Among the signatories were several contributors to The New York Times Opinion section, including Bari Weiss, a former writer and editor at the paper who resigned on Tuesday. In her own public resignation letter, Ms. Weiss argued that “intellectual curiosity — let alone risk-taking — is now a liability at The Times,” and claimed that she was bullied for her centrist views.
Both of these letters generated a great deal of both praise and criticism, including in the form of — yes — more open letters. Is it true that the ideal of open debate is under siege? Here is a rundown of, as it were, the debate.
What exactly is ‘cancel culture’?
If you are a sentient person with internet access in the year 2020 — and I regret to inform you that you are — you have almost certainly heard the phrase “cancel culture,” which depending on your point of view either doesn’t exist or heralds a new totalitarianism. But what does it actually mean, where did it come from and what does it have to do with free speech?
Tediously, it is actually useful here to refer to a dictionary. According to the etymologists at Merriam-Webster, the concept of canceling was popularized in recent years as a way of demanding greater accountability from public figures who have committed or are accused of having committed some disqualifying moral transgression. “It’s an agreement not to amplify, signal boost, give money to,” Lisa Nakamura, a professor of media studies at the University of Michigan, told The Times in 2018.
[Related: Should we even use the term “cancel culture”?]
Credited to Black users of Twitter, cancellation has been said to share a lineage with midcentury civil rights boycotts, insofar as it enables those with little political power to litigate perceived injustices in the more accessible forum of popular culture (the cancellation court of public opinion, if you will). Increasingly, however, people across a broad range of personal backgrounds and political beliefs have criticized the practice as an imperious tactic of imposing on everyone, including those with relatively little power, a predetermined point of view by force of public shaming instead of persuasion. The culture of cancellation, they say, violates the spirit, if not the actual laws, of free expression.