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The Cancel Culture Thread


Muda69

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The New York Times Helped a Vindictive Teen Destroy a Classmate Who Uttered a Racial Slur When She Was 15

https://reason.com/2020/12/28/new-york-times-racial-slur-teen-jimmy-galligan-mimi-groves/

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Jimmy Galligan is an 18-year-old college freshman from Leesburg, Virginia. He may also be cancel culture's Count of Monte Cristo.

Some months ago, Galligan—who is biracial—posted a years' old, three-second video of a white, female classmate using a racial slur. Galligan had sat on the video for a long time, waiting for the moment it would do the most damage. After the girl—a cheerleader named Mimi Groves—was accepted to the University of Tennessee, the time had come.

"I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word," said Galligan.

The video depicted Groves, who was 15 at the time, and had just obtained her learner's permit, saying "I can drive, [slur]." The remark was not directed at anyone in particular. The brief video clip featuring it circulated on Snapchat until it was obtained and saved by Galligan, who had grown furious at how often he heard his white classmates using the N-word.

Galligan shared it publicly in June. In response, Groves lost her spot on UT's cheerleading squad. Then the university pressured her to withdraw from the school entirely. The admissions office had apparently received hundreds of messages from irate alumni demanding blood. Groves is now attending a community college.

This story is a powerful example of several social phenomena: the militant streak in social justice activism, the naivety of today's teens and their not-actually-disappearing Snapchat messages, social media's hunger for mob justice, and even the capacity for elaborate cruelty that has always existed among high schoolers. But the wildest thing about this incident is that most people will learn about it by reading The New York Times.

"A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning." That's the title of the Times's article on the subject, published the day after Christmas. Reporter Dan Levin tries to add considerable context by detailing a history of alleged unpleasantness at Heritage High School, which Groves and Galligan attended. It sits in a wealthy, predominantly white county where "slave auctions were once held on the courthouse grounds."

"In interviews, current and former students of color described an environment rife with racial insensitivity, including casual uses of slurs," notes Levin. "A report commissioned last year by the school district documented a pattern of school leaders ignoring the widespread use of racial slurs by both students and teachers, fostering a 'growing sense of despair' among students of color, some of whom faced disproportionate disciplinary measures compared with white students."

Levin connects the outcry from aggrieved students to the broader Black Lives Matter movement and protests that occurred this summer following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police. But nowhere does his article reckon with a very basic fact: The New York Times has opted to assist a teenager's desperate quest to ruin the life of a young woman who said something stupid when she was 15.

Everyone roughly 25 and older should thank their lucky stars that they completed adolescence before the age of social media and ubiquitous camera phones, because the country's most important newspaper apparently thinks it is appropriate to shame teenagers over their juvenile behavior. This is the very worst aspect of cancel culture—the burning desire to hold people accountable for mistakes they made as kids, even if they have long since learned their lesson and grown past them—and the Times has fully embraced it.

While the piece strives for a veneer of neutrality, it clearly lionizes Galligan, whose portrait—which appears early in the story—calls to mind The Washington Post's excessively flattering photograph of Lexie Gruber and Lyric Prince, who extorted the paper into humoring their Halloween-costume-related grievance. Levin never really challenges Galligan; in fact, the reporter lets Galligan get away with the assertion that his white father suffers from "white privilege." Groves is treated somewhat sympathetically, but Levin really should have explained the difference between using the word as an epithet and using it in the manner Groves did.

Or better yet, he could have simply not written this story, which concerns bad but by no means uncommon teenager behavior. If Groves had cheated on her math test, or planted a kick-me sign on a rival's back, would this constitute national news? No crime was committed; the utterance of the word did not even take place at school. The only thing novel about this situation is that it attracted the national media's attention.

It's for this reason that I do not share the conclusion of Rod Dreher in The American Conservative, who described Galligan as a "moral monster."

"What a horrible person that Galligan kid is," writes Dreher.

Galligan did a monstrous thing, but none of us should pretend to know whether he is a monster. It's unfair to write him off as irredeemably bad, just as it was unfair to brand Groves a racist and derail her future plans because of one mistake. They are both teenagers, and teenagers—even ones who turn out to be perfectly fine and upstanding adults—do really terrible things to each other. (Maybe you don't remember high school? I do!) They should be corrected, forgiven, and allowed to move on.

That's why this new drive to reduce teens to the worst moment of their lives is so pathologically toxic. It's completely at odds with the emotional and social journeys of most young people. Very few of us sailed through high school as saints, but today's kids are practically required to be perfect from the time they turn 12.

The people who really ought to have known better are not the story's teenage subjects, but its editors at The New York Times. Imagine thinking the paper should not run an op-ed by a sitting Republican senator because his policy proposal makes people feel unsafe, but a story about a teenage girl who said something stupid? Unleash the righteous fervor of social media upon her: The 1793 Project continues.

Agreed. Completely shameful that the NYT would run such a 'story' designed to ruin an 18-year old's life for something they said at age 15.  But that is the evil of cancel culture for you, something the "newspaper of record" has embraced in it's desperate attempt to stay relevant by pandering to SJW's.

 

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California Women's March Canceled for Being 'Overwhelmingly White'

https://reason.com/2018/12/31/womens-march-eureka-california-white-int/?itm_source=parsely-api

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Organizers of a planned Women's March in Eureka, California, cancelled an event due to concerns that too many white people would show up—which is a pretty damning indictment of intersectionality, the ubiquitous yet contradictory philosophy of the modern activist left.

A rally had been scheduled for January 19, but Women's March leaders aborted their plans because "up to this point, the participants have been overwhelmingly white, lacking representation from several perspectives in our community," according to a press release. "This decision was made after many conversations between local social-change organizers and supporters of the march."

This news attracted much derision, and deservedly so. For one thing, the disproportionate white involvement might simply reflect the fact that Eureka is about 75 percent white, according to U.S. Census data. For another, leftists often claim that white people are responsible for President Donald Trump's victory in 2016—inexplicably, white women are held in particular contempt, even though they vote Democratic more often than white men—and need to change their attitudes. But here's some white folks expressing enthusiasm about joining their comrades of color in the #Resistance, only to be told, Well, maybe you should stay home.

