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(Yes, I know Cancele is mispelled. It’s still amusing.)
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I think one reason some history-challenged people think that Frederick Douglass went around changing people’s minds on slavery by debating those who initially considered him less than human is that they vaguely remember there was a famous public discourse on slavery called the “Lincoln-Douglas Debates” but they have no idea what the context of the debates was… or even who Lincoln was actually debating.
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You know where Stephen Douglas’ tomb is?
In Bronzeville. That’s the Chicago equivalent of Harlem.
(Nobody calls it the Douglas community. Gee, I wonder why not?)
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Great take by Steven Salaita (also great just to hear from him).
Why is there so much hand-wringing about “cancel culture,” yet so little concern for the umpteen people cancelled for criticizing Israel? Why do people who deny Palestinians the privilege of speaking enjoy the honor of serving as our nation’s free speech paladins? Why isn’t Zionist repression, which gets a hearing in statehouses across the country, a constant scandal among the speech-loving punditocracy? Let’s not pretend that individual consistency can overcome structural inequalities. Sooner or later, even the most consistent free speech purist needs to ask why certain communities are disposable.
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As someone who has been in here venting my frustration with the entitled idiots who signed the Harper’s letter, I think that video is entirely consistent with what I’ve been saying. It’s important to see people as whole people. We shouldn’t deny people’s humanity because they disagree with us. We should be open to experiencing other people’s ideas. We need ideas we disagree with to come up with better ideas of our own. We need to be able to tell the difference between actual hateful ideas and ones we just don’t agree with. The mainstream media does limit which ideas it’s willing to publish and alternatives are important to support.
If that somehow seems inconsistent with the Harper’s letter being bullshit, maybe you could explain. I think if we had an objective test (which is impossible, for sure) we’d find that people in this thread who think the letter is bullshit are more willing to listen to new ideas that don’t agree with theirs than the people who signed the Harper’s letter. If only the people who signed that letter bothered to listen to uncomfortable ideas they wouldn’t have made asses of themselves publicly by rehashing centuries-old nonsense about the soaring importance of liberalism with no call to action at a staggeringly tone-deaf time.
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