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My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.
In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said ‘with ladies present.‘“
I’m linking two thoughts the essay doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think is important to the thesis of why 2010-era cancel culture didn’t get cancelled itself, and that’s its almost autoimmune capacity to cancel comedians.
That said, Graham elides over how cancel culture was renamed “woke.” Was it the left or the right who did this? I suspect the latter, at which point we have to contend with the existence of two mind viruses, the cancel-culture/woke one and the anti-woke totem of the left.
Also, this requires more thought: “publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained in business fell in the direction they'd already been leaning: left.”
Why? And why have right-wing publications failed to gain comparable traction?
See how much pearl clutching you will get by southern “anti-woke” folks when someone imitates their voice or start saying the only thing they care about is “Gods and Guns”.
FWIW: I was born and raised in southern GA and have only lived in two states my entire life - GA and FL.
They are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian.
Graham’s point, generously, is you’ll always have pearl-clutching prigs. What matters is if they’re empowered.
> are very sensitive if you talk about their way of life or say anything that can be interpreted as anti-Christian
But they haven’t—until recently—had the power to e.g. end someone’s career or ability to perform in New York or San Francisco over it.
That idea gets very close to
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/question/2009/march.htm
> “I am a middle-aged white person and even I know that blacks and other racial minorities cannot be racist, just like women can not be sexists. Racism equals power. Whites are not hurt by the everyday flow of society.”
I’m Black and I can go into a long rant about how I disagree with every word of that sentence.
But the Christian Right has had most of the power in the US for most of its existence until the rise of tech during the last 20 years. The entire crusade against “woke” is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a “minority majority” country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out.
I’d argue their power fell earlier, with the Civil Rights movement: we’ve seen almost monotonic decreases in Christian religiosity since [1]. (It’s currently in a generational peak. I don’t know if that’s a last gasp of their boomers or something deeper.)
> The entire crusade against ‘woke’ is that demographic shifts are going to make the US a ‘minority majority’ country within our lifetimes and that people who were usually in the shadows are now able to speak out
I think it’s about as unfair to paint the rejection of “wokeness” like this as it is to paint every progressive policy as woke.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...