The forthcoming young adult novel “Blood Heir” would not strike most readers as racist. Its Chinese author, Amélie Wen Zhao, was born in Paris and grew up in Beijing. Its fantastical plot — a princess with magic powers flees her father’s palace after his murder — draws inspiration from Russian history, particularly the Anastasia mythos, and its cast of characters is diverse.
Yet, in January 2019, a small number of far-left thought-enforcers launched a withering social media mob campaign to discredit “Blood Heir” on the baseless grounds that it was ignorant, racist, and reactionary. In the short term, they succeeded.
It’s an episode worth considering at length, as its resolution offers reason to fear that the callout culture of social justice warriors has not yet reached its apotheosis, and no matter how sick of it most members of the public have become, it may get much worse and seed the next generation of cultural commissars before winding down.
A scene in “Blood Heir” that triggered objections featured a slave auction scene and the death of a character who might be a member of a racial minority — it’s hard to tell, this being a fictional world and all — as if including such a scene constituted an endorsement of slavery and murder. Some members of the mob were angry that Zhao, an Asian woman, had referred to slavery at all, regarding it ignorantly as a uniquely black experience. “[R]acist ass writers, like Amélie Wen Zhao,” wrote one hostile reviewer, “literally take Black narratives and force it into Russia when that shit NEVER happened in history.”
[Editorial: The Left against debate]
Suffice it to say this criticism was inaccurate: Russia had slavery, both historically in the form of serfdom and more recently in the form of gulags. There was slavery all over the world, and there were slaves of all races. But in 2019, it doesn’t matter if the “wokescolds” are right, nor if they are many. What matters is that they are loud. Zhao asked her publisher, who had already committed to paying her $500,000 for the book, not to publish it.
By the end of April, the accused witch had talked herself down from the pyre and was attempting to discuss terms with the pitchfork-wielding villagers. Zhao reread her book several times and really didn’t think it was racist. Nevertheless, she decided to revise “Blood Heir,” soliciting feedback from “scholars and sensitivity readers,” according to the New York Times. She had experts police the text for stereotypes, and she asked an academic “who studies human trafficking in Asia” to make sure she had stayed in her lane. It is now scheduled for a November release, pending further melodrama.
The details are important because they map out the process by which more and more cultural fare is diluted before it reaches the market. The wokescolds, a term coined by the conservative writer Ben Shapiro, who came after Zhao represent a sort of Ghost of Social Justice Future.
That doesn’t mean they won’t come for the ghosts, too. Kosoko Jackson, a writer who was one of Zhao’s prominent detractors, became the mob’s next target. In February, his young adult novel, “A Place for Wolves,” was flooded with one-star reviews because its plotline was deemed problematic by the mob. He canceled its publication. Jackson’s main character was, like him, a gay, black man, but his villain was an Albanian Muslim. The wokescolds pitched a fit.
[Opinion: Social justice mob cancels book, because ‘eating’ is a racial stereotype or something]
Some people may take satisfaction from watching the mob turn on one of its own. But they shouldn’t. It should worry everyone. It suggests that when callout culture finishes with obvious targets, it does not pack its bags and close down. It stays in business by moving on to other targets. There is no natural endpoint or period of relative calm. There will always be someone else to cancel.
It also suggests that some who find themselves in the crosshairs will do as Zhao did: slink away injured but alive, their artistic or professional output intact though watered down and the power of the mob unchallenged.
Callout culture, known to its practitioners as accountability and to everyone else as a form of censorship, is more prevalent than ever on social media. For many modern liberals, ignorance of shifting expectations and assumptions is no excuse, nor is there posthumous amnesty. Twitter recently exhumed the reputation of actor John Wayne, who died 40 years ago, for expressing racially insensitive views in a 1971 interview. The Outline’s Rosa Lyster recalls a thread “calling out” King Leopold II of Belgium, who died in 1909.
Wokescolds come for the living and the dead: authors such as Zhao; comedians Norm Macdonald, Kevin Hart, and Nimesh Patel, who was told his unsafe jokes had no place at Columbia University; conservative figures such as Jordan Peterson and Shapiro; even athletes such as Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray, who was forced to apologize for homophobic tweets he sent when he was a 14-year-old child.
[Related: Toonmageddon: Political cartoons’ looming extinction would be a tragedy]
Those people are famous and wealthy enough to weather some storms. The greater cost of callout culture is how it affects everyone else. Wokescolds grew up on college campuses, but they are no longer confined to the university or to the insular bubble of Twitter. It used to be said that they would get a remedial dose of reality when they moved into the world of work. If only that had proved true. Instead, workplaces with young staffers are most vulnerable.
Consider Google, which fired an employee named James Damore after his concerns that the company was becoming an ideological echo chamber drew condemnation from the Left. Note that he expressed these views in an internal channel where the company solicited employee feedback. Right or wrong, Damore’s feedback wasn’t the kind of thing you can express to a certain subset of liberal 20-somethings in the modern age.
Media companies are facing a similar reality. The Atlantic hired the conservative writer Kevin Williamson and then swiftly fired him, ostensibly due to a public backlash on Twitter, but probably more because some staffers complained. Even Ta-Nehisi Coates, a widely adored liberal writer, felt compelled to apologize to his fellow writers of color at the Atlantic for failing to come out swinging against Williamson from the outset. “I was not like, don’t hire that dude,” said Coates during an off-the-record discussion inside the magazine’s offices, the contents of which were leaked. “To the contrary, I thought, OK, well he can come in and represent the position, and then we can fight it out.” But no, this clash of perspectives was impermissible as far as the wokescolds were concerned.
