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By Isaac Chotiner
On July 7, Harper magazine published what he called “A Letter on Justice and an Open Debate,” which have temporarily become a component of the verbal exchange on the theme of “the culture of cancellation.” The letter, signed through more than a hundred intellectuals, academics and authors, noted that “the forces of anti-liberalism are gaining traction around the world and have a tough best friend in Donald Trump,” and opposes an “anti-liberal climate that has established everywhere.” The letter continued: “While we have come to expect this from the radical right, censorship is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a fashion for public shame and ostracism, and the tendency to resolve complex political unrest. In a blinding ethical certainty. He continued: “Restricting debate, whether through a repressive government or an anti-liberal society, invariably harms those who lack strength and makes all but those at least compatible with democratic participation. The way to defeat bad concepts is to spread them, discuss and convince them, not to look to silence them or prefer them. »
The letter was signed by novelists Martin Amis, J.K. Rowling and Salman Rushdie, leftists such as Noam Chomsky and Gloria Steinem, and journalists, adding several New York contributors. Among the signatories was Thomas Chatterton Williams, editor of the New York Times magazine and columnist for Harper, who also helped write the letter. Williams is the story of two memoirs, “Losing My Cool” and “Black and White Self-Portrait,” which chronicle their struggles with racial identity in adolescence and adulthood. The son of a black father and a white mother, he describes himself in his ebook of the moment as “an ex-black man”. He is known for his critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who, according to Williams, places too much emphasis on race and racism, creating “a fantasy that flattens the mental and curtain differences within and between groups.”
I recently spoke on the phone with Williams, who was at his workplace in France, where he lives. During our conversation, which was edited for longer duration and clarity, we discussed what was intended to be achieved with Harper’s letter, whether the culture of cancellation has existed in various forms and its considerations about Black Lives Matter and media attention to COVID-19 mortality rates. among other people of color.
What is the genesis of the lyrics?
It’s no secret. No one seeks to be evasive, however, has emerged from conversations that the five of us: [Atlantic and former New Yorker editor] George Packer, myself, [Columbia Humanities Professor] Mark Lilla, [journalist] Robert F. Worth and [historian and journalism professor] David Greenberg – started an email chain five or six weeks ago. Array talking about everything I’ve been talking to some of them for years. It turns out that a bad temper or climate has been installed, especially over the more than 4 years, with the intensity Trump brings to all issues and social media: the expansion in the importance of social media can’t be taken away from anything we’re talking about. . I don’t forget that I was more on Facebook and other things, however Twitter has become very consumer, especially if it paints in the media or in academia, and that’s why I get the impression that Twitter has taken away this invisible and impersonal force that paints. through other people, but not one in particular, it sweeps and promulgates public humiliation and Punishment And has become some other figure in all of our lives, such as Trump’s specter looming over us.
At one point, we made a decision to see if we could write an open letter. We didn’t even know if anyone would pay attention. The five of us started talking about who we could touch and see if they could just point it out. We saw a lot of drafts on our own, and then, about a month ago, we started sending it to other people, and they gave us yes and no, and some of the other people who said yes and some of those who said had no smart answers, with amazing comments. Then we came back and incorporated it, so 20 other people helped write it.
Have you written more than anything else?
No, I wouldn’t even say that. I contributed to a first draft. I got really involved, and then it was a real collective. It is a document that has no author, but is in the hands of more than twenty people, and especially in the hands of five people.
What did you say when you got in touch with people?
You have to realize that this is something we didn’t know would interest anyone. Some of the other people we knew were more productive said they felt uncomfortable or feared negative reactions or simply didn’t get involved, and some of the other people we didn’t know very well intervened, so we had no way to measure. Everyone knew some names and contacted them on their own, with their own language. Sometimes he sent three lines to other people. Sometimes David would write beautiful, long letters with tons of evidence of why other people might need to sign. No one we contacted said, “Let me see who else signs and then I’ll answer you.” Not a single person. I don’t think any of us have done this before, so it didn’t even happen to us that this could be just a complaint along the way.
