FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Osita Nwanevu

freedom of speech. I am extremely excited to share them with you now, and one positive side effect of being able to do so is that it will give a chance for our hard working producer, shore Runner here a Deep Background, to have a little summer break. This episode in our Free Speech series is about cancel culture. The idea of quote canceling someone is itself relatively new. One of the first times the word was used in this way was in the nineteen ninety one action movie New

Jack City. I Know I'm Dating Myself Now, in which Wesley Snipes plays a drug lord and actually says it about his girlfriend can pitch. The idea of canceling someone then pretty slowly made its way into pop culture, first used in a humorous way and then eventually more seriously. Osita Jenevu, a writer at the New Republic, wrote a really insightful article about this phenomenon called the cancel culture Khan.

He's been following the evolution of the term. I spoke to Osita back in February, when the public debate around cancil culture was really gaining steam. Here's Osita's take. A couple of years ago, before cancel culture was a phrase in circulation, you would see people on Twitter, especially sort of ironically say that things had been canceled. Pop star

disappointed you in some way, or that person's canceled. There's a popular shift of celebrity on Twitter pointing to a coffee machine and had been broken and saying, oh, that's canceled out. You know. It was that kind of usage. And one I think it's interesting about that to me is the phrase political correctness originally emerged in a very

similar way. People in the New Left in the late nineteen seventies began using it as a way of describing a kind of orthodoxy or political orthodoxy within their circles. It's a politically correct thing to believe X, Y and z. But then it got picked up by conservatives. He used it earnestly to describe ideological tendencies on the left that they didn't like. So I think in a very similar

way we see now with cancelation cancel culture. I think that kind of mirrors the way that that terminology has emerged.

That's totally fascinating. Can I just say, as a purely linguistic matter, the reason this is so fascinating is when we think about appropriation of phrases, we're kind of acclimated to be thinking about cases where you have a term that is a racist term, or is enophobic term, or some other form of bias a homophobic term, and then the group that is subject to bias appropriates the term, repurposes it and makes it a term of pride. You know.

The term queer is the sort of archetypal example of this where this happened in my lifetime when I was a kid, Queer was solely at least an ordinary discourse, a homophobic insult, and then it came to be taken over in the process of act up in the movement against AIDS as a statement of pride, so it went from badness to self appropriation. In this case, this is

actually really fascinating. You're saying that the movement is the other way it starts with an ironic self description by the in group that sort of light heart did, and then comes to be as it were appropriated by the outgroup, and then it gets reaffied as an actual thing. That's a great point that you're making right there. That's certainly

my understanding the history of the phrase political correctness. And I think that's particularly interesting to me is that in that translation, or in that appropriation by the right, you lose all of the iron it. You lose the sense that when people originally use the phrase political correctness, they were saying something self aware about themselves and their tendency to get carried away about certain things. Right, it was

an acknowledgments within those circles. That's some of the things that they believed or said, you know, we're a little wacky. But they could be humorous about it, and they're aware

of it, and they could criticize it. But when it moves over to the right, you don't just have the phrase shift over it, but you lose the sense that you were talking about a group of people that is capable of self criticism, and it's capable of the knowledging its own limitations, and you start believing in earnest, and these are people who are wildly doctrinaire about crazy out there identity political beliefs, with no sense of self awareness.

I think that's the thing that's so striking to me about that shift, and I think that with cancel culture there is also that self awareness now where people will, partially as a reaction to the way that this has become a discourse, will sort of jokingly say they're about counseling somebody for making a particular joke that is like just over the edge, but not really that's the offensive. There is no a serious use of it as well, right,