The Eureka incident lends itself to a kind of Eureka! insight about the problems with intersectionality, which has become the dominant intellectual theory of the left in the three decades since sociologist Kimberle Crenshaw first proposed it. According to intersectionality, various forms of oppression are distinct yet interrelated, and these forms stack: A black man is more oppressed than a white man, a black woman is more oppressed than a black man, a gay black woman is even more oppressed, and so on.

There's nothing innately wrong with such analysis, but adherents of intersectionality also tend to believe that the oppressed are the sole experts on the subject of their own oppression. At the same time, it is not their job to educate you—a line parroted by many activists, particularly on college campuses, when they are questioned. As a result, intersectionality in practice often means that some activists expect well-intended liberals to sit down, step back, and defer to the expertise of the most marginalized people. But those people might not be well-positioned to lead a mass #Resistance movement—they may have disabilities, poor mental health, or lack of access to financial means, which are all stackable categories of oppression—and they might even expect the cis white hetero males to take a turn doing the work. It's really hard to square all these circles.

That's one important conclusion of my book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which I am pleased to announce will be released in 2019. (It's already available for preorder here.) I interviewed tons of activists about their goals, motivations, and beliefs, and one of the most common recurring themes was infighting caused by intersectionality. As one young activist woman told me, she absolutely hated the 2017 Women's March that occurred the day after Trump's inauguration, in which half a million people took to the streets of Washington, D.C., to protest the president. Why? You guessed it: too white.

This intersectionality nonsense just needs to go away.

 

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On 12/30/2020 at 10:20 AM, Muda69 said:

California Women's March Canceled for Being 'Overwhelmingly White'

https://reason.com/2018/12/31/womens-march-eureka-california-white-int/?itm_source=parsely-api

This intersectionality nonsense just needs to go away.

 

You do realize this story was from 2018?

Methinks the "colorblind" society we were achieving at the end of the 1900's and in the first decade of the 2000's was obliterated.  I believe that is because a big chunk of the black community didn't want colorblindness to happen.  One would think that would be considered racism......But I've been given to understand that only white people can be racist.

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Here are you beginnings of a U.S. "Social Credit Score", where certain goods and services may be denied to you based on your political leanings:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/capitol-siege-businesses-political-donations-1.5868390

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Republicans in the U.S. Congress faced growing blowback on Monday from businesses that said they would cut off campaign contributions to those who voted last week to challenge president-elect Joe Biden's victory.

The announcements by Dow Inc., American Express and Amazon, among others, threaten to throttle fundraising resources for Republicans who will soon be out of power in the White House and both chambers of Congress.

"Given the unacceptable attempt to undermine a legitimate democratic process, the Amazon PAC [political action committee] has suspended contributions to any member of Congress who voted to override the results of the U.S. presidential election," Amazon spokesperson Jodi Seth said.

Hallmark Cards Inc. and MasterCard both confirmed they were suspending donations after reports earlier by Popular Information, a political newsletter.

Greeting-card giant Hallmark, based in Kansas City, Mo., and a large employer, said in a statement its political action committee requested Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, both of whom objected to Biden's certification, return all campaign contributions.

....

This is an awful slippery slope...................

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

At Times, Don McNeil Scandal Deepens: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/at-times-don-mcneil-scandal-deepens/

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This business over The New York Times pushing out veteran science journalist Donald G. McNeil, Jr., is shaping up to be deeply symbolic of the way wokeness has corrupted a major American institution. Seriously, the rot goes all the way to the top.

 

You will recall that publisher A.G. Sulzberger and editor-in-chief Dean Baquet pushed out McNeil, 67, who has over four decades of service to the Times, after the Daily Beast reported that a group of high school kids on a Times-sponsored field trip accused McNeil of using the N-word, and other offenses. It turns out that Baquet was aware of this, and had done an internal investigation, but cleared McNeil after he (Baquet, who is black) became satisfied that McNeil had meant no harm. The Beast story made the issue public, and stirred up the Woke Mob within the Times. After a meeting in which Madame Defarge Nikole Hannah-Jones was present, and reportedly threatened Baquet by proposing to undertake her own investigation of what happened on that 2019 field trip, Baquet and Sulzberger reversed course, and showed McNeil the door. These are the statements that came out last week:

 

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Unfortunately, McNeil abased himself before his persecutors:

 

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So that’s why one of the world’s top Covid journalists was forced to resign? Because he used the N-word in characterizing a dilemma in which the students were discussing whether or not it is just to punish someone for the N-word?

It has been pointed out that contrary to Baquet’s line that the Times does not tolerate racist language regardless of intent, the Times uses the word quite a bit. A search I just did of the Times website reveals that the word has appeared in its pages 20 times in the past year. Try it yourself.

Here is how the word appears in a 2019 Times op-ed about school busing:

 

Screen-Shot-2021-02-09-at-4.13.52-PM.png

You know who wrote that op-ed? Nikole Hannah-Jones, who persecuted Don McNeil. When Dean Baquet says “we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” he is lying. The only question is whether or not he’s also lying to himself.

Now, today Erik Wemple, the Washington Post‘s media columnist, wrote a piece in which he contacted some of the students who were on that 2019 field trip to Peru with McNeil, and who complained about him. The trip, by the way, cost over $5,000 per student; your parents would have had to be pretty well-off to send you on it. Here is what Wemple found:

Six students who participated in the trip told the Erik Wemple Blog a consistent story about McNeil’s comportment: He provided expertise about public health and science consistent with what the students had expected. When the structured discussions yielded to informal chatter about other topics, it was a different story. McNeil was brusque and difficult, they said, in keeping with his prickly reputation in the newsroom.

As for specifics:

  • Students largely confirmed in broad outlines McNeil’s account of the n-word fiasco. But they said that he uttered the epithet in a way that they perceived as casual, unnecessary or even gratuitous.
  • In a discussion of cultural appropriation, McNeil scoffed. Though the term applies to people in Western countries adopting fashions or other items from other cultures, McNeil offered the example of people all over the world eating imported Italian tomatoes, according to a student in attendance. What’s the problem with that?
  • Two students reported coming away with troubling impressions of McNeil’s view of white supremacy, with one of them claiming that he said it didn’t exist.
  • Speaking about high incarceration rates of African Americans, McNeil argued that if they engage in criminal activity, that’s on them, and not on an oppressive and racist power structure, recalls a trip participant who said that the comments were “triggering” to the group. The participant, however, said that McNeil’s opinions didn’t disparage African Americans.