What was the importance of racial, gender or ideological diversity, especially to bring others to the left? I know you said before that the letter was, first of all, more directed to the sins of the left.
There were disagreements. The letter was never conceived in a single way. There has been a sense that Trump deserves to be more vital and others think that in a short letter you have to focus on the kind of culture that comes into our own industry, which Trump doesn’t fully control. Then there was the feeling, after talking to more and more people we respect, that we really want to recognize that there is nothing in Trump’s outer void.
You said, “The criticism opposes censorship and, therefore, after learning that the letter would be incomplete by focusing only on the left, we felt it was obligatory to be transparent that Trump is the cancelling leader.”
Exactly. We’ve all been talking for quite some time about how we can’t think of someone who’s been more overruled in American culture recently than Colin Kaepernick. We were talking about the black reporter from Pittsburgh who couldn’t hide the protests because of a tweet. We oppose Twitter’s involvement in workplace decisions and in the human resources department. You see what I’m saying This has been interpreted differently. It was a constant verbal exchange of “Think about how to make this as ideologically varied as possible” and, also, we know from our own lives that you can’t expect how other people think based on their color category, religion or gender identity, or anything.
You mentioned ideological diversity and the importance of it. As far I could tell, there were no open Trump supporters who signed the letter. Did you feel that it was important to not have signers beyond a certain level of conservatism in part because then critics could say you don’t really care about liberalism? Trump has the support of more than forty per cent of the country, so aren’t we all drawing our own lines somewhere about ideological diversity?
There’s been a lot of discussion about that. It was nothing we did not know would be a point of discussion, but we also necessarily made the decision that we had to be as idealistic as imaginable within the limits of understanding that we also want to be pragmatic and rhetorically effective. You can’t have a document that’s been as successful as ours, I think, right now, with all the vision problems. Even a user I contacted, who is not, I don’t think, a Trump supporter said, “No, I probably wouldn’t point this out because I don’t think Trump is the biggest threat in the country.” We were a little skeptical about the option of having a defense of liberal values, a serious defense of liberal values, with someone who was also a staunch Trump supporter. We also feel that if you had someone who was, you’d be very threatening to waste other people you want to turn it into a rhetorically effective document.
Bari Weiss, who recently resigned from the New York Times and signed Harper’s letter, said in her resignation letter that she brought after Trump’s election to bring in more ideological diversity. But the Times hasn’t hired a pro-Trump columnist, with which I have no challenge if I’m fair to myself.
But you’re seeing a contradiction.
I suppose I’m wondering whether we’re all drawing the line somewhere, and therefore if in fact both you and people to your left who you view as restrictive are drawing lines on a spectrum, rather than there being some giant chasm about what the meaning of liberalism is.
I think it’s right and not right. I think it’s absolutely undeniable that nobody really advocates for complete total speech without any consequence or absolute freedom of expression. There’s a line that most of us agree on somewhere. We wouldn’t want calls for pedophilia. But that’s not actually what we’re talking about. We’re not saying that there are no standards or no lines. This letter is about the climate of censoriousness and self-censorship and fear that happens when people are made an example of on social media with no recourse and there are calls for their stigmatization. That’s the part of it that goes beyond just speech or disagreement within the bounds of civility. It’s this extra step that seeks to punish and also banish from the community a respectable opinion. What happens is that your employer is contacted and you must be fired from your job, but then you’re supposed to not be employable anywhere. The really seriously troubling case that I can think of that happened recently is David Shor. That’s a quintessential example of what we’re talking about.
That’s right, David Shor was a scholar who tweeted a study article through Omar Wasow, whom I interviewed, and who is a very intelligent guy who studies how the election protests. People on Twitter criticized Shor, then his employer, Civis Analytics, panicked and fired him. I think many other people who have followed these disorders consider this case to be quite disgraceful. Are there other cases where you believe that others have been fired and told that they deserve not to be hired for minor sins again?
It’s not my non-public example, but I think there’s been a lot of debate about [the resignation of former New York Times editor James Bennet. I wasn’t organizing a letter around something like that, because I think it prevents us from making a broader point.
