Cancel culture is why we're in the goddamn streets, Bari
When an elite faces the spectre of their own disposability for the first time, they'll make damn sure it's all that anybody is talking about for weeks
Obligatory apologies here at the outset: nobody needs another cancel culture take right now, certainly not my feeble one. But there are many swirling themes hereāfree speech, labor rights, democratic judgment, political rights, membership of the polis and the bounds thereofāand all these issues are at the crux of the historical and political moment weāre living right now. So of course itās all I can think about.
We found out last night that federal officers with no identification and unmarked cars are detaining protesters off the street at random. This (rightfully) raised alarm bells in my largely white TL, with some of you bringing up disappearances under Latin American dictatorships, etc. I will say this is probably just a maneuver to shake white liberals up, remind them that the state can make them targets anytime it likes. Indeed, a state that is serious about the repression of a particular group doesnāt arrest them off the street and then release them 90 minutes later so they can immediately go talk to the press. A state that is serious about repression of a particular group murders them openly, with impunity, on the street, as our state murders Black people every day. State terrororization of people of color in this country has always been designed to underscore their disposability to society. [1] Note that the affirmation Black Lives Matter is designed to be a retort to this regime of disposability of Black Americans.
What does this have to do with cancel culture? Everything, obviously. When we bring up the fact that Weiss, Pinker, Rowling and co.āthe spokespeople of an entire class of white liberals who suddenly feel insecure about their influence in the polisāare taking to their platforms to express their anxiety that they might be arbitrarily disposed of at this particular moment of uprising against racialized disposability, we are not engaging in a derailment. We are pointing out the predication of the speech act.
What do I mean by this? The concerted efforts of activists, academics, and writers over the past decade (and far beyond that) have helped reopen the historical narrative over the domination and exclusion imposed on Black, indigenous, and brown peopleātheir disposal by the settler colonial stateāat the time of founding and expansion of this nation. The protests today underscore that this domination and exclusion, this disposability, is not just a historical horror and crimeāit defines the texture of everyday life for BIPOC people to this day. To maintain their integrity, settler colonial institutions must enact a continued violence of disposal on those outside the polis. In other words, the polis in its current form cannot exist without the continuance of policies of disposability.
What made the Harperās letter odious in ways that many of its signatories seem not to understand [2] is that the political rights it sought to vindicateāthe parrhesia feature of free speech highlighted in this thread by Teresa Bejanāare features of a polis, a common political world, whose legitimacy is currently being contested wholesale. The predication of the polis on exclusion is prior to discussions about the political rights of the people who are in it (as the founding of the liberal American polity and the granting of political rights to those within it required the genocide of indigenous people). [3]
Thus, to the people doing the speaking, the exclusion at the basis of the polis, to the extent that they consider it at all, might seem incidental to their rights claims, and bringing it up may be interpreted as an act of derailment. To the people to whom the rights claims are directed, the fact of exclusion is constitutive of the vantage point from which the speech act is occurring, and the speaker is revealing either an ignorance or a malice that makes any asseveration of solidarity vacuous because it is being made from the turf of exclusion.
No wonder Yascha Mounk and Jesse Singal and Bari Weiss, those paradigms of entitled malicious mediocrity, are feeling insecure in their positions. The terrain from which they are speaking is under contest, and they think they can successfully defend it by turning the language of those of us questioning the legitimacy of that position against us, like we donāt have any idea what weāre talking about when weāre talking about what weāre talking about. This maneuver is not going to work, though it has been unfortunately successful in keeping us all talking about them in particular while we process this generalized, permanent issue of disposabilityāācancel culture,ā if you willāin our liberal polity.
Back to the protesters being shunted into unmarked cars in Portland. This is unquestionably concerning, but if you are a white liberal, I would say resist the impulse to panic about your own potential disposability right now.
Itās really not the time for that.
[1]Ā Was reading this the other day from Angela Davisās āPolitical Prisoners, Prisons & Black Liberation, written in 1971 while she was detained in Marin County Jail:
[The police] are there ā¦ to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives. Arrests are frequently based on whims. Bullets from their guns murder human beings with little or no pretext, aside from the universal intimidation they are charged with carrying out.
[2]Ā I am being generous here because I think many of them are not bad faith actorsāthough several clearly are.
[3]Ā I do not put liberal in scare quotes in this sentence because I think itās long past time for liberalism to own up to its human rights crimes.