” In response to the Royal
Mint’s decision, Amanda Bowman, vice president of the Board of Deputies of
British Jews, also spoke out against Dahl. “The Royal Mint was absolutely correct
to reject the idea of a commemorative coin for Roald Dahl,” she said. “Many of his
utterances were unambiguously anti-Semitic. He may have been a great children’s
writer but he was also a racist and this should be remembered.”

In December 2020, it came to light that the Dahl family and Roald Dahl Story
Company, in what some saw as a preemptive move to deflect criticism of
forthcoming projects, had issued an apology for Dahl’s history of anti-Semitismon
the official Dahl website. It’s unclear exactly when the statement first appeared on
the site.

“The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologize for the
lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl’s statements,” it
reads. “Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked
contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories,
which have positively impacted young people for generations. We hope that, just
as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the
lasting impact of words.”

In a statement obtained by TIME, the Roald Dahl Story Company also noted that
the company and Dahl’s family “have apologized unreservedly for the hurt and
suffering caused by Roald Dahl’s anti-Semitic comments. Those prejudiced
statements are in marked contrast to the values of kindness and inclusivity at the
heart of Roald Dahl’s stories.”

Due in part to the controversy surrounding transphobic comments made by Harry

Potter author J.K. Rowling over the past year, news of new Dahl projects has come
amid a period of increased scrutiny of writers’ personal views and whether those
views can be separated from their work. Dr. Seuss Enterprises recently announced
that it would cease publication of six of the author’s booksthat have racist and
insensitive imagery, a move which some critics, including Donald Trump, Jr.,
chalked up to “cancel culture.” But as Abraham Foxman, the national director of
the Anti-Defamation League at the time, wrote in a 1990 letter to The New
York Times following Dahl’s death, “Talent is no guarantee of wisdom. Praise for
Mr. Dahl as a writer must not obscure the fact that he was also a bigot.”

Here’s what you need to know about the author’s history of prejudice and how it’s
impacting his legacy today.

Dahl’s personal life and early career

Actor Patricia Neal recovering at home after a stroke with her husband, author
Roald Dahl, and their three children, (l-r) Theo, Ophelia and Tessa, in Great
Missenden, England, in 1965.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis—Getty Images

In the 1993 book Roald Dahl: A Biography, author Jeremy Treglown wrote that
Dahl was a man of contradictions: “He was famously a war hero, a connoisseur, a
philanthropist, a devoted family man who had to confront an appalling succession
of tragedies. He was also, as will be seen, a fantasist, an anti-Semite, a bully and a
self-publicizing troublemaker.”
A native of Wales, Dahl lived in Africa for a year after taking a position with Shell
Oil in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika (now in Tanzania), following his graduation
from Repton, a British boarding school, in 1934. In 1939, following the outbreak
of World War II, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force and served as a fighter pilot
before suffering severe injuries to his head, nose and back in a plane crash in the
Libyan desert. Dahl was eventually sent to Washington, D.C., to join the British
Embassy as an assistant air attaché, and it was there that he began his writing
career, publishing a short story in the Saturday Evening Post.

In July 1953, Dahl married Hollywood actor Patricia Neal, who later nicknamed
him “Roald the Rotten” because of his alleged mistreatment of her. The couple
settled in Great Missenden, England, and had five children together. But in the
midst of his writing career taking off, Dahl faced a series of family tragedies.
Ahead of the 1961 publication of James and the Giant Peach, Dahl’s 4-month-old
son Theo suffered a severe brain injury when his pram was hit by a taxi in New
York City. This was followed by the death of his eldest daughter, Olivia, of
measles encephalitis at the age of 7 in November 1962. Neal then suffered a series
of strokes in February 1965 from which she never fully recovered.

Dahl and Neal divorced in 1983, and later that year he married set designer Felicity
Crosland, with whom he’d allegedly had an 11-year affair. Dahl’s later years were
arguably the most successful of his career, but also the period that has fueled the
most controversy.

What did Roald Dahl say that was anti-Semitic?

Closeup candid portrait of writer Roald Dahl waving a cigarette while talking at
home.
Ian Cook—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

During his lifetime, Dahl made openly anti-Semitic remarks on a number of

occasions.

In a review of a book about the Lebanon War that appeared in the August 1983
edition of the British periodical Literary Review, Dahl wrote, in reference to
Jewish people, “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched
so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.”

He also made reference to “those powerful American Jewish bankers” and asserted

that the United States government was “utterly dominated by the great Jewish
financial institutions over there.”

Later that same year, he doubled down on his statements in an interview with the
British magazine New Statesman. “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does
provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” he
said. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even
a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

A few months before his death in 1990, Dahl stated outright that he was anti-
Semitic in an interview with The Independent.