There have been many, many educators who have been silenced. There’s a U.C.L.A. teacher who had serious disorders from reading ‘Letter from Birmingham Prison’. [William Peris, a professor of political science, reportedly clashed with academics about his resolve to read the N-word aloud in King’s letter and exhibit a documentary on lynchings. U.C.L.A. told the New Yorker that there is no formal investigation, but that the scenario is being “reviewed.” There is a University of Chicago educator who has questioned some facets of orthodoxy at Black Lives Matter. [Harald Uhlig, a professor of economics, compared Black Lives Matter activists to “flat, creationist lands.” A student then claimed that Uhlig had commented on racial discrimination in his class. The university conducted research and concluded that there is no explanation for continuing the process.
Many other people say that the cancellation of culture does not exist, then you give an example and say, “This user deserved it”, then there is the culture of cancellation, but it works under their responsibility. But you don’t want so many people, because all you want are some high-profile instances that give examples and that we see and replace our habit accordingly. Nor do we simply replace behavior that might be considered bad. We are getting quite far from the border, so it has a narrowing effect and I think it suffocates not only speech, but also thought, and it’s frightening.
How do we know that the free exchange of concepts is increasingly restricted, as the letter states?
I’m sure some of your Twitter readers can already imagine, as laughing, that it’s anecdotal, but I have tons of other people who tell me they wouldn’t write bound things, they wouldn’t say bound things, that they’re not. even comfortably enter into a verbal exchange about Black Lives Matter, about Israel or about any of those Things Array because they did not think that they could simply participate in a verbal exchange without massive repercussions that would be harmful, because they do not possess the identity that provides them what I would say is the epistemological authority of the same weight, and therefore it is only a landmine. You’ll need to have a specific identity to participate in tied verbal exchanges or you’ll face a backlash that will come so temporarily that you won’t even be able to protect yourself. Enter your workplace.
I think we agree that there are safe areas, involving racial and gender identity, for example, that are increasingly being questioned. I also think there have been things other people were afraid to communicate about, whether it was religion, Israel, the army or the police. The letter says things are becoming more and more restricted. Are things becoming more restrictive or are new teams making their voices heard in a way that is rarely perceived as binding, but in a way that other teams in the United States and around the world have done? I don’t need to protect that so well, but why are we sure this is new?
People are like, well, nothing is new. Jesus Christ was canceled. Of course, others who oppose the behavior or discourse of some other people have been with us at all times: some perspectives are silenced and others are prioritized. There was a counter-letter that said blacks were at all times canceled and excluded, or were about to be cancelled. I’m the son of a black man who was born in the remote South. I’m very familiar with the kind of cancellation culture he had to go through and the way he left, precisely what they’re talking about. But what bothers me and worries me is that the global that we create and that is made imaginable through the truth of Twitter that is established is a global in which we do not look literally to make everyone as safe as the directly white man that was once. . super safe. We’re really checking the exit so everyone’s as insecure as my father was, but everyone can sense it now. That is why the letter calls for the presentation of concepts in the gentleness of an open debate where they can defend or defeat, but with intelligent faith, without seeking to appeal to the fury of the crowd. I don’t need to live in a world where the white men I paint with have to be reduced to a lack of confidence as my father was.
You think we’re in danger? You said your father grew up in the remote south. I’m a white guy who works for a liberal media institution. I feel like I’m a long way from what you just described.
You are, but how global I feel is settling down, and I don’t need to get into a hyperbole. I think I use this language that is hyperbolic only when it is repeated, because it is truly the language that goes into the complaint of our letter. They say the other have been canceled. I wouldn’t start with that. I answer that statement. My father comes from a culture where he thought you could get rid of. I don’t need to enlarge this lack of confidence as much as possible. I write on the basis that we are not in the same country as my father and that none of this is the same as in the past, and we all deserve to take a step back from the hyperbolic language that exaggerates the demanding situations we face in softness of the demanding situations that we have already overcome.
