I will admit that I had never heard of the "cancel culture" until recently. And even now I struggle to completely understand it. Recently Flannery O'Connor's name was removed from one of the buildings at Loyola University Maryland. Again, the charge is racism. But this need to 'cancel' people from monuments and buildings erected in their honor has spilled over into a closed mindedness that disturbs me. In "The ‘Cancelling’ of Flannery O’Connor? It Never Should Have Happened" by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell (Commonweal, Aug. 3, 2020), the author notes a June 22 article in the New Yorker by Paul Elie that mines a book by O'Donnell to find incriminating evidence that O'Connor was a card-carrying racist and therefore needs to be shunned.
O'Donnell writes:
Elie’s essay has caused a great deal of damage. As soon as it was released online, Twitter lit up with public denunciations of O’Connor and avowals from former admirers that they would never read—or teach—her books again. More than one declared dramatically, “Flannery O’Connor is dead to me.” Conversely, admirers of O’Connor, who know something about the reality of her life and the pernicious presence of racism in the mid-twentieth-century South, lamented Elie’s careless and cavalier treatment of this complex subject. But the most concrete expression of that damage arrived in my inbox the day after the article appeared. A student from Loyola University Maryland was moved to enlist my help with a movement she was organizing to have Flannery O’Connor’s name removed from one of the buildings on campus. She was horrified to read that O’Connor was a racist and lamented the “hate” she had expressed toward African Americans. (It is important to note that this is a word O’Connor never uses to describe her attitude toward African Americans, either in the passages quoted in the New Yorker or otherwise.) In our emails back and forth, I tried to explain to her that she was mistaken in her understanding of O’Connor’s writing and the reasons why I would not support such a campaign. I tried to explain that O’Connor was valuable to us precisely because of her experiential knowledge of racism. I tried to explain the ways in which her stories reveal and repudiate racism. I tried to explain to her that in her ambivalence about race, O’Connor’s inner war between her best (anti-racist) self and her worst (racist) self is the same war that all white people who are born into and (mal)formed by a racist culture fight, if they are honest enough to admit it. I tried to explain to her that O’Connor is the perfect writer for our moment. But she did not believe me.
The Loyola student initiated an inaccurately worded petition at change.org and garnered more than 1,000 signatures. Many of the signers admitted to not knowing who O’Connor was, but they heartily affirmed her erasure. The university president convened a small committee. No students were present. Only two faculty members participated, one from the theology department and one from the English department. They were the only two people familiar with O’Connor’s work. The committee arrived at a decision in what seems to be record time. And so little more than a month after the New Yorker essay appeared, the cherry-pickers showed up on campus.
What disturbs me is now quick some are to denounce those from the past, especially when they lack knowledge of the person, the complexities of their life, and the context in which they lived. And the idea of "avowals from former admirers that they would never read—or teach—her books again" further disturbs me. There is afoot, I fear, another form of censorship. In another time books might have been removed from libraries out of righteous indignation over unacceptable content regarding sex and other such taboo topics. But the idea then often involved children. Now adults are asserting that they will refuse to read or teach books simply because the author is deemed to have expressed herself in a way unacceptable in today's charged climate.
Is this the way forward for the "Cancel Culture"? How sad for the education of many who will be encouraged to only read what is politically and culturally approved.