I mean, so I completely buy what you're saying. And a huge number of the uses of cancel are clearly intended lightheartedly or ironically, and certainly when critics of cancel culture say that everyone has been canceled, part of the reason for that is that people are using the term sometimes in this lighter way. But there is some phenomenon of people on Twitter using the term non ironically. Yes, what when do you see that getting used and what

trends do you see in that usage. I think that when Chappelle came out this special, you know, it was a good example of this. People were offended by some of the things you said about transgender people and the jokes made by Michael Jackson. And I'm sure if you saw videos that were being posted on Twitter on the social media's time, you'd see in the comments people saying, well, now Chappelle is canceled, and they'd mean it. You know, they didn't mean that the special would literally be canceled,

because it wasn't. But they may have meant that they would like that to be the case, or they may just have meant that they personally were canceling him in the sense that he was now out of their pantheon of comedians that they would listen to. So it's really unclear, right, Like, I don't know that most of the people who use the term would say, well, now Chappelle should literally be like the special should be pulled from Netflix and Chappelle

should be removed from all of his contracts. But I think it's most of the time it's people saying personally to them, as far as they're concerned, Chappelle is no longer good in their eyes. So you know, that's that's that's a real thing, and it's a real way that people use the phrase, I think one of the things, I guess the main thing really I'm trying to get out in the pieces to what extents are we watching

a sort of new phenomenon in these critiques? Is it really the case that there is a new culture of criticism that's emerged that is uniquely and troublingly unsparing and un empathetic, or is it take case that we are seeing forms of criticism that have always sort of been around translated into a new medium on social media and that is sort of upsetting people's understanding of the line between creators and artists and their audience and journalists and

their readers. And are we basically just watching technology transform something that already existed into a new and unfamiliar and kind of scary seeming novelty. And your argument is that very much it's the latter that we've always had, you know, people saying, cancel my subscription, or we've had people engaging in systematic criticism or saying, you know, such and such a person is outside the pale because of this or that view that they hold, and that there's a kind

of cancel culture panic going on out there. Is that a fair read of where you come down. I mean, I certainly think so. I start the piece talking about Lenny Bruce, a very controversial comedian in his day, who made a lot of jobs at powerful people and rubbed people a ang way. His use of language was also

self consciously designed to shock and to break taboos. He was breaking taboos, especially about swearing, and he gained an audience for doing that, and he gained a lot of respects for doing that as somebody who you know, is bringing first values to their fullest expression. But he was also basically persecuted by obscenity laws. And there was a time in which cancelation, or what we sort of think of now is cancelation, wasn't sort of just a purely

social phenomenon or purely a matter of public opinion. It was the law that if you said certain things, you could lose your gigs or end up at a workhouse, you know, as he was sentenced to. So, I mean, I think that in examining episodes like that, in examples like his life, it comes very clear that there's nothing particularly new about the act of saying that something is

beyond the pale or offensive. Obviously, there's not even something new necessarily about the public on mass congregating to say that a particular television program, particular comedian, particular article was wrong or bad or off the mark or offensive in some way. People used to send in letters. You'd have the Parents Television Council dial up the FCC when they thought things on television that they didn't want their kids to see in etc. I think what particularly concerns people

is sort of it called a mob like. It's the fact that you have the worst cases, maybe hundreds of people with thousands of people coming together and saying this joke, this TV program, this movie, whatever, is wrong in some way. Even that the fact of people on mass coming together to criticize people. It's not like an invention of the social media age. It used to happen. It's just the social media has made it particularly easy and particularly visible.

It doesn't always see all they hate mail that you would have used to flow into magazine mail rooms. You know, that wasn't something that the public could look at and feel a ghast about, but you do see tweets and comments. We'll be right back as I am very very convinced by your argument that that kind of opposition is not new but is just much more observable. But I've been really trying to come up with the most sympathetic account

that I can of the form of the criticism. So let me try out the following hypothesis on you of the other side's view. And I'm not attributing this to any actual person who's criticizing Cancel culture. This is just my attempt to reconstruct the best argument you could make

on their side. The argument would be this, the distinctive form of criticism that one hears again and again and again today is that we should break down the distinction between the artist or the author or the maker on the one hand, and the human being on the other side. That we should admit that we can't distinguish the dancer from the dance, and for that reason, when we see a moral failing in the person, we should respond by

sanctioning the artwork that that person creates. So to take a concrete example, you know, if one is convinced that the allegations from many years ago against Woody Allen that he abused his daughter, an allegation that's important to note he was cleared of at the time. But if one came to believe that that allegation were true, one should therefore not watch any Woody Allen movies. And in the sense that fits into the word cancel because it's not

canceled the thing or argue against the utterance. Usually a human being is the direct object of the verb to cancel. Yeah, and so if that's what they're really upset about, I think one can have a very serious debate or argument about this, because I'm not sure there's a clear correct answer. I can see both sides of the argument. But that does seem to be some trend that is a little greater today than it was, say, ten years ago. What do you think about that hypothesis? See, I just don't know.