After claiming that Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was “hushed up in the
newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned,” he went on to say, “I’m
certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a
Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism. I think
they should see both sides. It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the
rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media
—jolly clever thing to do—that’s why the president of the United States has to sell
all this stuff to Israel.”

What about his books?

Roald Dahl holding his cane while standing outside of the shed where he wrote in
Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England.
Ian Cook—The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

Dahl’s children’s books aren’t considered notably anti-Semitic. However, his

publishers—especially longtime editor Stephen Roxburgh—are credited with
cutting racist and misogynistic content from some of his most famous stories,
including The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG.

In a 2013 reminiscence on working with Dahl on The Witches, Roxburgh wrote, “I

was concerned about the portrayal of women, but Roald wasn’t.” Roxburgh recalls
Dahl telling him: “I don’t agree with you about women coming in for a lot of stick
all the way through. The nicest person in the whole thing is a woman [the
grandmother] so I have not changed anything here.”

The 1983 book has been banned by some U.K. libraries for its perceived negative
portrayal of women, and also appears on the American Library Association’s list of
the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990 to 1999.

As for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dahl’s original portrayal of the Oompa-

Loompas, depicting them as African pygmies that Willy Wonka shipped to
England “in large packing cases with holes in them,” has also been duly criticized
for perpetuating racist ideologies. “In the 1964 book, Wonka explains that he
found the Oompa-Loompas ‘in the very deepest and darkest part of the African
jungle where no white man had ever been before.’ They were near starvation,
living on vile caterpillars, so Wonka smuggled them to England for their own
good,” Livia Gershon wrote in December 2020 for JSTOR Daily. “The wildly
colonialist stereotyping apparently received little pushback until 1971, when plans
were announced for a U.S. movie version of the book.”

Even after the NAACP began protesting this depiction of the Oompa-Loompas,
Dahl was apparently reluctant to rewrite the characters. But he did eventually
revise the book, reimagining the Oompa-Loompas as “long-haired, rosy-cheeked,
and white, hailing from the island of Loompaland.” In the movie Willy Wonka and
the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas have orange skin.

Dahl’s widow, Felicity Dahl, claimed in a 2017 interview with BBC Radio 4

Today alongside Dahl biographer Donald Sturrock that the titular character
in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was initially Black, but Dahl’s agent insisted
Charlie Bucket be portrayed as white because of concerns about having a “Black
hero.”

Even so, previous criticisms reportedly also did not temper a racist description of
the Big Friendly Giant in an early draft of The BFG, which was ultimately changed
before the book was published in 1982. “[Dahl’s] first draft of The BFG, the
friendly giant at the center of that book emerged as the very worst imitation of a
Zip Coon figure, a black, flat-nosed, giant with ‘thick rubbery lips . . . like two
gigantic purple frankfurters lying on top of the other,'” wrote historian Donald
Yacovone, an associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African &
African American Research, in 2018. “For once, an editor spoke up.” Yacovone
said Roxbourgh, who later edited The Witches and Matilda, “properly denounced
Dahl’s characterization as a ‘derisive stereotype.’ Dahl conceded the point,
responding: ‘the negro lips thing is taken care of.'”

Response to the Dahl family apology

Roald Dahl reads to three of his children, from left, Tessa, Theo, and Ophelia, in
the kitchen of his home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England in
September 1965.

Leonard McCombe—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

In the wake of the Dahl family’s apology, the Campaign Against Antisemitism said
in a statement that while it was encouraging for Dahl’s prejudices to be
acknowledged by “those who profit from his creative works,” the acknowledgment
was long overdue.

“The admission that the famous author’s anti-Semitic views are

‘incomprehensible’ is right. For his family and estate to have waited thirty years to
make an apology, apparently until lucrative deals were signed with Hollywood, is
disappointing and sadly rather more comprehensible,” the statement read. “It is a
shame that the estate has seen fit merely to apologize for Dahl’s anti-Semitism
rather than to use its substantial means to do anything about it. The apology should
have come much sooner and been published less obscurely.”

The family offered a bit more context on their original apology in a December
statement to The Sunday Times. “Apologizing for the words of a much-loved
grandparent is a challenging thing to do, but made more difficult when the words
are so hurtful to an entire community. We loved Roald, but we passionately
disagree with his anti-Semitic comments,” they said. “This is why we chose to
apologize on our website, an apology easily found on Google…These comments
do not reflect what we see in his work—a desire for the acceptance of everyone
equally—and were entirely unacceptable. We are truly sorry.”

Suggesting that the “teaching of Dahl’s books should also be used as an

opportunity for young people to learn about his intolerant views,” Marie van der
Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, also spoke out against the
timing of the family’s statement. “This apology should have happened long ago—
and it is of concern that it has happened so quietly now,” she said in a statement.
“Roald Dahl’s abhorrent anti-Semitic prejudices were no secret and have tarnished
his legacy.”

