The New York Times Woke & Cancel Culture Appropriation
The New York Times Woke & Cancel Culture Appropriation
The New York Times, reportedly at the direction of publisher A.G. Sulzberger, has published an editorial entitled “America Has A Free Speech Problem.”
They’re not addressing the free speech embedded in the constitution, namely that the government cannot (under normal circumstances) be the arbiter of what gets said in public facing media.
Instead this editorial represents the latest attempt at muddying the waters over what I say are consequences for words or actions some people find offensive.
The Times, being the newspaper of record, attempts to ’both sides’ this phenomenon, blaming what it says is
because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture.
According to Dylan Byers, writing at Puck, it’s a statement that can:
“be read not just as a declaration of the Times’ commitment to long-standing values, but as something of a declaration of resistance against ‘wokeness’ and some of the most censorious impulses of its left-leaning staff members, who have been able to exert significant pressure on the Times both internally and via Twitter.”
Full stop. What’s this about “cancel culture” and “wokeness?” Aren't both words, regardless of their origins, being used as pejoratives by a right leaning pundit class and assorted Tea Baggers wearing their Sunday best?
People whose rhetoric and actions dabble at the edges of polite society have always run the risk of being castigated and shunned. Sometimes it’s not what they said but how they said it.
Sometimes they emerge as winners – filter-free radio hosts like Joe Rogan and the late Rush Limbaugh certainly weren’t impoverished and forced into exile.
Sometimes they emerge as losers – Kathy Griffin’s illustration of Trump’s bloody head and the entire spectrum of college professors being dismissed without due process are examples.
A bunch of this canceled stuff is just plain bs, like just about anything Sean Hannity says. Oooops! Does my disparagement of his words mean I’ve canceled him?
Here’s Jennifer Rubin (no flaming liberal) at the Washington Post:
The GOP’s profligate use of “cancel culture” — like its use of “critical race theory” and “wokeness” — has turned the phrase into an all-purpose epithet to be flung at the left. “Cancel culture” is a cry of victimhood and an accusation (the left is made up of intolerant bullies!). But it has no real meaning. It’s a way of escaping accountability or even mild public criticism for behavior that deserves social opprobrium.
When a right-wing politician who cheered on the Jan. 6 mob loses a book contract, he isn’t being “canceled”; his publisher is exercising good moral and business judgment. When Twitter and Facebook boots a defeated former president from their networks, they are not “canceling” him; they are forcing him to find his own platform from which he can undermine democracy.
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The words “cancel culture” were re-popularized by (mostly) Black Twitterati to signal an intent to not patronize or support a person or organization because of something they didn’t agree with.
It’s like when I vowed not to buy Welch's grape products upon learning about the company’s founder being a John Bircher. It was a marketplace decision by a consumer (me) that, while I often shared the opinion, didn’t obligate anybody else.
OMG! Marketplace! Consumer preference!
Say it ain’t so!
Similarly, “woke” has its origins in Black culture, dating back at least a century.
The earliest known examples of wokeness as a concept revolve around the idea of Black consciousness “waking up” to a new reality or activist framework and dates back to the early 20th century. In 1923, a collection of aphorisms and ideas by the Jamaican philosopher and social activist Marcus Garvey included the summons “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” as a call to global Black citizens to become more socially and politically conscious. A few years later, the phrase “stay woke” turned up as part of a spoken afterword in the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. The song describes the 1931 saga of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who were accused of raping two white women.
Most (white) Americans heard the word following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. For the activists on the front lines of the protests following that event it was a call to be aware of and report injustice at the hands of the police.
Its usage (at least among white intellectuals) morphed into describing an awareness of the interconnectedness of all struggles for social justice. “Woke” became the expected standard for political awareness among progressive activists, even if many of them were just giving the concept lip service.
Nowadays, “woke” has also become a right wing shorthand for “political correctness” gone awry. That “correctness” includes all the fright mongering words in the conservative vocabulary, starting with socialist and (possibly) ending with vegan.
If you've been paying attention to the above paragraphs, you’ll notice that the words at the heart of the New York Times editorial both hail from Black America and their struggle for rights.
If the words “cultural appropriation” come to mind, give yourself a pat on the back.
I’ll use the concise definition at verywellmind.com, a publication devoted to mental health:
Cultural appropriation refers to the use of objects or elements of a non-dominant culture in a way that reinforces stereotypes or contributes to oppression and doesn't respect their original meaning or give credit to their source. It also includes the unauthorized use of parts of their culture (their dress, dance, etc.) without permission.
Let’s see; words are certainly an element. Black American culture is certainly non-dominant. And there is certainly some stereotyping and intent of oppression going on, even if many users of those terms aren’t aware of it.
I’m reminded here of Lee Atwater, Nixon’s Southern Strategy mastermind, who confessed as he was dying about the Republicans’ use of words as code to win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
The culture wars/moral outrage focus of today’s GOP dates back to the 1984 Republican National Convention held in Dallas. It was there that Republicans cemented an alliance with evangelical White Protestants.
Despite the fact that the evangelical vote is shrinking as part of the American electorate, they do vote in large numbers. This explains why cultural issues like Dr. Seuss, transgender humans, and CRT are such a big deal to the GOP. Stoking the ire of White Protestants and making it harder for others to vote is the party’s two pronged strategy for winning national elections.
The 23,000 votes rejected in the Texas March 1 primary gives proof to the power of voter suppression strategies; 13% of all mail in votes were tossed this year, as opposed to 1% in the 2020 presidential elections.
Utilization of the Black vernacular is just another facet of this voter suppression strategy, even when it’s weaponized against liberals and progressives in general. As Lee Atwater said, the connection to racism doesn’t have to be obvious.
Getting back to the Times editorial, it’s tempting to say it represents the old guard center right at the paper of record pushing back against ongoing questioning of their editorial, opinion, and news analysis standards.
I’m sure that today’s social media environment befuddles much of the old guard. But that doesn’t change the impact of the words the paper’s editorial board used to describe their frustration. Whether they realize it or not, they are using appropriated expressions, twisted with the intent of sending a white supremacist message.
To be clear, I’m not saying the Times editors were consciously racist in writing that editorial. They’re just expressing their opinion via a myopic historical lens.
As historian Thomas Zimmer (who wrote a fabulous thread picking apart the Times editorial) noted:
The next problem with the editorial is that it’s completely a-historical. It presents a narrative of decline: “something has been lost,” it says – but when, exactly, was that golden age of free speech when all Americans were free to speak their minds at all times?
Unless we are talking about white Christian men only, it makes absolutely no sense to construct a version of U.S. history in which the past was characterized by free speech for all Americans, in which the very recent past has been marked by a loss of free speech.
It is true that white elite men face a little more scrutiny today than in the past. This has caused quite a bit of anxiety, which is what is really animating much of the “cancel culture” moral panic. That seems to be the overriding perspective of the editorial board.
I am saying that the Times editorial will have the effect of emboldening elements of a society that are already motivated by the notion of dehumanizing others giving them (the illusion of) power. They blow the whistle and the dogs come running.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com
Note about lead graphic: The character pictured is from nineteenth century American minstrel show advertising. The white man in blackface was named Jim Crow.