A caveat: There were about 20 students on the trip and many conversations. This is not a comprehensive inventory. But the tensions between McNeil and the students — a predominantly White group with progressive sensibilities — led some participants to withdraw from interacting with him as the trip wore on.

So these were rich liberal white kids. An older white man questioned their woke assumptions about “cultural appropriation,” and that hurt their feelings. The older white man supposedly said that high incarceration rates among black Americans might be a result of high black crime rates, and not racism. Hey maybe he’s wrong about that, but that’s a debatable proposition — though not to these rich white progressive snowflakes, who were “triggered.” I would very much doubt that a New York Times reporter would deny that white supremacy exists, but I would imagine such a figure saying that it is not as ubiquitous as these teenagers think it is.

Over nit-picky crap like this, the Times cashiered an irreplaceable resource of science reporting expertise. That newspaper doesn’t want to be a newspaper anymore; it wants to be a day-care center to coddle woke crybabies.

Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon peeked in on a private Times employee Facebook group, and reports on infighting there:

The Washington Free Beacon reviewed a series of postings to a Facebook group for current and former Times staffers, where a tense debate is unfolding over McNeil’s exit. One camp argues that his dismissal was justified and another asserts it set a troubling precedent, which the New York Times union should have done more to prevent.

“What ever happened to the notion of worker solidarity … to giving a fellow worker the benefit of the doubt,” asked Steven Greenhouse, who spent three decades covering labor issues for the Times. “And why didn’t the NewsGuild do far more to defend and protect the job of a long-time Times employee, one who at times did tireless, heroic work on behalf of the Guild to help improve pay and conditions for all NYT employees?” McNeil had excoriated management’s attempts to freeze pension plans in 2012, calling those involved “belligerent idiots.”

Times crossword columnist Deb Amlen accused Greenhouse of an excessive focus on the “perpetrator,” arguing that he and others should shift their attention to the people McNeil had “harmed.”

“Why is it that the focus in discussions like this almost always [is] on ruining the perpetrator’s life, and not those who were harmed by [his actions],” she asked. Reached for comment, Amlen told the Free Beacon this is a “private group” and that she would “appreciate it if you do not use anything I said or wrote.”

“Harmed.” When Sibarium reached out to Nikole Hannah-Jones for comment, she doxxed him by releasing his phone number onto Twitter, in violation of Twitter’s policy. But we know that nobody will ever hold Hannah-Jones responsible for her actions. She’s untouchable. After all, she runs The New York Times, and tells Dean Baquet and A.G. Sulzberger what to do — including, it appears, to fire an old white man after 45 years of service to the Times, and who happens to be one of the most valuable science reporters in the nation, for spurious ideological reasons.

What does this say about the Times‘s commitment to serious journalism? To providing its readers with the best possible coverage on urgently important news (McNeil was the lead Covid-19 reporter)? It is clearly more important to the Times leadership mollify the zealously woke screaming meemies in the newsroom than it is to serve the readers who pay the salaries of the whole lot.

What is it going to take for sane, serious people to regain control of The New York Times? 

 

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Disney Cancels The Mandalorian Star Gina Carano Over Provocative Social Media Posts: https://reason.com/2021/02/11/disney-cancels-the-mandalorian-star-gina-carano-over-provocative-social-media-posts/

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Gina Carano is a former MMA fighter, outspoken Republican, and co-star of Disney's The Mandalorian. On Wednesday, Lucasfilm—the Disney-owned studio that produces The Mandalorian and other Star Wars properties—denounced her social media posts and said there were no plans to include her in any future projects.

"Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future," said Lucasfilm in a statement. "Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable."

This statement apparently referenced a recent Instagram post of Carano's that did indeed contain a tortured and offensively hyperbolic analogy. Carano did not "denigrate people based on their cultural and religious identity," however. And while Disney is within its rights to cease working with an actress who occasionally makes provocative right-wing comments, it's impossible to ignore the double standard at play here, since similarly provocative statements from liberal Star Wars cast members have not resulted in any sanction.

Here is what Carano wrote on Instagram:

Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.

This was a very flawed comment: For one thing, Nazi soldiers absolutely beat Jews, in the streets and elsewhere. Carano is right that part of the Nazis' agenda was to persuade German citizens to hate and fear their Jewish neighbors—but what happened in 1930s Germany is not remotely similar to what is happening today in the U.S. The Nazi Party's demonization of the Jewish people led to genocide. The media's demonization of the Republican Party—which is not directly referenced in her post, but it's assumed that's what she meant—is obviously not comparable to the Holocaust.

That said, Disney is wrong to say that Carano denigrated Jewish people, or that she is "abhorrent" for making such a comparison. She's a celebrity with an obnoxious political opinion, which is not exactly a rare animal.

And that's the bigger issue with Disney's decision to drop Carano: hypocrisy. If the studio doesn't want to work with actors and actresses who make over-the-top Nazi comparisons, it has a major problem on its hands: Pedro Pascal, the star and eponymous character of The Mandalorian, once sent a tweet likening Trump's immigration policies to Nazi concentration camps.

This is not so surprising: Hollywood is chock full of people with quirky political views making dramatic analogies. As Bloomberg's Eli Lake pointed out, Sean Penn is an apologist for former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Benicio del Toro dedicated an award to the memory of murderous Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. Nick Cannon praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a repugnant anti-Semite. (ViacomCBS fired Cannon for his remarks, but rehired him after he apologized.)

Carano has occasionally made other controversial comments: She has criticized universal masking and suggested that combating voter fraud should be a major part of the Republican agenda. Disney apparently abandoned plans to give Carano her own show following one such post back in November.

Some conservatives have called for a boycott of Disney following its decision. While I'm not the biggest fan of boycotts, it strikes me as reasonable for conservatives to be upset about this double standard. Why does Disney care more about Carano's dumb but relatively inconsequential Instagram post than it does about China's ethnic cleansing of the Uighur Muslims? If the company thinks "denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities" is abhorrent, then perhaps it shouldn't be working so closely with the Chinese Communist Party, which earned a "special thanks" in the credits of Mulan.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 2/10/2021 at 11:34 AM, swordfish said:

If you ain't black, don't even think of dropping the "N" word.....No matter the context.....

