The old Hollywood actor and civil rights champion’s reputation has been tarnished by accusations of hate and racism. This calls for some sifting and winnowing.
Conversations about cancel culture so often frame things in extreme terms for the sake of catching those Substack subscriptions and Twitter likes; they tell people exactly how to be outraged. But Field conducts discourse like a symphony.
“The Great Experiment” flatters liberal readers that by expressing their distaste for cancel culture, they have become diverse democracy’s most gallant defenders.
We might grasp cancel culture as an expression of punitive thinking within our own social movements, whereby the purge of individuals symbolically substitutes for the collective structural and cultural transformations that liberation requires.
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