I agree that, in general, we need a less censored society rather than a more censored society. I worked in a magazine, The New Republic, where in 2003 Tony Judt was stripped of his publisher name because, in some other publication, he wrote an article saying that a solution to a state for Israel could be a smart idea. I don’t need to protect that, but was it canceled from the magazine, for which he never wrote again? I wonder if those things have been going on longer than we think, and I have a feeling that when they come from certain neighborhoods now, they are perceived as a greater risk to liberal democracy than in the past. You think I’m far from that?
I think there is something that now wants to be part of the definition of the culture of cancellation that is not in the description that you used in the example of the New Republic, but which cannot be removed from the technological aspect. Yes, there are sight issues that can cause you discomfort or there are prospects that would have an effect on your task in the past, however, the cancellation of the culture is now based on outrage, and then there has to be a quick movement: this happens through social media, and then Array will have to be in touch with your employer , and then you will deserve not to be similar to your concept or the paintings you actually made for you as a stigmatized person. This is what the culture of cancellation really does: you’re out of the circle of respectability. I don’t know enough about The New Republic. I don’t think it looks that way.
Did he stick to the case of Blake Neff, who worked for Tucker Carlson’s exhibition and was fired for posting horribly racist things on a message board unrelated to his work?
A little yes. I think once it was your employer, here’s the challenge of the cancellation culture. It is not a consultation about violating your employer’s transparent regulations. I’m sure of what Blake did against the regulations of his work. The cancellation culture also operates elsewhere which makes it very difficult to defend, i.e. changing regulations. This is partly because you have damaged a rule that is not yet specified or transparently in your employment contract or even necessarily in our public understanding of the rules. You’ve activated a new thread and it’s an example of that. Being fired for poor functionality or having a tight ego that publishes incredibly racist things doesn’t cancel culture.
However, explain to me why. Forget whether you’re on your employment contract or not.
I think it’s a very important issue. If you tweeted searches and don’t add any comments and they return you because other people attach a context that you didn’t anticipate and couldn’t wait to anticipate it, it’s very different from if you sneaked in. adjust the ego that tweets racist language that violates the regulations of your work.
We keep coming back to David Shor, which I agree is terrible. I think most people think it’s terrible—I obviously don’t want to defend it.
Kneeling is also contrary to the rules of your work.
In the N.B.A., the rule is that the national anthem must be protected. I guess you don’t think if someone kneels for that, they deserve to be fired.
I am not aware that this is a component of your employment contract that I must. [The N.B.A. the rule book says that “players, coaches and coaches will have to stand upright and line up in a dignified posture,” the anthem.]
I asked the consultation on the way. Even if someone hasn’t violated their employment contract, if someone goes to an online page and says, as Blake Neff said, things terribly racist, that I don’t even feel comfortable reading, or that they’re fired like Nick Cannon did, for anti-Semitism, through Viacom: is that a culture of cancellation?
We have to have the citizens agree. Part of the challenge in this debate is how we are turning our citizens lately. I perceive that this is not a science, but if there is a punitive facet in the collective reaction to anything that is done and is a popular that is not yet solidified, it is very different for me to transgress what turns out to be a popular understanding. I know you can say there’s a lot of difficulty in perceiving, but you know there’s actually a difference.
Neff, it’s true, violated what I think a lot of us would agree on as a criterion in saying a lot of terrible things. At the same time, he works for a television screen that can broadcast those things every single night, which the president looks at and tweets. Nick Cannon, who circulated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, had prominent athletes communicate before retracting his claim. I think other people would see those things as a culture cancellation. They’d say other people are too sensitive.
You look at anything new, and when there’s enough quantitative difference, you have a qualitative difference. It’s anything that’s been with us: an impulse to punish and distinguish and turn into a scapegoat and exclude and stigmatize, this is not new. But when you have a quantitative difference that generation gives, and I don’t need to go back to generation, yet it’s inseparable from the existing experience.