Unless your name is Lyndon B. Johnson. Probably the most racist president ever............until he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then he was deemed a hero. Allegedly, after signing the new law, he turned to the two governors in the room and said to them..........."we'll have those n-----s voting democrat for the next 200 years." It's all about the vote. Always has been, always will be.

Last week, while at that gym, I was watching FOX and CNN side by side. While FOX was celebrating the start-up of high school sports on Long Island, CNN was promoting racism by marketing white on black crime. 

This morning, while FOX was focusing on the return of kids to the classrooms, CNN was promoting white on Asian hate crime. The more divided we become as a country, the more the Dem's have minorities wrapped around their finger. 

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Americans' Lust To 'Cancel' One Another Should Spark Soul Searching

https://reason.com/2021/02/19/americans-lust-to-cancel-one-another-should-spark-soul-searching/

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After annoying some progressive activists years ago over a column I wrote about a property dispute between a predominantly Latino school district and one of its neighbors, I had to sit through a meeting where I was questioned about my ethnic sensitivity. It was a weird feeling given that my column covered land-use matters and not race or nationality. Fortunately, my critics were polite and the editors had my back. Life went on.

Nevertheless, the incident provided a "note to self" moment. Imagine what can happen to those who say or write something that's too close to—or slightly over—the (ill-defined) line. I've published 200,000 words In recent years, canceling has become quite the phenomenon. It's the result of our overly politicized culture where many people like to shame and destroy their enemies. Since it seems that we're all now members of warring political tribes, there are plenty of enemies to go around. Social media platforms make that shaming process fast, fun, and easy.

Did you read about the 30-year-old executive who, before boarding a2013 flight from New York to South Africa in 2013, sent out snarky tweets from the airport? She joked about a German with body odor, Brits with bad teeth, and then—to her regret—let loose an offensive tweet about AIDS and Africa. Despite having only 170 followers, the tweet went viral. Her career and reputation were ruined by the time the flight landed in Cape Town.

Last week, we learned that The New York Times ousted a top reporter, 45-year veteran Donald McNeil Jr., after 150 fellow employees demanded his firing. They learned that he had used the N-word while representing the newspaper during a 2019 trip to Peru. In his apology, McNeil explained that he was "asked at dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur."

McNeil said he "asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself." The Times took an unyielding approach. "We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent," the newspaper's top editors said in explanation. No wonder so many normal, non-racist Americans are concerned about canceling.

Intent should always be a factor. Not that these incidents usually are judicial matters, but our legal system provides a guide. There are much stiffer penalties for those who plot an elaborate murder and for those who accidentally kill someone through recklessness or even by accident. If intent doesn't matter and due process is denied, then we all better clam up, keep our heads down, and not look at anyone the wrong way.

Certainly, private companies are free to set their own standards. I'm legally allowed to spend my weekends speaking at neo-Nazi rallies, publicly praying for an Islamic state, or organizing the local chapter of the Communist Party, but my employer has every right to dismiss my "at will" contract after learning about any of those activities. (Note: Do not call the editor or "cancel" your subscription. That was only a joke.)

Many of us, however, feel frustrated by the inconsistent standards. The Times embraced "zero tolerance" with McNeil, but took a different approach in 2018 when it hired Sarah Jeong, who had used the hashtag #CancelWhitePeople. Among her many odd tweets: "Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?" I ponder the intent of that question.

What do we do? There are no simple answers, but we can embrace general guidelines. Canceling was designed to attack public figures. How about cutting non-public figures slack? Let's recognize a statute of limitations. Saturday Night Live featured a hilarious skit about cancel warriors who doxed 5-year-olds for their insensitive words. It should make us think twice before ruining someone's life because of a stupid teen-aged post.

Despite the Times' editors' arguments, I think intentions matter. So do apologies. And how about recognizing that punishments ought to fit the transgression? People who incite online mobs ride a moral high horse. Let's view them for what they really are: the online version of Mean Girls, who take perverse pleasure in humiliating others.

I'm not calling for policy or legal changes, but for Americans to do some soul-searching as they navigate a brave new social-media world where small mistakes can be telegraphed to millions. The bottom line: Let's be more forgiving and embrace a broader culture of open dialogue.

 

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Syracuse University Is Not ‘Okay’

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/syracuse-university-is-not-okay/

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Have you ever configured your fingers in such a way that could signal your support for white supremacy and deny the humanity of your friends, colleagues, teammates, classmates, or other peers? I’d be surprised if you hadn’t.

Remember the Brett Kavanaugh hearings? Forgotten among all of the boofing, games of Devil’s Triangle, and careful examinations of the nominee’s high-school calendars is the pre–Christine Blasey Ford controversy touched off when a former clerk’s hand incidentally formed the “Okay” symbol behind Kavanaugh while he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Zina Gelman Bash, the clerk in question, is a Mexican-American Jew, so the idea that she would be spreading coded white-supremacist messages in Congress was always ridiculous on its face. Fortunately, while the very-online #Resistance crowd jumped all over her, even left-leaning outlets such as Vox acknowledged that the symbol’s occasional use by racists on 4chan did not mean that any and all use of it should be seen as racist.

After all, even Democrats such as President Biden and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have used the gesture in the past. And why wouldn’t they? Few Americans spend their time monitoring shady Internet forums to find out what words, phrases, and symbols the fringes are trying to appropriate. Fewer still believe that the fringes should be ceded whatever it is they’re trying to appropriate without so much as a fight. After all, the “Okay” symbol has an actual purpose — and an important one in the context of activities such as scuba diving. Why should we rewrite all of our society’s rules and regulations to accommodate a small number of vile lunatics? They don’t deserve that kind of power.

Most college students — or at least those at Syracuse University — seem to disagree, though. On Tuesday, a member of the women’s lacrosse team posted a picture of her making the “Okay” sign on her leg on the team’s Instagram page. Big mistake. Before you could say “Okay” ten times fast, the outrage mob was off to the races, insisting that the post was at best obtuse and offensive, and at worst a sure sign of bigotry and a toxic atmosphere on the team.

