FREDDIE DEBOER: If Publishing’s Efforts to Diversify Haven’t Done Anything, Why Did You Fight for Them? Why Do You Defend Them Now?

Here’s the bigger thing. At one point cancel culture comes up, and they recite the usual progressive catechism about it – canceling doesn’t matter, people aren’t really canceled, canceling doesn’t hurt anyone. This is of course not true, and I don’t think the people who say it really believe that it’s true. (If you’d like to argue about it, let’s meet in the lobby of the movie theater the next time a movie starring Armie Hammer is released.) The trouble with saying that canceling doesn’t work is that it immediately prompts this question: then why did you take part in it? Why did you defend it? It’s been whiplash-inducing to live through the cancel culture era. Liberals lustily participated in canceling campaigns, throwing fuel on every Twitter fire, insisting that the social media pile-on was a vital tool for achieving justice…. Those of us who expressed reservations were called the enemies of progress or worse. BUT ALSO, now, we’re constantly told that cancel culture isn’t a thing, that nobody really ever gets canceled, that people often actually benefit from cancelation! etc etc etc. These are, of course, totally incompatible claims. And yet not only do people move from one to the other, many somehow manage to believe both at the same time.

And that’s what’s really at play here too, the same question: if publishing’s effort to publish more minority writers and fewer white men has not actually worked, why is it worth defending? Alternatively, if white men’s primacy in the book world really has been meaningfully reduced, in what way are the white men pointing that out in error? You can either tell me that efforts to de-white-man-ify publishing are worth doing, a meaningful effort to improve the world, or you can tell me that no white men ever lose opportunity because of that effort and it’s thus harmless. You can’t do both.

As Rod Dreher’s “Law of Merited Impossibility” states: “‘It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.’”