“Cancel culture” is getting out of control, according to members of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
Members of the board, which typically leans conservative, reacted on Sunday to a report released last week by a Washington, D.C., commission recommending renaming, removing or contextualizing” dozens of public schools, government buildings, and city parks with namesakes tied to slavery or the historical oppression of minorities. Among them are Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Andrew Jackson.
Dan Henninger, deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, said such an effort to rename institutions is a way of trying to rewrite history and predicted schools will be similarly sanitized.
“They are reinventing history, they are doing this across the country, you can bet if those District of Columbia public schools ever reopen, they will be teaching the students exactly this,” Henninger said on Fox News’s Journal Editorial Report. “It is a complete transformation of American history, and I think it really does require more active resistance than it’s getting, ludicrous as it may seem. It’s a big problem to me.”
A summer reckoning on race began after George Floyd, a black man, died in Minneapolis police custody on May 25. Amid demonstrations against racial inequality and police brutality, there have also been pushes to remove, topple, or otherwise reassess symbols, monuments, and names that have ties to slavery or other forms of oppression, including the Confederacy. All this is ensconced in a wider notion of “cancel culture,” in which people withdraw support and shame someone or an entity after he or she expresses a viewpoint or statement deemed to be offensive.
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser assigned a city task force to come up with a list of names and symbols the city should ask the federal government to “remove, replace, or contextualize” but pushed back on critics claiming she was attempting to remove the city’s federal landmarks, such as the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial, and removed a page from the report on federal monuments. “I thought it was a good idea to understand the full breadth of issues of concern, people of concern, or markers of concern in the district,” Bowser said. “It was not our intention to do anything with the federal monuments and memorials.”
The original report, which cites the names of monuments, memorials, statues, and parks to all be considered for reconsideration, also said figures with ties to oppressing other minority groups such as women and the LGBTQ community will also be discussed for possible renaming.
“Since July 15, we have worked with eight working group members and more than twenty staff members to engage residents, examine policy and conduct research in making the recommendations contained herein,” the report said. “Our decision-making prism focused on key disqualifying histories, including participation in slavery, systemic racism, mistreatment of, or actions that suppressed equality for, persons of color, women, and LGBTQ communities and violation of the DC Human Right Act.”
Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel criticized the idea of applying modern standards to the past, urging people to resist thinking in that kind of context.
“You have to stop and think, if you said to George Washington, ‘LGBTQ,’ he would probably think you are speaking Latin,” Strassel said. “The idea that you can apply 21st-century standards to 18th-century figures is just crazy. But that’s what we’re trying to do, and I think that’s the attitude you have to fight back on, you have to expose it and just say … how silly it is.”
Jason Riley, a longtime columnist for the Wall Street Journal who frequently writes about race relations, questioned the significance of protest culture as a whole. He also pointed to larger issues on which he believes Washington, D.C., should focus, such as enhancing education and reducing its growing crime rate.
“What is the point of all of this? Forcing people in raising a fist or chanting some silly slogan or kneeling or what have you, what is the point?” Riley said. “In Washington, D.C., homicides are up over last year, assaults are up, car thefts are up. D.C. children read and do math well below the national average. What is removing a monument going to do to address that? What is contextualizing a statue going to do to address those problems?”
