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I appreciate your well-thought-out and well-written response. Thank you.
I’ll grant that whether or not the school could have guaranteed her safety may indeed have been a potential liability and reputational issue. But what message does the school’s action send? That it will cave to a mob, even if the mob is only theoretical.
If 15-year-olds can be excluded from universities over what they said years earlier, there seems to be no safe haven for anyone to utter any comment they might later regret. Their apology will not be accepted. So to return to the question posed at the beginning of this conversation, I agree with those who say that truly open discussion is not possible in the current environment. The risks to one’s reputation, livelihood, and perhaps even life may be too great.
Like I said, a casualty of the moment. Only because it was June 2020, did that weaponized post become viral. Any other time and it would have attracted less attention & her apology would have been accepted.
There wasn't really a "discussion" going on. It was more an escalating series of reactions.
It was an interesting and disturbing display of what social media can do.
Will we ever be able to be honest with each other again?
When it is perfectly fine to say "Black Lives Matter" but controversial to say "All Lives Matter," you know that we've reached an uncomfortable point in our public discourse. And this is being done in a country in which 88% of the population is not black.
There is a kind of reverse McCarthyism going on in America with political correctness and cancel culture. We are being told that we cannot speak the truth or be honest about who we are anymore. Honest discussions are being hunted down and censored, for all practical purposes.
When it is perfectly fine to say "Black Lives Matter" but controversial to say "All Lives Matter," you know that we've reached an uncomfortable point in our public discourse. And this is being done in a country in which 88% of the population is not black.
There is a kind of reverse McCarthyism going on in America with political correctness and cancel culture. We are being told that we cannot speak the truth or be honest about who we are anymore. Honest discussions are being hunted down and censored, for all practical purposes.
Have you yet heard the explanation of why that is? The whole Black/All Lives thing?
One of the most apt metaphors I've heard of, is being dismissive of a breast cancer charity by saying, "I don't support that because all cancer matters." Or your friend tells you that their father just died, and you're with them at the funeral and say, "All parents matter! I have a father! What about him??"
The intent of "Black Lives Matter" was not to imply that non-black lives DON'T. It was to place some focus on a particular problem. And coming back with "All Lives Matter" is basically saying, you don't believe that there IS a problem. Which is also a lot how it feels when women talk about their experiences with harassment or sexual assault and there is always a guy who says, "Well men get raped sometimes, too." OK, so? I don't really understand why compassion for another human being who is not YOU or doesn't look like YOU is something that people need to be so stingy about. What is it honestly costing you, to give a damn, to acknowledge that somebody has it tough, possibly in ways that you don't? To at least be like, "You know what, you're right, you got a raw deal and I care and I will use my voice to push back when people aren't treating you right"...? Is that seriously just way too much to ask? To extend to others a little of the human decency that a lot of us take for granted?
I don't think it is.
Notice. I'm not here to tell you that you cannot say something. But I can tell you how it will be taken, and why people will argue it with you. But the fact is, there are lots and lots of people who stand on that side of that slogan, hell I see it on bumper stickers, still. Who has silenced them? No one.
Some people might think that you're a jerk for saying something, but that's not censoring. Someone thinking that you are wrong, or saying so, is not "cancelling" you. Your voice just isn't the only one in the room.
When it is perfectly fine to say "Black Lives Matter" but controversial to say "All Lives Matter," you know that we've reached an uncomfortable point in our public discourse. And this is being done in a country in which 88% of the population is not black.
There is a kind of reverse McCarthyism going on in America with political correctness and cancel culture. We are being told that we cannot speak the truth or be honest about who we are anymore. Honest discussions are being hunted down and censored, for all practical purposes.
100 years ago, had you said "Black Lives Matter" in public you would have gotten beat up as a white person or lynched as a black person. Heck, 50-60 years ago in the south, speaking out against segregation was still a bodily risk.
In comparison, social media "cancellation" is mild.
I think that people vastly over-inflate "cancel culture." Except in rare viral instances, if you get bullied on social media it's usually something like 50 people and none of them are not going to escalate anything to the real world. I think we forget that. Our social media bubbles feel bigger than they are. They are only big in the viral instances, and who goes viral are usually already-famous people.
I got "cancelled" by some people for saying things on Facebook, and I had to remind myself that it was like 12-15 people that cut me off, most of them people I hadn't interacted with in real life for at least 6-7 years, if not 12-15 years.