This letter is an attempt to open a verbal exchange, to start thinking seriously about anything that many other people have noticed. You don’t get a verbal exchange abroad with a 3-paragraph document like this if you don’t touch anything that many other people understand. This letter has been republished in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan. I receive maintenance requests from Chile. He published in Mexico. There were at least 3 articles in the Guardian about it in the UK. It’s anything.
I’ve noticed that you’re communicating that, as you said in an interview, no one has a topic. Essentially, we take a look at the content of what other people say, not their identity. Is that right?
I sense how delight informs perception, but I don’t think there are issues where secure identities simply have to be silent. What I reject is what the economist Glenn Loury calls the epistemology of identity, that is, as a partial descendant of slaves, I have a perception of American truth that can never be opened to them. I reject that idea. I believe that if you care enough to perceive it, you can perceive a lot of my pleasure to the extent that everyone can perceive an individual. You can if you wish. Now a lot of other people aren’t looking hard enough.
What about people having the right to say certain things based on their identity? I was wondering if you thought that people could be privileged to say certain things or speak on certain topics, or that the most important thing was to judge the words themselves.
I studied philosophy. I genuinely believe that the most important thing is to judge the quality of the insights, the idea, the language, the argument. I don’t think that there is a Black point of view, because Black people don’t all agree on anything. When you say that somebody has more authority to speak as a Black person, what does that mean?
In “Losing My Cool,” you wrote, “Where I lived, books were like kryptonite to” the N-word [the text uses “niggas”]—“they were terrified, allergic, broke out in rashes and hives.”
I’m all in this book.
This is nothing a white user can say in societies with the best manners. It’s also a concept that I think a lot of people would find very problematic: that books were like kryptonite for black people.
That’s why context is vital. The total eebook spoke of how the eebooks were my father’s life and that the black culture he came here from was the one that prioritized schooling as the ultimate vitality in which a human being can participate, the act of cultivating himself. This comes in the context where I said that the kind of street culture I was in made a false statement that e-books were kryptonite, that they weren’t for us. We were immersed in a culture that monetized the glorification of our anti-intellectualism, which is my opposite argument to hip-hop culture. When you remove it from this little article on Twitter, it’s to make me look like a racist who hates his blackness. When, in fact, the ebook is a love letter to the kind of black culture and culture my father came from.
To give context, you end this paragraph by saying, “Charles Dickens was anything that swayed between your legs, not Martin Chuzzlewit’s. You may get your ass kicked for stopping calling and using bad words. The brothers did not need to be poets or theorists; most of the time, they did not even seek to articulate, they spoke with their hands (fists, daps, slapping, ebooks, signs of peace, jumping shots, table percussion) and aspired to be athletes and rappers, not scholars or knights. The point I was trying to make is that it’s anything you can say that you can post in an eBook because of your identity and that other people can’t.
Other people can’t, but is that the best way that we can have conversations around knowledge and human experience, that other people can’t? That I’m not sure about. Because I can imagine a situation where you could understand my experience enough where you could actually suggest some insight into the dynamics that play around toxic masculinity or street authenticity that gets conflated with racial authenticity.
The fact that you’re not allowed to publish that is not my choosing. I think that there’s a way that you could engage in that that would be good-faith and would be equally insightful even if you’re coming from outside the identity. It’s not the blood or the skin that gives you the ability to understand the spirit.
I know kryptonite and line of books come from a piece of Chris Rock from a while back.
Exactly.
But I also find it a concept that has a busy racial history, and that we have to be careful when other people say things like that. Maybe that’s where we don’t agree.
This is where I draw a line, and that’s why other people want to pay attention to the arguments and not scan the quotes for cheating. I’m not going to tell you. I say that other people love gotcha as a very smart way to get likes and a smart way to get dopaminergic results. I am committed to him like many of us, because he encourages us all to behave in this way, and it is valuable to resist. But if you interact with an intelligent faith, I think you can have conversations about sensitive topics. What I’m saying is that we don’t read to each other so that everyone has the ability to revel in each other. We are committed to contributing to the strengthening of the epistemology of identity, and I think what is so unhappy with this is that it limits the number of conversations we can have. It’s impoverishing if you literally care about wisdom and concepts and make a kind of multi-ethnic society work.
