In the words of one publisher, James Bennet is “a journalist of enormous talent and integrity” who oversaw “a significant transformation” of the opinion department of the country’s — perhaps the world’s — most iconic newspaper.
As editorial page editor of The New York Times, Bennet helped reimagine how opinion-laced news ought to be delivered. He returned to the Times after a stint as editor of The Atlantic and was rumored to be on the shortlist to run the whole outfit someday. He expanded the paper’s voices, both to the left of its editorial board and to the right.
Then he published one voice too many.
Bennet is now a former editor after publishing a wild op-ed from Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton headlined, “Send In the Troops,” which advocated for military force to quell unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Its flaws were later detailed in a lengthy editor’s note set atop the piece.
Bennet first defended it: “We understand that many readers find Sen. Cotton’s argument painful, even dangerous. We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate.”
The scrutiny came for Bennet, instead. “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” swelled the Twitter chorus of journalists within and without the newsroom. In a company-wide video call, Bennet tearfully apologized. He later announced his resignation.
Higher ups acknowledged this wasn’t the first misstep of Bennet’s tenure. Still, it’s how the situation unfolded that’s worth examining. His wasn’t the resignation of an underling forced out by a board of directors. He wasn’t reassigned or placed on leave without pay. He exited on more populist terms — in a groundswell of emotion from staffers and a public who vowed to end their subscriptions.
In today’s parlance, James Bennet was canceled.
He ran headlong into a years-old cancel culture that’s finding fresh legs in this moment of awakening, spurred by the death of Floyd and aided by the memory of victims before him. Its proponents hope to build a more virtuous republic by calling out racism and diffusing prejudices, but without allowing for repentance and forgiveness, the culture’s cherry-picked morality will do the opposite.
On its face, it’s a worthy pursuit by activists to highlight the harms of glossing over history. Certainly the country should revoke its support of institutions that protected the ownership of another human being. For no reason other than tradition has the Confederate flag flown inside the NASCAR track. It’s best for it to leave the venue and for racial caricatures dotting the world of enterprise to do the same.
And the statues? It’s not a stretch to consign Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis to the same fate as the flag they once fought and killed for. But then again, “When you start wiping out your history, sanitizing your history to make you feel better, it’s a bad thing,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said of Confederate monuments in 2017.
Rather than sit in a public square, maybe those figures are best fit for a museum where their painful images can invite contemplation.
Rice also made this distinction: “It’s not actually our heritage, it’s our history. We as a people have thankfully moved on.”
It’s alarming, then, to watch America’s quest for perfection leap from the shallows of Instagram to dismantling the figures and namesakes adorning communities the country over. It’s a purge of the sort usually reserved for old Facebook posts — relegating the flawed, embarrassing and incongruent to the dust bin.
Of course, that’s what Anglo-American hegemony has done to U.S. history for decades. Textbooks are riddled with holes where massacres, lynchings and periods of minority empowerment should be. That’s wrong; an incomplete history isn’t really a history.
Which is why the neo-cancelers have it backward. The focus should be on more stories, more inclusivity, more complexity, not less. Instead, they have come for the opportunistic Columbus and the slave-owning Founding Fathers. They have come for Brigham Young, the eponym of my alma mater and the leader of one of the largest religious migrations in the country’s history.
It’s healthy to expose the thorny characters of history’s pages — and there’s a distinction for those who fought against their country and those who built it — but to ignore or eliminate wholesale their contributions to the nation’s foundation is a slippery slope, indeed.
And now it’s getting harder to tell exactly who is an ally and who gets canceled.
J.K. Rowling, a feminist who once handed a victory to inclusivity by declaring Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of her fictional school of magic, is gay, is now getting panned because she believes womanhood is determined by biological sex. “Harry Potter and the Author Who Failed Us,” lamented a recent headline.
Ellen DeGeneres was clobbered on Twitter last year for sitting next to former President George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys football game. Her rationale, “I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have,” didn’t soothe the digital vigilantes. She took another hit when a tweet was deemed not good enough following Floyd’s death.
HBO announced last week it would pull “Gone With the Wind” from its streaming service because of its rosy depictions of the antebellum South. It reversed course after several people reminded HBO that Hattie McDaniel’s performance earned her the first African American Oscar, and that the film remains a valuable text for examining the influence of white supremacy in popular culture. The movie will now be introduced with a message of historical context.
“Where does the canceling stop?” is a rational question. But a better query borrows a line from Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: What if everyone acted this way?
An ethical society, says Kant, is built in part by doing only the things you would want everyone else to do. Is canceling a maxim everyone should follow? What if everyone was poised to expel each other from public life at their first mistake?
The movement strives for dignity, respect and honesty. A virtuous society also requires reform, repentance and forgiveness, the absence of which leads to a hopelessly misanthropic civilization.
No progression, no humanity. Would that really be in society’s best interest?
The movement strives for dignity, respect and honesty. A virtuous society also requires repentance, forgiveness and mercy, the absence of which leads to a hopelessly misanthropic civilization. Repentance and forgiveness acknowledge human frailties — even malevolent behavior — and offer a framework for reaching a higher standard. They allow us to accept transgression as a momentary failure rather than a damning and defining attribute.
The goal should neither be a whitewashed history nor a canceled one, and only a full array of virtues will help us truly make sense of our past and see with eyes wide open the path forward.
It’s perhaps ironic that a trivial cartoon offers guidance for today’s weighty milieu. Warner Bros. got it right when they released their DVD collection of “Looney Tunes,” which included episodes of the problematic Speedy Gonzales. Preceding the show is this disclaimer:
“The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are still wrong today. ... These cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”
So slap a disclaimer at the feet of our monuments and the walls of our schools. Let society soak up the complexities and determine for itself the best way to learn from the past.
And maybe we all should hang a proverbial disclaimer around our necks: “Flawed, but gratefully able to improve.”