And yanno, despite my lefty leanings, I DO have some (kinda) issues with "cancel culture." But when I think about it more deeply, I realize that my issue is more with "celebrity culture" than it is "cancel culture." And it always has been! I have always felt disgust at the intrusiveness of the checkout stand tabloids, the paparazzi, the way people want to stick their noses up the backsides of famous people. Not only do I absolutely not give a crap who Brad Pitt is boinking, I wish that it were nobody's business. Seriously, there is a video from a long while back of Bjork losing it on some journalist who was stalking her and her baby on the train or something, she went all fierce lil mama bear and I said, good for her!
So somebody said something insensitive or went to some kind of party with racist implications years ago...I've gone to lots of things because my friends were doing it, when I was young, and it did not mean that I was wholeheartedly co-signing every concept implicit or implied that was attached to the thing. I like some art, writing, music and film done by people who were questionable at best and downright scum at worst. I've said and done things years ago in my relatively ignorant youth, that I would not say or do today. The difference is, I haven't had people following me around cameras at the ready to "catch" me in each and every regrettable thing I have ever spoken or thought or whatever. I cannot even imagine trying to live with that kind of scrutiny. All for the possibility of wealth, well...I'm not sure it's worth it.
I think just simply remembering a world pre-cell phone and pre-internet when I just rolled my eyes at the magazines, makes me hate the part of cancel culture that is frankly just invasive and intrusive, the motive to dig and dig to try and take people down for whatever reason. It's kinda gross.
However, when you say or do something reprehensible in the here and now, I do not think that you have a right for no one to speak up and disagree with you. And I do think that rights of employers have to be considered...if I can't go around the office yelling profanity, without being fired, I don't think that a company should be required to employ a celebrity who uses their public persona to blast out things that can harm the image of the employing company. ESPECIALLY if it's a clear violation of a written contract signed by the celebrity, which I'm 100% sure that it is.
So I guess I'm saying that I think there should be a line drawn somewhere and for me it has more to do with wanting people to have SOME privacy, some space to just be imperfect and human...which by and large has been a problem for celebrities forever. And like when a man is accused of sexual misconduct, I would rather see some kind of justice in the courts, than it being splashed all over the internet like it's somehow our business to be judge and jury...the fact that getting appropriate REAL justice is hard or impossible, is a bigger problem.
Hell, I've had friends who broke up, and one of them spread nasty talk about the other, and demanded all of their formerly mutual friends either "cancel" their ex, or else be "cancelled." I hate that, too. I had a very contentious breakup with an abusive ex, myself, but I damn sure didn't tell our old friends to choose my side. I don't expect other people to play judge in my imaginary courtroom and hear my case and take my side. It just seems...wrong, somehow.
I really don't think so. With everything going politically correct, the discussions would be minimal, due to the assumptions of saying the wrong things. Then here comes the reaction of those wrong things being said.
Also I believe that there's an honesty factor. People say we can't trust the media, government, localized branches of the government (police), things would sound far fetched. Already, people have an "all about me" attitude and brags on this and that. They also throw people under the bus for their own personal gains. Also blaming other people and circumstances instead of him/her self.
I really feel bad for our children and their children. Having to grow up with all the animosity, me against the world attitudes and diminishing sense of respect we all have come to in this country.
So no...I don't believe we'll have any more open, honest discussions.
Have you yet heard the explanation of why that is? The whole Black/All Lives thing?
One of the most apt metaphors I've heard of, is being dismissive of a breast cancer charity by saying, "I don't support that because all cancer matters." Or your friend tells you that their father just died, and you're with them at the funeral and say, "All parents matter! I have a father! What about him??"
To use the cancer analogy, it could also be seen as someone pushing for millions of dollars for non small cell lung cancer research, and someone else saying "Shouldn't we put our resources into something with a broader impact, breast cancer maybe?" and then the original person getting all upset because the breast cancer person is belittling the importance of non-small cell lung cancer. Really all they were proposing is a more efficient or more effective use of limited resources.
Shouldn't we focus our resources on stopping illegal killings by police officers of any type of person (all lives matter) rather than a tiny percentage of the population only? After all we are talking about less than 20 people in a year if we restrict the focus to only black people. Wouldn't it be better to just focus on the 50 or 100 or whatever number of unarmed people killed each year by police without the need to classify them by race (or gender, or income level, or hair length, or IQ, or anything else)? Just tell the police to kill fewer people, not just kill fewer black people.
Everyone should protest every time a policeman uses his or her power to kill someone illegally. It makes no sense to sort victims or protestors by skin pigment. Black people should protest when a policeman murders a white person, white people should protest when a policeman murders a black person, (or hispanic people, or oriental people, or middle eastern people, or dwarves, or transvestites, or any kind of person at all). Every kind of person should be outraged over a police murder of any kind of person.