Like I think, one of the things that's so hard about these conversations is that they're very hard to quantify. It's very hard to bring any kind of empirical evidence to bear sure, and a lot of this stuff, but you know, you can go back to Ezra Pounds and people talking about his anti semitism and the extent to which it may have you know, it should influence the way you see his poetry. You can talk about Roman Polanski. These are conversations that people have had about arts and

artists for a very long time. I think those are great examples. But the way I was taught those things, those were both taught as canonical people. So you know, the Norton Anthology of English Poetry, from which I was taught poetry and at a at a tender age, which influenced me, included all of the Ezra Pound poems one could want, including some of the ones that were anti Semitic. And sure a teacher might say, you know, ge, just

so you know, he's got these terrible views. And there are some people who think we shouldn't, but the sort of canonical answer in the culture was, but you should certainly read the poems. The same with Polanski. I mean he left, he had to leave the United States because of indictment for statutory rape. And yet I don't know too many people who studied film in a serious way who were told, don't watch Chinatown because of Roman Polanski's immorality.

That's a canonical film. I agree that people have been debating this. They're probably be debating this since there was art, But I think that more serious people today are saying that the person is out based on their immorality or the immoral features of some of their artwork than was the case in at least the classical reception. Maybe I just don't know. Like the thing that I've been thinking about in this realm of the past couple of weeks, although it's a little bit of a different example, is

Kobe Bryant. He's been the subject of many, many moving and loving tributes, politicians issued statements talking about how wonderful he was and all he did for the support of basketball. But he's also somebody with who had a very serious allegation of sexual abuse level against him, and that hasn't really broken into a lot of the conversation we've been

having since his death. In fact, the Washington Post reprimanded a reporter I believe on the afternoon came down that he had died for linking to an article mentioning this case. So you're saying this is the opposite of cancel culture, is this is the whitewashing culture. I have read things by feminists and others making the point that it's problematic that there's been this celebration of Kobe Bryant. But if your point is that, no, that the celebration, at least

culturally has substantially outweighed the criticism. I think you're unquestionably right about that. I guess the point I'm making is that we still have a very broad capacity to overlook the bad things that famous people have done, you know, And I think that you would have to have a

lot of evidence to suggest that. You know, we're now in this culture where any mark against you, if you're an artist or an athlete, or an entertainer or some kind, is now much more damaging to your public perception than it would have been previously. I think there's certain kinds of things you can do. I think that Brian example. Nonwithstanding, I think people are much less lenient about sexual abuse now and allegations of sexism. I think people are obviously

more sensitive about racism. But I don't know that people now in general are willing to sort of metaphorically burned books or paintings, or sort of strike people from historical record as far as popular entertainment is concerned for having done something wrong in the past. You know, I think that there's a different conversation now happening about historical figures.

That's certainly a related conversation. Conversation. Yeah, you know, one thinks of Calhoun's name being taken off of one of the Yale colleges, and there it's not fair to say

was based on one thing that he did. It is based on the fact that the very thing that had gotten him recognition in the first place, namely his statesmanship in US history, could not be disentangled from the position that he advocated at all of those moments, which was South Carolinian quasi sovereignty in order to protect slavery right.

And this sort of raises that it does seem kind of striking that maybe the is stereotypical, but the mostly white conservative critics of quote unquote cancel culture seemed to be really worried that people of color or women are the ones who suddenly have the capacity to, as they imagine, shut down a certain kind of discourse. And that seemed to be making folks very, very nervous in a way that it might not have been the case when the question of access or who you would listen to was

more broadly controlled by white elites. Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the big shifts in cultural politics I've been fascinated by over the past simple years. You have the people who in the eighties, I guess would have been railing against offensive lyrics in hip hop.