 

The mob’s power play worked, and the team released one of the most self-flagellating statements you’ll ever read. It begins:

Yesterday, as part of a social media campaign, a player on our team was “taking over” our Instagram account. One of the posts included a hand gesture that is interpreted by some as a white supremacy sign. The image was a background to a question sticker, but the hand gesture in question was clearly visible. Though it was never intended to do so, this justifiably offended and upset some.

Even this goes much too far. Was all of the offense and anger really justified? Was there any supporting evidence to suggest that the student who made the post even knew that the OK symbol was sometimes appropriated by hate groups, much less that she was using it with similarly bigoted intentions? No, but sadly, the statement gets much, much worse. It goes on to call the post “an unacceptable lapse in judgment and lack of awareness on the part of our entire team,” apologize for being “negligent and hurt[ing] people in the community we love so much,” and insist that the team is “grateful that the lacrosse community has held us accountable.”

Is it the responsibility of every American citizen over the age of 18 to monitor white-supremacist sites and understand their intricacies? How, exactly, is the rest of the team complicit in this supposed atrocity? Was anyone really hurt?

Most disturbing is the “thank you, sir, may I have another”–ism on display in the bit about being held “accountable.” What is it that they’re being held accountable for, and by whom? I, for one, do not appreciate the team’s inviting the mob to hold the rest of us accountable to its nebulous, ever-evolving standards by subjecting us to an endless torrent of online harassment.

To be clear, I don’t blame the students on the team for bowing so quickly and so low to the mob at their doorstep. I doubt very much that they wrote the statement released on their behalf, and would venture to guess that at least some of them are not happy with its contents. The culpability lies with the adults who threw these young women under the bus without a second thought to make their own lives just a little bit easier. Head coach Gary Gait, for example, is one of the sport’s most revered figures. Yet he did nothing to stand up for the team, instead calling the post a “mistake” and consenting to the tarnishing of the players he’s paid to mentor and protect. This is part of a larger trend of powerful adults and institutions failing in their obligation to shield the powerless from unfair criticism and unjustifiable consequences.

There’s only one word for it: cowardice.

 

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To me this new "woke" ideology in regards to hiring practices is a form of cancel culture:  

Blacklists In The Woke Workplace: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/blacklists-woke-workplace-national-association-of-realtors/

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A Pastor I know forwarded me this e-mail from someone he knows. I’ve taken identifying details out:

I applied to [a top STEM university] last week. My qualification garnered an immediate response from the [specific] department. But all was halted when they discovered that I did not write a “Diversity” statement. I was stymied as to what that was. I did a little research and found that it is basically an apology for being a white male. I wrote a page worth of equality and being fearfully and wonderfully made, and judge not by the color of their skin. It worked until the actual interview. The entire interview was based on my “racism.”

Nothing about my accomplishments in life. My lack of being woke. Not how would you teach or manage. … I truly doubt I will hear anything further from [this university].

I also spoke with [a physician who teaches at a medical school] and she … made mention of the impact the “diversity” statements are having at [her university]. Her comment was that “they are doing just what they are accusing us of.”

Here we see an example of the pre-totalitarian valuing of loyalty — in this case, to diversity ideology — over competence. In Live Not By Lies, I quote Arendt thus:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

This university — trust me, if you’re an engineering student, you’d be honored to have this school on your CV — was so excited about this man’s application that it reached out to him. But when he did not say the correct woke things in the interview, which interrogated him about his supposed racism, that was the end of that.

This is the new America. This is soft totalitarianism. He’s not being thrown into prison by the secret police, but he’s not able to get a job in his field, despite his qualifications, because the institution judges him to be ideologically unsound. This particular university is a public one. You think he’s not going to face the same at other universities, both public and private?

And most liberals support this stuff, and except for a brave few, those who don’t are too intimidated to speak out against it.

Here’s another one. The letter is too detailed for me to reprint it here, even with redactions. To summarize, the author is a practicing conservative Protestant who is in leadership at his Midwestern church. He also is a Realtor by trade.

A week ago, the broker/owner of his office called to ask his opinion about starting a new Multiple Listing Service in their local area. Why? The National Association of Realtors has a new ethics code that punishes Realtors for any hate speech or discrimination, not only on the job, but 24 hours, seven days a week. Well, the author of the letter attends a church that publicly dissents from the pro-LGBT line the NAR demands.

The guy’s boss is trying to help him out, but it’s going to be hard, maybe impossible. And if the Realtor is not a member of the National Association of Realtors, it dramatically affects his ability to do his job. The Realtor does not see how he can both affirm the NAR Code Of Ethics and his Church’s constitution, which he has also sworn to uphold.
 
Here is a churchgoing man who might have to surrender his livelihood rather than affirm what he believes is a lie.
 
And why? It’s one thing for the NAR to hold its agents to a certain standard in the workplace, but by what right do they have the right to tell those agents what they can do and say in the privacy of their own homes, and in their churches on Sunday morning? Law professor Eugene Volokh says:
 

The Realtors are a private organization, so this isn’t a First Amendment violation, just as blacklisting of supposedly “un-American” employees in the 1950s wasn’t a First Amendment violation. But it strikes me as potentially quite dangerous, especially given that National Association of Realtors membership appears to be quite important professionally to real estate agents; apparently,

in many parts of the country, NAR membership is required to gain access to the Multiple Listing Service, a searchable online database that sorts available real estate properties by parameters such as square footage, acreage, architectural style and much more. “If I were to lose access to that it would potentially devastate my ability to perform my career duties,” a Realtor commented on NAR’s Facebook page.

One way of thinking about this would be to ask what we’d think of this policy:

REALTORS® must not use speech supportive of unlawful violence, arson, or destruction of property, whether targeting political leaders, police officers, businesses, political organizations, or others.

Would we think that it’s good that private professional organizations are suppressing such speech, on the theory that such speech codes can help give people confidence that the professionals they’re dealing with support law and order? Or would we think that, even if most calls for unlawful violence are improper, there shouldn’t be professional blacklists of people based on their ideological views?

