Cancel Culture and Ruffled Feathers

Not every protest or disagreement means you've been canceled

Plugging Ears by Clover_1

The term “cancel culture” entered popular discourse about a decade ago. It generally refers to an environment that allows or encourages backlash to an individual who says or does something controversial, off-putting, or distasteful. But as a 2021 Pew Report observed, “There are plenty of debates over what it is and what it means, including whether it’s a way to hold people accountable, or a tactic to punish others unjustly, or a mix of both.” The Pew Report also noted “some notable partisan and ideological differences in what the term cancel culture represents.” Among respondents who had heard of the term, 59% of liberal Democrats thought it described actions taken to hold people accountable while only 36% of conservative Republicans thought the same. Unsurprisingly, without agreement on the meaning of cancel culture, there is little agreement about when it occurs.

In the News

Last week, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy and famed civil liberties litigator Harvey Silverglate suggested in Quillette that Silverglate had recently encountered cancel culture. Their essay, titled “Walkout at Milton Academy,” recounted Silverglate’s April 2022 visit to a private high school in Massachusetts.

Silverglate had been invited by a student group called the Public Issues Board to give a talk about free speech and academic freedom. During his talk, he mentioned several times a well-known book by Kennedy, the title of which uses the n-word. According to the essay, Silverglate said the word “to point out that if one followed the fashionable rule that the infamous n-word could never be appropriately uttered in full under any circumstances, one would have to leave gaps in the writings and performances of, among others, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty, Mark Twain, Richard Pryor, and Lenny Bruce.”

In response to his use of the n-word, “a substantial part of the audience walked out.” A few students remained and Silverglate finished his talk. Kennedy and Silverglate write:

We probably would have let this matter rest, were it not for the fact that days after Silverglate’s address, the Public Issues Board sent out an email to the entire student body, apologizing for Silverglate’s purported infraction.

The email apology noted that students found it “shocking and uncomfortable to hear the word voiced multiple times.” Silverglate asked to circulate a response but did not hear back from Milton Academy’s administration.

Kennedy and Silverglate conclude:

The lessons taught by this sad tale are sobering. One is that it is apparently acceptable for students to signal their disagreement with a speaker by walking out of an assembly rather than subjecting his or her ideas to the testing that vigorous dialogue allows. . . .

Another lesson is that the educational authorities at a storied academic institution are so afraid of offending the sensibilities of censors that they would rather discourteously ignore a guest speaker’s request to respond to a mistaken charge than permit the airing of a full debate.

According to Kennedy and Silverglate, the entire incident meant that Silverglate “got ‘canceled,’ in a sense.” But did Silverglate really get canceled?

In My Head

Let me start with three claims:

1. The term “cancel culture” is overused, but the phenomenon it describes definitely happens, and sometimes it happens in educational contexts.

2. Not every protest is an effort to cancel someone.

3. There is widespread (though unfortunately not universal) consensus that using the n-word as a slur against another human being is entirely inappropriate. There is less consensus about the appropriateness of using the word in an educational context to make a pedagogical point about the significance of the word.

Through my work on the right of assembly, I frequently find myself involved in student protests. Sometimes these efforts spin out of control, and sometimes they verge on cancel culture. But some protests—like the one Silverglate confronted—are just protests.

Here is how attorney Ken White summarizes the episode at Milton Academy:

[Silverglate] was invited to speak to private high-school students on the subject of free expression, he used the racial epithet commonly known as the n-word in the course of accurately quoting the title of Prof. Kennedy’s book, he did so several times, some of the students walked out, he continued to speak with the rest of the students, later the school sent its community an apology for the epithet being used in the classroom and said it was inappropriate, and the school wouldn’t print Mr. Silverglate’s response.

One friendly amendment to White’s account: it’s not even clear that “the school” issued an apology—it appears to have come from a student group (the Public Issues Board).

In an earlier post, I discussed a walkout at the University of Michigan’s Medical School and critiqued the National Review’s characterization of that walkout as a threat to academic freedom. White similarly observes:

Walking out is a time-honored method of student protest. It’s historically resonant, evocative, and effective at attracting attention and provoking discussion. It’s a classic form of dissent and protest that’s available to people, like students, with less power in the face of people, like Mr. Silverglate, with more power.

White calls Kennedy and Silverglate’s essay “deeply disappointing and embarrassing,” especially coming from two thinkers who “have done essential work at defending rights and discussing hard subjects seriously.”

The use of the n-word in pedagogical environments is hotly debated and sometimes generates fierce reactions that come much closer to the phenomenon of cancel culture. But that’s not what happened here. The protests did not substantially disrupt or shut down Silverglate’s talk, nobody threatened him or his listeners, and nobody launched a targeted and sustained attack on his reputation. Silverglate took a calculated (and principled) risk, it didn’t work out, students left in protest, and other students condemned his decision. That’s part of what it means to teach or speak publicly about controversial issues—not everyone will like what you have to say, and not everyone will even stay to hear you out. That doesn’t mean you’ve been canceled. And Kennedy and Silverglate of all people should know this.

In the World

I don’t regularly follow many newsletters (I’m too busy writing this one!), but I have found Ken White’s Substack reflections helpful across a range of issues, including his thoughts on Kennedy and Silverglate’s essay. I don’t always agree with White, but I find his posts clear, well-written, and clarifying more often than not.

In his day job, White is a partner at the Los Angeles law firm of Brown, White, and Osborn. His Substack, called Popehat, grew out of a blog by the same name. He also frequently posts on Twitter.

Back when White’s newsletter was still a blog, I came across a helpful post linking (mostly progressive) arguments for safe spaces to (mostly conservative) arguments for student group associational rights. Ash Bhagwat and I developed that line of thinking in a 2017 opinion piece on safe spaces for Inside Higher Ed.

White has also written personally about depression and, more recently, his experience clerking for a judge whose alcoholism spun out of control.

To my knowledge, he has not yet written about the right of assembly. But there’s still time, Ken!