Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a controversial speaker is invited to give a talk at a prestigious educational institution. The speaker is well-known for unorthodox, even offensive, views about racially charged subjects. Fearing a backlash from student audiences too fragile to hear something they don’t agree with, the school backs down and cancels the talk, claiming that the speaker’s presence will be too disruptive.
Dog bites man, right? Well, we’ve seen this kind of story far too many times in recent years, but this particular one has a twist:
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times journalist who conceived The 1619 Project, said Tuesday that she was recently disinvited from speaking at Middlesex School, a private boarding school in Concord, during Black History Month.
In a phone interview Tuesday, Hannah-Jones said someone from Middlesex had reached out through a friend in April asking if she would be willing to speak at the school in February 2022. Hannah-Jones said her assistant on Monday forwarded her an e-mail from a person at Middlesex saying she had been asked not to come.
“According to my head of school and board, the ‘noise’ associated with having Nikole as the speaker would take away from the overall experience,” the e-mail read, according to a snippet Hannah-Jones posted to Twitter on Monday. “I then suggested that Nikole be a featured speaker for our BIPOC alumni and was told ‘this is not the right thing for our community.’”
Paraphrasing the e-mail in a call with a Globe reporter, Hannah-Jones said the person who wrote the e-mail, whom she did not identify, stated they had put off sending it because they were trying to “help the school and the board make a different decision.” But “the head of the school and the board for the school” were not comfortable having Hannah-Jones as a speaker for Black History Month, the person wrote.
[…]
Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, which re-examines the legacy of slavery in the United States, has become a focus of ire from right-wing figures, who have engaged in disinformation campaigns as they protest how race and racism are discussed in schools. Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2020 for the project’s introductory essay and has won a MacArthur “genius grant” for her reporting on racial segregation in America. Critics have focused particular anger at The 1619 Project’s reconsideration of key events in US history as being driven by a desire to uphold white supremacy.
Earlier this year, Hannah-Jones accepted a position as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina, but the question of whether she would be offered tenure stalled for months amid complaints from a top donor to the school. Her tenure application was halted and later resubmitted to the board of trustees in May before the board in July reversed course and offered it. Hannah-Jones then said she would join the faculty of Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C.
Personally, I don’t think “anti-racist” activists have any trouble finding speaking engagements at American schools. And it’s not just “right-wing figures” who’ve criticized Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project. (Ironically, some of the most searing criticism has come from…the World Socialist Web Site.)
None of this is grounds for disinviting Hannah-Jones from a speaking engagement. Whenever people make excuses for censorship and deplatforming, my standard response is to point out that such tactics will inevitably be used against their own side. And so it is.
Maybe this is why even NHJ herself has been raising some alarm bells about “cancel culture” lately:
Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project has taken author and fellow social justice warrior Frederick Joseph to task after he used his massive social media platform to shame a woman publicly and force her employer to fire her.
When author Issac J. Bailey wrote on Twitter that Joseph's response to Emma Sarley, who allegedly confronted him and his fiance at the dog run at McKarren park, didn't "feel like a proportionate consequence for the offense," Hannah-Jones replied in agreement. "This didn't sit right with me," she said, "and does not seem like an ethical use of one's platform."
Welcome to the resistance, Ms. Hannah-Jones.
There’s a lot of doom and gloom on this substack, so I’m happy to come at you with some good news for a change: climate change is no longer an existential threat to all of humanity.
I’m assuming as much, anyway, seeing as how the Washington, DC chapter of the Sunrise Movement, an organization ostensibly founded to forment a “climate revolution,” has decided the issue isn’t so serious that they need Jewish allies anymore:
As others have pointed out, the cognitive dissonance in supporting statehood for DC, which was literally founded after displacing its original inhabitants, while demanding that Jews be cleansed from their ancestral homeland, is truly something.
In any event, not all alleged genocidal oppressors are created equal, apparently:
Re: Cancel Culture on campus...
Scientist Dorian Abbot disinvited form lecture at MIT because of previously posted views on affirmative action. ( Which, I believe, was not to be the subject of the lecture.)
Statement from one of his ( female ) critics: "This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated."
Pardon me, but wtf?
intellectual debate + rigor = pinnacle of intellectualism
Seems fairly straightforward to me, no matter the "world" from which it came.
One may argue the relative merits of intellectualism vs less highfalutin means of decision making and problem solving, but if you remove either of the elements to the left of the equal sign in that equation, one ends up with....The Claremont Institute.