Now rebranding themselves as a movement as the defenders of free speech and the defenders of free expression against the overlease and sorious twenty something woke people on Twitter, and you know, like I don't know that if you go through the history of the conservative movements and examine the way that the movement responded to certain controversies and the way that they respond to speech controversies, now you're going to find like a natural sort of intellectual evolution to

their current position. I think it's kind of a one eighty that's happening for pretty obvious reasons. One of the things that was mattening to me about the campus political controversies that took up so much attention a couple of years ago was that there was so much writing about people at events, you know, shouting at a professor or a speaker, or saying that a speaker shouldn't come to campus, and so on. You can have your view on whether or not that seat useful or meaningful form of protest.

There's always no writing at all about Republican state legislatures. By law trying to prevent certain people from coming to certain campuses, or trying to crack down on certain student movements. There was no conversation about that as a threat to free speech. You would imagine that actions state government would be slightly more concerning actions by five and a half liberal arts students in the Northeast. You know, sure, you're

making a point that I think. First of all, I think it's absolutely correct that free speech has only become

a rallying cry of conservatives in the last decade. And historically conservatives were more status, they were more in supportive the state when it restricted speech, and they were also more committed to what they saw as moral judgment and made the argument typically that when a work of art or something else violated community more out, it ought to be appropriate to suppress it or not to fund it. But I would just note the flip, what I call the flip, and the political economy of free speech has

actually taken place on both sides. I mean, it's also true that in left of center circles, the knee jerk view for most of the twentieth century was more speech is good. You know. The American Civil Liberties Union got its start as a really very far left organization, deeply embedded with socialism and even communism, and it gradually morphed into being a more general civil libertarian set of positions.

But this was an alliance that was driven in part by the left sense that the right controlled the institutions of the state and was interested in shutting them down. And so today, you know, when I teach my students and I teach free speech, I teach First Amendment to my students. It's noteworthy that many students who see themselves as left of center are very skeptical about the power of free speech, and many students who are right of

centers see themselves as deeply committed to free speech. And it's nearly one hundred and eighty degree flip, yea, even from what it is when I started teaching this, you know, fifteen years ago. So I've sort of watched this change happening in real time among my students, and I think they're reflecting a change it's happening more broadly in the society. So there's a lot of flipping to go around. You know, I don't know whether it's hypocritical or not, it's definitely

a transformation. And how we think about these. So I mean there are ways in which I think the left. I guess the campus left now is a little bit frankly better on speech than the previous iteration of the campus left back in the eighties and nineties, when you had the first sort of way of political practice controversies. No, I say this because I'm interesting hearing your perspective on it. During that first wave, a lot of campuses were actively

going about imposing speech codes. There were actual statutory efforts to prohibit people from saying certain things that were deemed offensive that ultimately ended up in a lot of court battles. Now, I think the way that this discourse happens is almost exclusively within social circle. Students will say among themselves, these are the kinds of values that we want to uphold. This is the kind of speech that we don't think

is okay. And it's much more informal debate. Whatever norms are being enforced now or not being enforced by dictadd's being enforced by social dynamics, in some cases group pressure. But it's not about somebody laying down the law administratively. Now, is it possible that that's because of the First Amendment? Jurisprudence that emerge out of that first wave. Maybe I have a competing theory about why. I mean, first of all, I think it's a super astute observation and really really

resonates with my own experiences, for sure. And I was a student in the very late eighties and early nineties on a campus, and I remember all of the intense debates about that, and you're totally right that those were about formal codification and now it's about the informal. But my instinctive reaction to that change, and to be blunt,

I hadn't thought of it before. I think it's a great point that you're making, is that it's because of the rise of social media, much in the way that the question of where free expression lives used to be very much about the state and the private individual, and or maybe by extension, the university, which might be private but still functions as the state when you go to one.