Yeah, they’re McCarthyites, but they’re McCarthyites for the Left, so it’s okay by our media. /sarc

It is incredible to me that this hasn’t raised the roof nationwide. We know what kind of people want to manage your every thought: totalitarians. The fact that this totalitarian prospect of the company owning your soul has not prompted an outcry tells you how far gone we are down a bad road we already are. A group of conservative, religious Realtors better lawyer up and sue.

You’ll recall the point I made about Amazon’s recent decision to start cancelling books it finds politically problematic (like Ryan T. Anderson’s book critical of gender ideology): that the real threat here is not just to Anderson’s ability to sell books, but, given Amazon’s massive power in book retailing, the threat is to the ability of any books on that one’s theme being published. Amazon cancelled Anderson’s, but has not (yet) cancelled a similar one by Abigail Shrier. Why not? Who knows? The thing is, shoot one author, teach a hundred publishers. How likely are you, as a publisher, to consider now publishing a book critical of gender ideology? Sure, Abigail Shrier has sold a massive number of them, so it would appear that there is a market for them. And she hasn’t been cancelled yet. But now that we know that Amazon will cancel these kinds of books, no matter how professionally written, and it will do so without feeling the obligation to alert publishers and writers, and without feeling required to offer an explanation. Therefore, it’s a real risk for a publisher to take a chance on a book that might out of nowhere be yanked from the shelves of America’s largest bookseller by far. If Amazon won’t sell it, it won’t likely be printed.

Given that, given what the NAR is doing, and given what universities are doing, it is long past time for conservatives to settle for a laissez-faire attitude towards running businesses, at least businesses of a certain size. Take universities out of it for a second. Both Amazon and the NAR are private organizations that have the right to govern themselves. A government powerful enough to tell Amazon that it must sell a certain title is powerful enough to tell a Christian bookseller that he has to sell The Satanic Bible. Technically, you don’t have to be a member of the NAR to sell real estate, but practically you do. In both cases, real life doesn’t match real-world power.

Why not let’s start unions? you might say. OK, but notice that the Newspaper Guild didn’t do Donald McNeil Jr. much good when he got on the wrong side of the Woke at The New York Times.

If we don’t get some major reforms in labor law, this woke blacklist is going to find its expression across institutions. Unless you are running a religious, political, or in some other sense an institution driven by a specific mission, why should you enjoy broad rights to hire or fire people based on their willingness to affirm an ethics creed that has little to nothing to do with their ability to do their jobs? Again: why the totalitarian urge? Why on earth does the National Association of Realtors care if on Sunday morning, one of its members gives a church school lesson on what the Bible has to say about human sexuality, and expresses Wrong Thoughts™?

Next time, I want to see the Republican Party led by somebody who doesn’t just tweet and give incendiary speeches, but who also has the focus, competence, and determination to use state power to protect people like the church elder who only wants to make a living doing what he’s always done: sell houses.

 

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Dr. Seuss Is Canceled

https://reason.com/2021/03/02/dr-seuss-canceled-books-biden-library/

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The cancel culture bells have tolled for Dr. Seuss, the beloved author of children's books like Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Oh, the Places You'll Go.

President Biden declined to mention Dr. Seuss, the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel, in his kickoff speech for Read Across America Day, a national event that promotes literacy and is historically connected with Dr. Seuss. (It even takes place on the author's birthday.)

While the Biden administration got the #DrSeussIsOverParty started, it's Seuss' own publisher who's really taking things to the next level. Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it would cease printing six books that contain vaguely racist imagery: And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, McElligot's Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat's Quizzer.

The books are currently unavailable on Amazon.

This is not the first time Dr. Seuss has come under fire: In 2017, a librarian criticized First Lady Melania Trump's donation of Seuss books, which are "steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes." This year, Loudon County schools in Virginia ordered librarians to stop mentioning Dr. Seuss, citing a study that found there were few racial minority characters in his books. (Most Seuss characters aren't even human.)

It's true that Dr. Seuss is a more complicated figure than he first appears. Some of his oldest books do contain problematic illustrations of black and Asian characters. He harbored anti-Japanese sentiments during World War II and produced several cartoons that could be seen as defending U.S. internment camps. But like many people, Dr. Seuss changed his views over time, and he also published cartoons that were clearly anti-racist.

Indeed, Dr. Seuss's most famous books tend to promote liberal and anti-authoritarian messages. The best-known example is probably The Lorax, a save-the-environment parable, but it's hardly the only one. The Butter Battle Book is a Cold War satire, and the eponymous villain of Yertle the Turtle is meant to echo the rise and fall of Adolph Hitler.

Nobody has to read Dr. Seuss if they don't want to. But it's worth remembering that his books were so popular with children in large part because of the crazy stories and funny pictures. Learning to read was very boring until The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham came along in the 1950s. Problematizing everything that's different, weird, or uncomfortable won't get us any place worth exclaiming over.

Agreed. I'll be looking for copies of these books at used bookstores and the like, and will delight in sharing them with my grandchildren some day.

 

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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/last-exit-to-mulberry-street/

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When I sit down to read a book,
Some idjit says to me,
“Oppressor, check your privilege —
We’ll decide what you can see!”
And if I dare to contravene
Or decline to heed his quarantine,
Some philistine on Twitter sternly says,
“That literature’s obscene!
“You must do as we dictate,
“And we shall de-platform that hate!”

Now, what can I say
About the news today?

Under pressure from the mob
A gaggle of millionaires
— Dr. Seuss’s own literary heirs! —
Are nixing six books — they are pressing “Delete.”
And we’ll never again stroll down Mulberry Street.

That’s nothing new to us:
Just go ask Mark Twain
How the story of Huck Finn
Got flushed down the drain.

“Art should break rules!”
So they used to say.
But the fools’ new command
Is that art must obey.

Conformism’s victory is almost complete
So you’ll never again visit Mulberry Street.

The great and the small fry,
From Steinbeck to Weiss
Are pushed into the margins
Their words put on ice.
Harper Lee, Whitman, Rushdie, and Golding —
Faced with complaints, the school boards are folding.

Freedom of speech has nary a booster:
Not at The Atlantic nor at Simon & Schuster.
The New York Times will bellow and bleat,
And the silence will echo down Mulberry Street.

No, this won’t do, this won’t do at all —
This won’t do, these minds so small!
If they see just one word that they deem indiscreet
They’ll melt into puddles on old Mulberry Street.