To use the cancer analogy, it could also be seen as someone pushing for millions of dollars for non small cell lung cancer research, and someone else saying "Shouldn't we put our resources into something with a broader impact, breast cancer maybe?" and then the original person getting all upset because the breast cancer person is belittling the importance of non-small cell lung cancer. Really all they were proposing is a more efficient or more effective use of limited resources.
Shouldn't we focus our resources on stopping illegal killings by police officers of any type of person (all lives matter) rather than a tiny percentage of the population only? After all we are talking about less than 20 people in a year if we restrict the focus to only black people. Wouldn't it be better to just focus on the 50 or 100 or whatever number of unarmed people killed each year by police without the need to classify them by race (or gender, or income level, or hair length, or IQ, or anything else)? Just tell the police to kill fewer people, not just kill fewer black people.
Everyone should protest every time a policeman uses his or her power to kill someone illegally. It makes no sense to sort victims or protestors by skin pigment. Black people should protest when a policeman murders a white person, white people should protest when a policeman murders a black person, (or hispanic people, or oriental people, or middle eastern people, or dwarves, or transvestites, or any kind of person at all). Every kind of person should be outraged over a police murder of any kind of person.
The reason that there is a focus on race here, is because of how police treat black communities, compared to even white communities of similar income levels. The war on drugs has disproportionately affected black communities in particular, and that's where you get a lot of those "raids" on people's homes that can lead to tragedy. And then there is this:
Some people think that there are so many black people in prison because black people are more likely to be criminals. I don't think so. My own life experience backs this up. As a teenager, I indulged freely in marijuana and LSD, both totally illegal at the time. I never had a moment's fear that a cop would catch me or I'd get in any trouble whatsoever. I know a young white man who was CONVICTED of rape, and got a lighter sentence than a black man who was caught with a small amount of weed, especially in certain states that are really harsh on drug sentences.
I mean, you have a population that was only emancipated from slavery 158 years ago, and before that, there were 250 years where white families of means had the ability to use black slave labor to build wealth. The kind of wealth that CAN be preserved for many generations, if handled well. When the slaves were freed, most of them had NOTHING. So there they are, starting from scratch, which would not be so bad in the "Land of Opportunity" if white people had been maybe willing to get out of their way and let them reap the rewards of their work. But do you think we did that? Let them build prosperity in peace? Of course we didn't. But ya know, our schools raise us to act like slavery, reconstruction, even racism, are relics of a long gone past, that we can just wave aside and forget about. Why did I have to learn about Tulsa from a show at age 42? That is just embarrassing.
Frankly, I think that getting the State to get off black Americans' backs and stop tearing apart their families and lives, to even give them the chance to keep what they earn, live in peace, and prosper, is the LEAST that this country can do for them. The very minimum. Since there has never been justice for anything that white America has ever done, to black America. Ever. And yanno, I understand that as individuals, you or I, we don't want to be held to account for things we did not personally do. I didn't ask to be born to a race with so much blood on its hands. But that doesn't mean that I abandon my sense of right and wrong, and tell other people to be silent about their hardship, act like people asking not to be terrorized is somehow an attack against ME.
And the thing is, if we do focus on fixing the problems that cause this? If we do the things that will bring about change that benefits black communities, that is a rising tide that would lift all ships. The BLM movement would be thrilled if we started holding police accountable for criminal behavior, for murder, assault, rape, theft. They aren't ASKING for those things to be selectively changed so that cops are ONLY put on trial if it's a black victim. So the real effect of this change, would be an "all lives matter" effect. For which we could in fact THANK the black community, for doing the hard work to bring about, if we're being real, here.
And if I'm being really "open and honest" in this here discussion, I find it somewhat petty in the light of the greater issues, to be complaining about feeling excluded from a slogan.
Let's face it...if you dissent from the current political positions, you are shut down.
And let's be honest...the current political positions may not be all honest and true. And that statement alone is hard to defend, as any dissent is considered heresy today...and would be shut down with the trendy labels.
Will we ever be able to be honest with each other again?
I am honest and speak my dissent. If someone isn't interested in holding a conversation with me, it's their problem, not mine
I didn't ask to be born to a race with so much blood on its hands.
What race is that? I agree with a lot of your sentiment re: the drug war being detrimental and disproportionaly impacting black communties. But the comment from your post I highlighted above is what really starts to dig deeper into your apparent victimization/victimizer mentality that I would like to explore further. Would you mind elaborating? Much respect.
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