Now the big topic in free expression is really social media and what it means to have pre expression in an era where all of the platforms have terms of service that include community standards that regulate what you can say. And so since today's students are genuine digital natives whose entire adolescent and post adolescent lives have been completely structured around the idea that where the important expression happens is

on social media. So I think it follows from that that they accept non state oriented modes of sanction and they accept, you know, let's all do it together on social media forms of sanction. And that may also be one of the things that scares the daylights out of an older generation of conservatives, who say, oh, my goodness, this phenomenon of collective judgment is itself the thing that's scary because it's not in the hands of the state.

It's not in the hands of the people who run the inslution, it's not in the hands of the quote unquote grown ups or the traditional actors who exercise power. It's democratized, it's spread out, it's decentralized, and it has this social feature to it that grows out of social media. I think, I mean, I think I'm just saying your theory back to you to try to explain the phenomenon that you described, So I describe the theory to you,

not to me. Sure, I mean, I think it's anybody can be a gatekeeper of sorts now the power to sort of align yourself with a particular constituency and define values amongst yourselves and enforce those values. It's no longer just in the hands of people who belong to mainstream political constituencies or people who are within the existing racial

or cultural religious majority. Anybody can sort of develop a set of beliefs and values that they sort of, you can't really say, impose on the rest of the world, but they can take jobs at people of prominence on the basis of those values in the way that they wouldn't have been able to ten twenty thirty years ago,

as you said, as a consequence of social media. And you know, if you are a conservative or not just a conservative, but if you're frankly a centrist liberal with a lot of respect for lead institutions, it is very understandable why you'd find that frightening. But I think that we should be clear and understanding what the actual risks

of this kind of new discourse actually are. If we go around saying to ourselves what's happening now can be half metaphorically half not connected to Stalinism and the Gulag and witch hunts. I think that we lose our sense

of perspective when we draw those comparisons. If there's something to be critiqued about this new discourse, I think that we don't do ourselves any favors in understanding those things if we're constantly reaching for something else that is obviously so dramatically different but has this i don't know, like rhetorical or emotional resonance when you reach for it. You know, you might not like being criticized on Twitter, but if you're comparing the situation to Nazi Germany, like you're not,

you're not bringing any clarity to what's actually happening. See. I just want to really thank you because to me, your cultural critical analysis here is terribly powerful because you're not responding to the critique by just saying, well, that's a right wing critique and the left is better. Nor are you saying that the right is entirely tilting at

a windmill. Instead, you're stepping outside of it and evaluating the phenomenon that's actually in play and asking us to think about how that phenomenon is actually cashed out in terms of who has the capacity to do what, and how power is handed out, and how communication actually happens, and that to me is tremendously clarifying. And I just want to say thank you, and I hope we can talk again in the future as you continue to unpack

and explain other kinds of cultural phenomenon. And I'm going to look out for your stuff and I'm really grateful to you. Well, thank you so much. This is truly wonderful. Thank you. Vocita raised some really important questions around the social mechanism that's driving what is known as cancel culture.

He points out that in almost every situation, those calling for the cancelation of a person or a figure or an idea are doing so themselves, not through the exercise of official governmental power, or indeed through attempts to create an institutionalized mechanism of censorship, but rather in their own expression of their own beliefs and ideas. True, it may happen that institutions respond in individual cases, so it's not

as though the movement is disconnected from institutional reality. But the calls themselves are not calls for a fundamental set of institutional changes. In most instances, that has major implications when we try to puzzle out exactly what free speech principles should tell us about calls for cancelation or the phenomenon of cancelation itself, assuming that phenomenon even exists. As Zosita reminds us, our Freedom of Speech series will continue

next week. Until then, be careful, be safe, and be well. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia gene Coott, with mastering by Jason Gambrell and Martin Gonzalez. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis GERA special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. I also write a regular column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman.

To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts. And one last thing. I just wrote a book called The Arab Winter, a Tragedy. I would be delighted if you checked it out. If you liked what you've heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. You can always let me know what you think on Twitter my handle is Noah Our felt. This is deep background