I guess my argument would be that if a white user said that line, I’m not sure the right answer is to sit down and pay attention to it carefully.
It’s based on what made a white user say that.
I can think of one thing that might.
What is it?
I was joking. I wanted to ask you what you wrote about Black Lives Matter in your book of moments. You said those teams “reinforce the same racist mental behavior that they claim to have the need to succeed. I don’t mean this point rhetorically, I mean it literally. He went on to say that “you massively share “the goals of Black Lives Matter”, the same framework, the perception that some lives are necessarily black while others are white, is politically true in an express sense and, more generally, philosophically inappropriate. And “We will never be able to succeed over pathologies so confusing and tenacious with the flawed and flawed intellectual behavior that brought them in the first place. If, as cliché says, a definition of madness does the same thing over and over again. expects other results, how could we?
In recent months, Black Lives Matter has been effective in mobilizing a lot of empathy, and who knows what the polls will show next year; but for now, it turns out that, for the vast majority, the public supports the motion’s goals and recognizes that racism is a challenge in American life. I think the component you’re reading relates to my broader argument that I don’t think we’re going to solve the challenge of racism if we don’t keep an eye on the abolition and elimination of the categories that arise from it. Africa and Europe in the slave industry and the New World. If we don’t get rid of those categories, which most of us would say have no biological basis, they mean safe racist concepts that cannot be overcome.
So Black Lives Matter is effective now, and I’m in favor of that, yet my position is that there is no fundamental, intrinsic, essentially, black or white lives. There is a human life and we have other ethnicities and cultural traditions, but we will have to abolish the concept of race, period, otherwise we will have the residue of racism.
Do you still say that Black Lives Matter reinforces the same thought behavior they claim to have to defeat?
I think there’s a limit to what can happen as long as we have black lives and white lives. I think it’s effective in what it’s looking to accomplish now. But my argument in the e-book is how a society never unlearns race, and you can’t unlearn race by clinging to the categories that create racism. We don’t live in a society about to get rid of those categories. Black Lives Matter doesn’t allow us to get rid of those categories. What it does is a basic awareness of how other black people and others are experiencing disproportionate violence and abuse, and I think that’s really positive. But I don’t see how framing brings us closer to a society where other whites abandon their whiteness and blacks let go even though everything goes beyond stigma.
How would we frame the fact that tens of thousands more African-Americans died from coronavirus than we would expect from their percentage of the population, without resorting to the categories you criticize?
Oh, I think we’d have a serious verbal exchange about what’s going on with elegance in this country. We often confuse race and elegance, and in many tactics they are sticky and difficult to untangle, however, I think many other people point out that the racial challenge cannot be solved, especially if you don’t. Tackling the challenge of elegance and, more importantly, diversifying the richest 1% won’t help those other people either.
Well, however, we know that other people who have been disproportionately injured by coronavirus are not just other people without means, but also, in particular, other black and Latino people who have difficulty getting the right medical care, even compared to the targets of circumstances.
yes, too, they are disproportionately workers, and far fewer blacks and Latinos were in positions they could occupy remotely.
I agree with you: elegance is a huge problem. But I don’t know how we have this verbal exchange without saying that doctors treat black and white patients differently, even with the same socioeconomic elegance. I don’t know how we don’t communicate about all those things.
We can communicate many things we communicate about. The kind of cultural and racial reports that lead some black people like my father to be more cautious when it comes to seeking medical attention. We can communicate about many facets that contribute to the fact that other black people have been discovered in painting spaces that disclose them more to COVID-19 – the fact that even racism can have physical consequences that lead to comorities and many things.