When Jonathan Chait, a liberal writer consistently critical of the excesses of political correctness, privately joked that the Trump presidency, while awful, is at least sort of entertaining, one of his colleagues at New York magazine leaked the remark to Huffington Post’s Ashley Feinberg, a scold if ever there was one, who repurposed it in maximally uncharitable fashion for a lazy hit piece on Chait.
These incidents show that social media itself is not really the problem. Though Twitter can be an important accelerant of controversy, mobs form in response to remarks uttered in private as well.
[Also read: Facebook doesn’t have to be a forum for open speech, but it should be]
These incidents are among the best-known, but undoubtedly, people without any public profile endure callouts as well. Some of them voted for Trump in 2016 precisely because he vowed to fight this brand of intolerance. Polls show 80% of people, virtually everyone but the hard Left, think political correctness is a problem. Belief that political correctness has gone too far was the second most reliable predictor of whether a person voted for Trump. The first was being a Republican.
The current incarnation of callout culture has trickled outward from the campus culture where it originated. It was student activists who normalized the leftist idea that words are themselves a form of violence and they can inflict pain just as sticks and stones do. Declining support for unfettered free expression among the activist crowd is a natural consequence of this belief. While 1960s-era liberals and their immediate descendants were militant supporters of the First Amendment, today, many campus radicals think “hate speech” should not enjoy legal protection. When I interviewed student activists for my forthcoming book, “Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump,” many of them told me that shutting down offensive speakers was a valid tactic for protecting their marginalized allies.
Case in point: The faculty of Williams College held a meeting a few months ago to discuss persuading the administration to adopt the University of Chicago’s free speech pledge. Some 15 students showed up touting signs that read, “Free speech harms.” Luana Maroja, a professor of biochemistry, reported that she heard some of these protesters “screaming that we [the faculty] were trying to kill them.” With words.
It’s important to clear up two misconceptions. First, contrary to conservative fears that liberal professors are indoctrinating their students, many far-left professors are actually terrified of this new wave of anti-speech enthusiasm, since they are often the victims of it. To many of them, the First Amendment should be enjoyed by everyone, including the Westboro Baptist Church and the Ku Klux Klan.
[Books: Ben Shapiro’s intro to Western civ]
Second, the wokescolds are a minority on campus and everywhere else. This is not really a generation-wide problem, in that few millennials and Gen Zers want to throw a punch at Charles Murray, or get Williamson fired, or force the Oscars to rid itself of Hart. Those who do are relatively few and far between.
The problem is their power and influence, which, despite their numbers, are increasing. During the Obama years, they weaponized federal guidance on anti-harassment law: A then-little-known statute called Title IX allowed a small number of individuals to file a large number of complaints against students and professors whose conduct they disliked. Know Your IX is now an activist organization, and its founders have the numeral tattooed on their ankles.
Many readers will doubtless be familiar with the ordeal of Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis, whose vocal skepticism of Title IX attracted complaints from activist students. Administrators spent weeks investigating the professor for speech that clearly should have been protected by academic freedom. But Kipnis is far from the only victim of muzzling under the aegis of Title IX. I’ve documented plenty of similar cases over the years: One student at a private Jesuit university received a visit from the Title IX coordinator after he objected to the campus’s annual drag show; an art professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design was forced into early retirement for showing his students a sexually explicit film; Wichita State investigated a fraternity for advertising “free house tours” in violation of Title IX, somehow; City University of New York told professors not to use gendered salutations in any emails, just in case this violated Title IX (it did not); and so on and so on.
It is not a defense that one’s words and actions are not wrong. As a community college dean of human resources once admitted, what matters is not “the truth, as has been determined,” but “that person’s truth,” as in, the accuser’s truth.
One of the most unexpected and least appreciated achievements of the Trump administration has been Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ reversal of the overly broad Title IX guidance that encouraged such abuses in the first place. Unfortunately, the massive bureaucracy created to investigate Title IX complaints at various universities and colleges is still intact, and many university presidents have vowed to proceed with business as usual.
[Editorial: Adam Schiff renews the Democratic war against the First Amendment]
In any event, it would be easy to imagine a small subset of liberal-minded activists weaponizing workplace harassment law in the same manner. Indeed, this has already begun. The firings of Damore and Williamson were both due in part to arguments that their views could, in a broad sense, contribute to a hostile work environment, something prohibited by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. These arguments are clearly wrong, as Title VII is not intended to shut down difficult conversations in companies that thrive on internal disputation. But some firms would rather heed their scolds than face the bad publicity that follows when such fights are made public.
Just as campus Title IX accusations had less and less to do with actual harassment the bolder the activists became, so hostile workplace environment accusations will have less and less to do with actual office hostility. If you want a vision of the future, imagine an employee receiving negative feedback about his or her performance and immediately complaining that the office has become unsafe.
Greg Lukianoff, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is fond of saying that, contrary to popular belief, the much-derided political correctness-run-amok cycle of the early 1990s never actually went away. Like Dorothy’s power to return to Kansas in The Wizard of Oz, it’s been there all along.
So while it’s always possible the scolds find new hobbies or their antics receive less media attention, depriving the social media mobs of their power, it seems more likely we won’t be rid of callout culture for a long time to come. More likely, we will live as Zhao does, making our compromises with ignorant and angry villagers wielding their pitchforks.
Robby Soave is an associate editor at Reason magazine.
