The "cancel culture" debate is dumb. By Matthew Yglesias

The "cancel culture" debate is dumb. By Matthew Yglesias

SlowBoring.com

January 27, 2021. 

Hey folks: It’s Thursday and “cancel culture” has been back in the discourse this week.

I think it’s a stupid term and I agree with everyone who thinks conservatives have been simultaneously incoherent and hypocritical in their take on this topic. I don’t use the term and don’t think that I ever will.

But I will say that I think the general dialogue on this issue has gotten too focused on the particulars of Twitter dynamics and the possibility of people getting fired for bad tweets. There are a bunch of interesting questions about social norms around social media use, and a bunch of other interesting questions about at-will employment and workplace norms. But what I actually think is roiling left of center circles is not these process questions, but questions of substance.

When I was a kid in the 1990s, it was common for people to call things “gay” as a kind of generic insult. But kids who went to Grace Church School in Greenwich Village didn’t do that — it was a super pro-LGBT community, and all the adults would give you shit about it. Then for high school, I went uptown and it was “gay” this and “gay” that, but the students insisted that they didn’t mean it in a homophobic way, and it was just kind of tolerated. Obviously, there were many places in the United States in 1997 where people would just say “there’s nothing wrong with homophobia.” But that wasn’t the culture of my high school on the Upper East Side. Anti-gay bigotry was definitely wrong; there was just this question of whether or not that particular slang counted. I hope people have changed their view of this since then — change can be good!

But not every change is good. And one thing that’s happening is that we are arguing not about whether or not it’s okay to say racist stuff, but about which stuff is racist.

Ibram Kendi’s redefinition of racism

Ibram Kendi followed up his excellent book Stamped From The Beginning with the less academic, better-selling How To Be An Antiracist, which I think is a good book that’s worth reading and engaging with. But like many good books that are worth reading and engaging with, I don’t agree with all of it.

The main thrust of the book is that Kendi is self-consciously trying to redefine racism.

There are a few steps to this but his main idea is that any form of inequality between racial groups is racist (by definition) and that failure to support policy measures to close that gap is, again, racist.

And he takes this in fairly extreme directions. Where I think most progressives would traditionally have said that Black children’s lower test scores and high school graduation rates reflect structural disadvantages, Kendi argues that calling attention to this “achievement gap” is itself racist.

The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies. We degrade Black minds every time we speak of an “academic-achievement gap” based on these numbers. The acceptance of an academic-achievement gap is just the latest method of reinforcing the oldest racist idea: Black intellectual inferiority. The idea of an achievement gap means there is a disparity in academic performance between groups of students; implicit in this idea is that academic achievement as measured by statistical instruments like test scores and dropout rates is the only form of academic “achievement.” There is an even more sinister implication in the achievement-gap talk—that disparities in academic achievement accurately reflect disparities in intelligence among racial groups. Intellect is the linchpin of behavior, and the racist idea of the achievement gap is the linchpin of behavioral racism.

My view is that it is 100 percent correct to say that if someone tweets something racist he should be criticized. And if someone is persistently tweeting racist things, you’d want to fire him. But I don’t remotely believe that saying the racial achievement gap is a real thing and a real problem in American society is racist. There’s a disagreement here not about “is it okay to say racist stuff,” but rather about what stuff is racist.

Kendi is wrong about this

My sincere hope is that Kendi could actually be convinced that his analysis of this topic is wrong.

For starters, academic achievement is not the same thing as intelligence. My dad is a smart guy but he didn’t graduate high school so there’s plenty of random math stuff that most college-bound people learn that he never did. I’m sure he could learn to pass an AP Calculus test if it seemed important, but it doesn’t, so he hasn’t done it. If you can pull off what dad did and get a novel published when you’re a teenager and then drop out of school and go on to have a successful career as a writer, then good for you. But the expected value of this strategy is low, and for most people, learning skills in school is important aside from questions of how smart you are.

There’s also tons of research like:

Kids do worse in school when they’re food insecure

Kids do worse in school when they survive a school shooting

Kids do worse in school when they have racist teachers (Kendi himself actually says this in the book)

Kids do worse in school when they lack stable housing

Now what would be convenient would be if this all meant that school is meaningless somehow. But it’s not. When kids face problems early in life that make it hard for them to learn, the consequences of that ripple forward. Black kids are more likely to suffer from disadvantages outside of school. They are also more likely to be assigned to less experienced and less effective teachers, which makes things worse.

My point here is not particularly novel. Kendi was criticized on this specific achievement gap point by Kelefah Sanneh in his 2019 review of Kendi’s book for The New Yorker and in Randall Kennedy’s review for The Washington Post.

But of course, despite those criticisms, Kendi is a more prominent figure today than he was when those reviews were published. And to the best of my knowledge, he stands by his view, and his book is now widely recommended in education circles. As I say, I think it’s a book worth reading. But I do worry about its use in schools precisely because its specific take on education policy seems really wrongheaded.

This is a dispute about the substance of the issue — not “is it okay to say racist stuff about education?” but “is it in fact racist to see significance in Black kids’ lower test scores or does the existence of a gap just show that the tests are racist?”

The culture of conformity

It’s fine as a matter of process to sanction people for bigotry. It’s also fine for standards of what is considered bigoted to change over time. We have had a lot of change in that regard in my lifetime, and much of the change has been warranted and good. But some of it is bad and worth criticizing.

Now here’s where we get to “culture.”

My perception of one of the ways in which the media industry has changed is that it used to be the case that editors would actively encourage writers to lean into addressing this kind of controversial subject. It would stir things up, attract attention, set the agenda, and broaden the terms of the debate. That’s how James Bennet edited the Atlantic when I worked there, and it’s the approach he took to the New York Times opinion section until he rather suddenly stopped working there. They don’t Slatepitch at Slate anymore. When I was on The Ezra Klein Show in September we talked about this a lot, and I think it’s a good conversation since Ezra and I have very similar substantive opinions about American politics but different views about this transformation in journalism.

Something I’m a little obsessed with is how these days on social media you’ll get scolded sometimes for failing to “read the room” and people have created the character of “the contrarian” as a villain.

I have a friend who in real-life social settings totally refuses to read the room and insists on being a contrarian who picks little arguments with people rather than letting conversations flow. I like this guy a lot, but I think that’s legitimately bad manners and an annoying way to behave. But I don’t think journalism should be done like you’re a guest at a dinner party. This trend isn’t “incipient totalitarianism” or the end of free speech but it’s making publications dull and tedious while depriving the audience of interesting and informative content.

Some of this, I hope, is just a reaction to Trump. It was natural, to an extent, to want to adopt a “no enemies on the left” approach to an emergency moment for American democracy. But I do wish that progressive media people would keep in mind that what we do has much more impact on how progressive spaces themselves are governed — both in the sense of the internal norms of progressive institutions and in the politics of big cities and blue states — than we do on the choices of swing voters. If the only people who push back on certain unsound left-wing ideas are right-wing people, then those ideas will end up triumphing in blue areas with real consequences. It’s necessary, at times, not to fail to read the room but precisely to read it and pick the fight anyway. And to have institutions that support that.

So there is a real procedural aspect to this, in terms of whether controversial takes are valued or stigmatized and what kinds of controversies are welcomed. But fundamentally it’s not a question about who should be fired or what should happen on Twitter, it’s a question about which ideas are right, which are wrong, and which are in the middle ground where we need to see some debate and argument to make up our minds.