Political Correctness vs. Politeness

Political Correctness is, in many ways, an extraordinary and admirable
achievement of our age. It involves an acute sensitivity to the suffering of minority
groups traditionally overlooked by the dominant forces in society – and a
commitment to teasing out examples of adversity in the large but also the small
moments of daily life. Its aim is to spread empathy, justice and fairness.

For a movement with such admirable aims, it is surprising how many people it
appears to have upset. The reason may lie not so much with its noble underlying
ambitions as with the manner of their execution. When we receive lessons in
political correctness, some of the following may occur:

– We’ll be invited to see ourselves as rather nastier than we had ever imagined we
might be and much more closely involved in oppressing others. We can – at points
– feel unbearably guilty.
– A generous path to redemption won’t necessarily be on offer: the oppression to
which we discover we are party is so large and widespread, it appears it won’t be
in any one person’s remit to solve it. We’ll just need to keep feeling guilty.

– We realise that the target of our re-education isn’t just our manners and what we
outwardly say or do. It is also our thoughts. Our guilt spreads to a new area: the
very recesses of our minds.

– We learn that we are, comparatively, extremely privileged. What’s tricky is that

we may not feel ourselves to be so, though this is precisely – we are informed – the
leading symptom of our inbuilt advantages. We are so privileged as to be unaware
of our privilege. But inside us, it may seem as if we were being taxed on a legacy
we had never actually received; as if four generations back, we’d had a wealthy
great-aunt we’d never met and from whom we’d never received any money, but on
whose estate we now learnt we were expected to pay an enormous tax bill.

We seem to be faced with an unfortunate choice. Either we embrace the goals of

kindness as defined by political correctness, but face a high degree of non-
redemptive guilt and humiliation along the way. Or, in a bid to regain our peace of
mind, we give up on all attempts to be sensitive and generous under the terms
proffered, and feel ourselves implicitly pushed into the camp of the boorish, the
insensitive and the crude – to which we don’t actually want to belong, but to which
there seem few alternatives.

There is, however, an important way out of this dichotomy, a philosophy of social
concern and interaction that flies under a deceptively simple and traditional
name: politeness.

Politeness shares some of the major objectives of political correctness: it too wants
a world of sensitivity, kindness and grace. It too seeks to avoid causing suffering to
strangers. But it has some decisive – and very helpful – differences.

– Politeness is universal, not selective

Political correctness zeroes in on the distress of particular groups in society; it is

selective in its emphasis on where respect needs to be directed. The ambition of
politeness, however is more expansive: it commands that one should be deeply
courteous to everyone, whatever creed, colour and background they might be. No
one is left out and therefore no one can feel embittered.

– Politeness focuses on Action rather than Thought

Politeness recognises we will naturally and inevitably sometimes have mean or
dark thoughts about other social groups. The philosophy of politeness doesn’t
panic, because it accepts that our brains are in many ways primitive. It doesn’t
believe that such thoughts can ever be entirely removed. Instead, the effort is
concentrated in the one area where it matters above all: how people actually
behave towards one another day to day. This is where politeness directs all its
attention – and gets strict. Our manners must be beyond reproach; our thoughts can
be left to themselves.

– Politeness is apolitical 

Political correctness is highly tied to politics, and specifically, to a left-leaning

agenda. The big risk is that if one disagrees with the politics, one might then ignore
the overall command for sensitivity and kindness. This is where Politeness has an
enormous advantage, for it is prior to and larger than politics. It starts in childhood,
in the way we treat our little sister, the bus driver or our awkward uncle. Politeness
teaches us tenderness to the vulnerabilities of others irrespective of what’s
happening in the economy and without reference to a particular interpretation of
history. Politeness doesn’t belong to any one political group; it’s simply a basic
requirement of being human.

– Politeness is gently taught

The polite person is polite in a crucial area: the business of teaching politeness to
others. They never make anyone feel guilty for not already being polite. They take
it for granted that no one ever starts off that way. They see rudeness as a
consequence of not having been sufficiently helped or of being in pain, not a sign
of evil. They make the attractions of courtesy appealing through their own gentle
behaviour.

– Politeness is an aspiration – not a legal requirement

Political correctness can seem as if it is laying down principles we have to follow.

Politeness suggests it is giving us aspirations it would be beautiful if we managed
to follow. The difference is key. When you have to do something, you no longer
feel any pride or virtue in doing so. But if an action is voluntary, we come away
with a glowing sense of our own decency in having chosen the right path. It is the
difference between charity and taxation: the former feels noble and kindly, the
latter, an oppressive chore we’d love to wriggle out of.

It is a tragedy of the age that some of the goals of politeness have been undermined
by the more forbidding aspects of political correctness. We need to rediscover
politeness as a route back to building more civil, less mean-spirited societies and to
giving proper expression to what is always a fundamental force in us: the desire to
be kind and respectful to others.