I’m not saying that we don’t live in a very racist country, but I’m saying that I’m starting to feel uncomfortable when we call it “Black Plague,” as if the disease affected other black people biologically differently, as if there was a biological weakness in the dark, as if we could also communicate about contagion, in particular by racializing it on our own new terms by understanding our own social divisions. That’s what worries me. And there’s also a long history of assimilation of the disease to decrease groups, so I think we have to be very, very, very careful when we call things casually. “The Black Plague” was the name of a New Yorker song that, in my opinion, was really a little harmful. I think it’s even harmful from a pragmatic point of view. The United States of America is the only country in the world that has lately reported the coVID-19 surge rate and does not meet official guidelines. It’s an atypical value, and why? That’s because the disease is racialized only in America. There is no European country, possibly multiethnic, adding France, which is a very multi-ethnic society and does not collect data based on race.
And you think
And when you call it the Black Plague, you end up with an organization of other white people saying that the disease doesn’t affect them and behaving in all sorts of tactics that end up infecting it.
So pieces like The New Yorker are one of the reasons he’s outside the United States and is killing tens of thousands more blacks. Is that what you mean?
No, that’s what I’m saying, and please put that kind of wording. I’m saying moves like the New Yorkers are the reason. I’m saying the United States has a problem, as the language of the New York article demonstrates. He wasn’t the New Yorker alone. Many publications have classified COVID-19 as a black disease.
Wasn’t it racialized by Array..
So you have a scenario where everyone responds to the disease as if it were affecting everyone. Even if in the outer suburbs, in the less prosperous suburbs of Paris, where the population is strongly black and Arab, there are disproportionate cases, but the disease has never been racialized.
I can only speak for myself as someone who did interviews on this. My thinking was that the coronavirus was affecting Black and Latino people much more than white people, per capita, and I thought that was something to highlight. I don’t think that’s the reason that many white people didn’t take the disease perhaps as seriously as they should have.
Once the disease became widely racialized in the public conversation, the lack of vigilance took hold of some white communities, especially in the Red States. It’s pretty well established. There was a Washington Post article that said that once the disease was noticed as something that disproportionately affected other black people and not actually deguyd healthy young whites, they were left out. [The article, which was published on May 17, interviewed others in an exclusive Atlanta suburb who were largely disconnected from the virus. It wasn’t a race question, one guy said, “When you start seeing where instances and demographics come from, I’m not worried.”
I understand, but the media comments that it disproportionately affects other black people –
I really don’t want you to say that I am saying that the media is responsible for that. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that the language of racialization and the idea that it became a Black disease did lead to white people tuning out.
There was a brief controversy in which you tweeted “you look interesting” to a non-binary person, which provoked a lot of anger on Twitter. Do you need what you meant?
Of course, I just need to say I was walking in an interview with France Culture the moment I saw the tweet. I didn’t click on the writer’s biography and just presented a ‘you look interesting’. I didn’t know the user wasn’t binary. I regret all this, but you can’t literally answer those things when you have one like that, because you probably wouldn’t be caught up in an intelligent faith. There’s a concept I meant a lot more than I meant. My answer is to disconnect, because I think I was dealing with someone as an individual. I didn’t even know how they identified. I must point out that the user’s call is Matt, and I have not clicked on his biography. And then it caught my eye, but you can’t get away with it on Twitter.
[After our conversation, Williams wrote on Twitter that she had deleted the tweet, which “retrospectively unpleasant.” I’m angry at myself for commenting on someone’s appearance rather than their ideas, especially since I didn’t realize their identity, which can make my comment more hurtful. “]
I know there was a funny thing that went around Twitter about you kicking someone out of your house, or someone “self-ejecting” from your house, for saying something not nice about Bari Weiss. Do you want to just, for the record, tell people what happened?
This has attracted more attention than I can believe. Can I say something that doesn’t completely satisfy you? I can’t comment on this because of the sanctity of my own intellectual aptitude at home.
An earlier edition of this story distorted the language used in online message forums through former “Tucker carlson Tonight” member Blake Neff.
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The question of whether readers burn Y.A. Novels have valid reasons for getting angry and, if so, what a form the offense deserves.
A Princeton politics professor discusses the protest tactics of the civil rights era, what violent protests have meant for the election, and Donald Trump is a figure of disorder.
The Klickitat County Sheriff is one-on-one with Gov. Jay Inslee and defies the state’s social estrangement guidelines.
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