Hold on a minute! Has it come to that?
Yertle the Turtle? The Cat in the Hat?
The Whos down in Whoville —
All samizdat?

Informers informing, keep your eyes on your feet:
The Secret Police patrol Mulberry Street.

Must we be doomed to litigate
The past, which did not anticipate
The present? Must it be our sorry fate
To comically self-flagellate?

We live and we learn
And our attitudes change.
Every day is a new day —
But isn’t it strange
That people who sell books
Should have the conceit
To put up a roadblock on Mulberry Street?

The hucksters and hypocrites
Are quick to join forces
And report any wrongthink
To Human Resources.

I know what I know . . . and this isn’t right.

Amazon plots
In the dark of the night
And gone is a book
That won’t see the light.
But wouldn’t it be grand
If they cared half as much
About books as their brand?

Oh, but who needs all that reading when there’s Netflix to binge?
The Star-Belly Sneetches now have their revenge.

An intelligent book
Deserves someone to read it.
A book that starts fights?
We desperately need it.
An unpopular view?
The campus should hear it.
But both teachers and students
Are afraid to go near it.
They cling to their wubbies
And bury their faces.
Away with you ninnies —
Back to your safe spaces!

Go back to TikTok or stay home and tweet.
You don’t deserve to see Mulberry Street.

Brilliant.

 

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Remember when the Left was against burying books for ideological reasons?: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/dr-seuss-gets-blindsided-by-a-moral-minority/

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If, in 1987, the editorial boards of the major newspapers learned that a fanatical cult of angry moral scolds, representing a small sliver of the population, was successfully campaigning to remove books from the public eye with the not-so-subtle encouragement of the president and his political allies, they would have been outraged. In fact, liberal pundits were outraged — by far-less disturbing developments than these — and in the Nineties, they were re-enraged by suggestions that even the most deliberately offensive art should not enjoy a public subsidy, nor scarce space among museum displays.

 

So, what changed? The Left used to be against banishing books, banning books, burning books. Now, scarcely a week goes by without some breathtaking new advance in its campaign to bury this or that book in order that the public might never be infected with its ideas. Just six years ago, when Barack Obama was publicly praising Dr. Seuss on March 2, Read Across America Day — a day specifically chosen by the National Education Association to honor Theodor Geisel’s birthday — you would have called me a paranoid wingnut if I had told you that books such as On Beyond Zebra! would soon be yanked from bookshelves across America at the behest of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Yesterday, that’s exactly what happened.

The memory of (perhaps) the single most beloved author in America was insulted by having that title and five others pulled as an anti-birthday present and the traditional presidential mention of Dr. Seuss on a day built around his work was absent. It was as if all mentions of George Washington were scrubbed from the official celebration of President’s Day. (That’ll never happen, though. Not until at least 2022.)

Geisel’s illustrations sometimes strayed into awkward racial stereotypes, but it is a massive stretch to label them “racist.” “Racist” implies racial hatred. As Geisel’s stepdaughter put it, “There wasn’t a racist bone in that man’s body.The body of his work identifies him as a progressive humanist, undoubtedly a man of the Left, who lampooned various kinds of prejudice. Some of his stories, notably The Sneetches, are brilliant allegories about the stupidity and vileness of racism. Dan McLaughlin points out in his excellent essay that most of the six books yanked by Dr. Seuss Enterprises seem to have been targeted for trivial details that only the most hypersensitive hysteric would deem “hurtful and wrong,” as the Seuss outfit now labels them, declining to specify exactly what it finds offensive. McElligot’s Pool seems to have been nixed simply because of a harmless drawing of an Eskimo; On Beyond Zebra! for its depiction of a proud-looking camel-riding Arab nobleman, dubbed Nazzim of Bazzim. The Dr. Seuss books stand accused both of depicting too many white people and for including non-white people in its blithe comical sensibility.

Our friends on the left are ridiculing conservatives for defending Dr. Seuss’s work; this tendency isn’t censorship, they point out. (No, but it was college roommates with censorship, and they played a lot of hacky sack together.) It’s a private company’s decision, they say. Yes, but it’s a private company whose strings are being pulled by an alarming cultural regime that wields immense power despite being opposed by most people. You racists only like Dr. Seuss now that he’s been revealed to be racist, racists. But Geisel very obviously wasn’t a racist, and ordinary sensible people object to huge swaths of imagery and speech being retroactively classified as racist, just as we find it ridiculous that it is becoming hard to have a mature discussion about anything from math to Muppets without some hysteric poisoning the wells of discourse with a claim of racism. This isn’t cancel culture, it’s a company withdrawing its legal property from circulation, and anyway there are 50-odd Seuss books that remain in print. Though the word “cancel” is, like “snowflake,” becoming so trite as to be on the verge of uselessness, what single better word is there for forcing books out of print because they supposedly offended someone, rather than due to lack of sales? This is simply good cultural hygiene, and slippery slopes are a myth, critics say, as the mountain turns to mud and slides into the ocean. Reports the Los Angeles Times: “The Cat in the Hat, one of Seuss’ most popular books, has received criticism, too, but will continue to be published for now.” For now.

Note that the six withdrawn Seuss books are lesser titles; the Woke Brigades for Cultural Sanitation haven’t come for the really beloved ones yet. But they’re just getting warmed up, aren’t they? No one who acquires immense power ever says, “I’ve had enough of control now.” Babar the Elephant, Curious George, Little House on the Prairie, et al. are now in the crosshairs. The progressive Left enjoys greater control over the educational establishment than any other institution, and it senses an opportunity to revise the canon of young people’s literature so that every title in it advances the propaganda imperatives of today. The Sneetches, for instance, rings with Civil-Rights-era idealism by saying it’s silly to pay attention to race when we’re all the same underneath the skin. Today, that is now a right-wing vision of race. The Left today obsessively focuses on race with the purpose of apportioning good things according to the accident of skin color rather than the content of people’s character. Once the educational establishment has fully turned its guns against Laura Ingalls Wilder, it’s a short step to getting her removed from libraries, then bounced from Amazon. As the shelf of America’s children gets emptied of the classics and the boringly nonpolitical stuff, it is being busily restocked with books that overtly advance the activist Left’s agenda on illegal immigration, “white privilege,” capitalism, and everything else.

