Post by addisona on Feb 11, 2022 14:32:59 GMT
cancel culture is real but it’s not the ‘woke mob’ you should worry about
Hello, my name is Arwa Mahdawi and I would like to cancel myself, please. I have a book to sell, you see, and it would seem that the easiest way to drum up a lot of free publicity these days is to declare yourself the latest victim of cancel culture. Suddenly everyone is inviting you on the telly to wax on about how you’ve been cruelly silenced by the woke mob. “Nobody can say anything any more!” the usual pundits lament in their 972nd piece on whether cancel culture has gone too far. “Free speech is dead! It’s just like Nineteen Eighty-Four!”
I don’t know if Big Brother is going to let me share this, but I have something terribly shocking to tell you about cancel culture. Here we go: you should definitely be worried, but it’s not the woke mob you need to be worried about. A depressing amount of energy is being expended on arguing whether calling someone out for using language a lot of people perceive as bigoted is “cancel culture”. But, while endless arguments rage about the intolerant left, free speech is under a terrifying assault from the right.
Want to know what real cancel culture looks like? Well, just sit back and look at the unprecedented surge of book banning efforts happening across the United States. Last year, for example, a county prosecutor’s office considered charging library employees in a conservative Wyoming city for stocking books about sex education and containing LGBTQ themes. Around the same time, Moms for Liberty, a rightwing advocacy group, tried to get a number of books banned from Tennessee schools because they contained content that disturbed them. They deemed a book about Galileo to be “anti-church”, and were outraged that a book about Martin Luther King contained “photographs of political violence”.
More recently, a school board in Tennessee banned Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its classrooms. Their reasoning? It contained eight swear words and a picture of a naked cartoon mouse. Yep, you read that right. What upset these people most about a book detailing how Jewish people were gassed to death in concentration camps by Nazis were some curse words.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/01/cancel-culture-books-anti-church-lgbtq-banned-us
Hello, my name is Arwa Mahdawi and I would like to cancel myself, please. I have a book to sell, you see, and it would seem that the easiest way to drum up a lot of free publicity these days is to declare yourself the latest victim of cancel culture. Suddenly everyone is inviting you on the telly to wax on about how you’ve been cruelly silenced by the woke mob. “Nobody can say anything any more!” the usual pundits lament in their 972nd piece on whether cancel culture has gone too far. “Free speech is dead! It’s just like Nineteen Eighty-Four!”
I don’t know if Big Brother is going to let me share this, but I have something terribly shocking to tell you about cancel culture. Here we go: you should definitely be worried, but it’s not the woke mob you need to be worried about. A depressing amount of energy is being expended on arguing whether calling someone out for using language a lot of people perceive as bigoted is “cancel culture”. But, while endless arguments rage about the intolerant left, free speech is under a terrifying assault from the right.
Want to know what real cancel culture looks like? Well, just sit back and look at the unprecedented surge of book banning efforts happening across the United States. Last year, for example, a county prosecutor’s office considered charging library employees in a conservative Wyoming city for stocking books about sex education and containing LGBTQ themes. Around the same time, Moms for Liberty, a rightwing advocacy group, tried to get a number of books banned from Tennessee schools because they contained content that disturbed them. They deemed a book about Galileo to be “anti-church”, and were outraged that a book about Martin Luther King contained “photographs of political violence”.
More recently, a school board in Tennessee banned Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its classrooms. Their reasoning? It contained eight swear words and a picture of a naked cartoon mouse. Yep, you read that right. What upset these people most about a book detailing how Jewish people were gassed to death in concentration camps by Nazis were some curse words.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/01/cancel-culture-books-anti-church-lgbtq-banned-us