I’m old enough to remember when liberals saw looming Christian theocracy as the most pernicious threat to liberal values, and when banning books was the single most horrible manifestation of that tendency that they could imagine. Now that we’re in the early days of the establishment of a woke theocracy, they’re eagerly looking for more books to throw on the cultural bonfire. Look out, The Cat in the Hat. There’s a fable promoting Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax that’s eager to take your place.

This statement from the excellent opinion pieced couldn't be more true:  "The Left today obsessively focuses on race with the purpose of apportioning good things according to the accident of skin color rather than the content of people’s character."   Yet isn't this pretty much the exact opposite of those like MLK preached?

 

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https://rare.us/people/marry-poppins-blackface-allegations/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=agora&utm_term=faves&utm_campaign=faves&fbclid=IwAR3r4fqd_pYnOh3t3QZ6yp5oR5ydXdonhvGLKtmx1Bgf2Qmq7jWn5oEcT8Q

It looks like some people just can’t enjoy the simple pleasures in life. In November 2018, Disney decided to release a ‘Mary Poppins’ sequel, led by Academy Award nominee Emily Blunt, called “Mary Poppins Returns”. Which, if you haven’t seen, you should because you’re seriously missing out. As expected, this was huge news for ‘Mary Poppins’ fans, because honestly, who didn’t like the first one?

Of course, this prompted several people to go back and watch the original version of the classic Disney tale, which is where Professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner comes in. Turns out, he is deeming the classic 1964 film “Mary Poppins” racist, accusing Julie Andrews of “blacking up” her face with soot while dancing with several chimney sweeps.

 

So - what happens to someone whose job it is to clean chimneys?  THEY GET ASHES ON THEM.  Regardless of skin color.

 

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Why Dr. Seuss Is Worth Defending

https://reason.com/2021/03/08/dr-seuss-defend-cancel-culture-toronto-books-censorship/

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Oh, the extreme places they'll go. Last week, when Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it would no longer publish six Seuss books said to contain racially offensive imagery, foes of cancel culture (this author among them) cried foul. Many others shrugged, noting correctly that this isn't an issue of censorship: A book publisher is free to decide it wants to cease publishing a very old book.

But now those books are being pulled from the shelves of some public libraries as well. "We are part of the broader community who have identified these books as being harmful," Manny Figueiredo, director of education for a school board in Ontario, Canada, said in a statement. "The delivery of education must ensure that no child experiences harm from the resources that are shared."

A journalist for the Toronto Star issued an impassioned plea for more libraries to take action—and for Dr. Seuss Enterprises to make amends for its historical failures.

It's not just Canada: The Chicago Public Library system agreed to remove the six books in question—And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, McElligot's Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat's Quizzer—pending an investigation.

Disappearing books from library shelves gets us closer to the classic example of censorship, though of course a physical library possesses a finite amount of space and thus has to consider certain priorities. What's happening to Dr. Seuss is the result of a very specific kind of prioritization, however: One decided upon not by readers or the public at large, but by activist educators peddling a false narrative about the beloved child author's books and characters.

This narrative—the result of a highly misleading 2019 report on "Orientalism, anti-blackness, and white supremacy in Dr. Seuss's children's books"—has quickly become influential, motivating much of the recent shift away from Seuss among certain government officials, educators, libraries, and even private publishers. Learning for Justice, an outgrowth of the undeservedly well-regarded Southern Poverty Law Center, cited the report as evidence that it had misjudged The Sneetches, a Seuss story about a group of birds—some with stars on their bellies, some without—who eventually come to realize that their superficial physical differences don't matter at all:

At Teaching Tolerance, we've even featured anti-racist activities built around the Dr. Seuss book The Sneetches. But when we re-evaluated, we found that the story is actually not as "anti-racist" as we once thought. …

The solution to the story's conflict is that the Plain-Belly Sneetches and Star-Bellied Sneetches simply get confused as to who is oppressed. As a result, they accept one another. This message of "acceptance" does not acknowledge structural power imbalances. It doesn't address the idea that historical narratives impact present-day power structures. And instead of encouraging young readers to recognize and take action against injustice, the story promotes a race-neutral approach.

They actually had it right the first time. But nonracism—the idea that skin color should be overlooked—has lost popularity among progressive activists, and anti-racism—the idea that skin color matters a great deal—is in vogue. The former is an egalitarian message at the heart of many Dr. Seuss books; the latter is a smokescreen for all sorts of policies that have very little to do with combating racism: like abolishing standardized tests or spending more time renaming schools than reopening them.

There is certainly no obligation to read or teach Dr. Seuss, nor should Seuss defenders feel some moral or practical imperative to gloss over his imperfections. The man did draw racist caricatures, and some of his work can be read as a defense of Japanese internment. He was a flawed genius—but a genius nonetheless, and a towering figure in the world of children's literature. There is a disturbing trend among modern liberalism to seek to cast out all such flawed figures, which has the rest of us reasonably worried that no art or artist more than a few years old can possibly stand the test of time. (For another example of this, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow recently accused Pepe Le Pew, the lovesick skunk from Looney Tunes, of perpetuating rape culture.)

There's not really a law or policy that could fix this problem—though Sonny Bunch's proposal to release now unpublishable works into the public domain is an interesting one—and so much of the pro-Seuss grousing in nonliberal circles can feel as performative as the anti-Seuss extremism. Yet there's good reason in this case to regard the slippery slope with suspicion. The report that led to the cancellation of the six books also stipulates that The Cat in the Hat embodies a "racist tradition" and that Horton Hears a Who! "reinforces themes of white supremacy."

I would not be surprised to find the entire Seuss canon under attack a few years from now. To quote the last lines of The Butter Battle Book, "Who's gonna drop it? Will you or will he?" (To which the narrator's grandpa replies: "Be patient. We'll see. We will see.")

Waiting for the book burnings to begin...............................

 

Edited by Muda69
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I wonder when they will come for more traditional literature that contains historically accurate racial situations ... which more enlightened generations have discarded. I’m thinking specifically of one of the greatest pieces of literature in the English language: Huckelberry Finn.

Edited by Bobref
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