Where do you draw the line between a disagreeable opinion v. something so abhorrent as to warrant cancelling someone's job, e.g. the use of racial slurs in spoken language?
Not rhetorical. Genuinely wondering.
There are courts to deal with issues like racism. There are laws. Firing people because they say something you don't agree with is a very slippery slope indeed. Especially when it's not on company time. In my part of the world, it will likely result in the employer being taken to court.
Yes.
> That completely bypasses the ever important context of the situation, bypasses due process, etc etc etc
It really doesn't. If you're "using" a racial slur, you're leveraging the definition of the word, which requires mal-intent by definition.
"Do not call me a ______" or "This word [written on the board] is a horrific hallmark of bigoted Americana that must be excluded from your vocabulary" is not the employment/use of a racial slur.
Not always, and within these types of assumption lies the key problems. There are a lot of words which had their meaning changed or become less used with time to accommodate racial biases. Even in the software industry, where terms such as “black list” or “slaves” shouldn’t be used anymore.
With racial slurs, always. 100% of the time.
It takes at least a generation of time for a word to evolve to that level of offense. You're describing terms which haven't evolved to that level of offense yet, words with which there's still a window of time to safely set the expectation that they shouldn't be used in a given manner.
> Even in the software industry, where terms such as “black list” or “slaves” shouldn’t be used anymore.
True, though it's worth noting that we should be seeking the opinion of the impacted population about this rather than assuming it to be true (Ex: https://twitter.com/marcusjcarey/status/1271624977805185024 - a fairly qualified opinion around which language in tech, or infosec specifically, should be revisited).
Not true, maybe you are biased towards English words. Take Spanish or Portuguese, where the word “negro” (not to confuse w/ any English slur) really means “the color black” (etymologycally) and is thereby synonymous to black. It has always been used to show respect, in a less biased sense towards black people, because it really doesn’t carry any ideology in its semantics. But now, its use and meaning are changing towards similar slur words avoided in the US. It didn’t take a generation in such countries to change its meaning (politically), it is happening now, even though the word itself is the same, means the same, and had no problem at all a couple of years ago.
We're also discussing a chiefly American phenomenon, and while I recognize that English isn't the only language spoken in the United States, English is the primary language of business in the United States, and boycotts/terminations are squarely in the realm of business.
So, not biased; appropriately scoped.
The article is clearly scoped to US issues. Language dynamics change when you move to other locales with other biases and prejudices. The article is even focused on US laws specifically.
Please read the article before you engage with others so that everyone's on the same page. I've disengaged from this conversation, sorry.
Nobody's cancelling people over political disagreements; they're cancelling people for dehumanizing groups of people, regardless of the tone of voice.
People may have had orderly disagreements more often back in the 50s, sure (although the violence against Black as well as Native Americans in the 50s is casually and commonly forgotten - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un...). The difference is that in the 50s, people weren't fired for casually employing the n- word against Black people. This is the difference between today v. the past. What you describe still feels like a regression.
That seems to be exactly what is happening.
Please cite? Need more than one, notably cases where people have lost their jobs for "offensive" language other than dehumanizing groups of people.
I despise Trump, didn’t vote for him, and think he has done significant damage to the office of the presidency and the country as a whole, but clearly expressing any sort of support for him will get you boycotted (I.e. canceled.) which falls under ‘unacceptable political opinions’ in my book.
Otherwise, I’m really not sure what your definition of ‘dehumanizing’ is. Outright racism and hatred is condemned by nearly everyone.
Context around what you're describing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/10/goya-boycot...
The boycott seems to be stemming from Trump's blatant use of bigotry against the Latinx community, so Goya is being blackballed by the Latinx community for endorsing racism.
Just because Trump is a politician doesn't mean boycotting people for endorsing him is only political. Considering Trump's generally-known and blatant bigotry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump), it's no different than boycotting someone for endorsing David Duke (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke)
[0] https://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2020 (there is better tools but this one is Ok-ish)
They used to call this “voting with your wallet” when I was a kid. I don’t really see what the problem is here. If I don’t like the ethics of a company, I’m free to buy beans from a company whose ethics I do like. This seems to be a critical component of capitalism. What are we supposed to do, force people to buy beans for Goya?
Some others:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-raci...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/14/rosetta-come...
https://www.thefire.org/research/disinvitation-database/#hom...
https://reason.com/2019/05/05/teen-fiction-twitter-is-eating...
Plenty more instances that have happened in the past 5 years.
1000‰, without a shadow of a doubt.
But looking at history with at least a layman’s perspective it seems this was only ever done in small subcultures/circles and never the norm.
Typically scholars of some kind and only within their group. So from a position of privilege: people who are well educated and have time to think. And given time to talk.
The mainstream media and social media typically don’t respect/support the latter.
Social media in particular is more inclusive. Everyone gets to speak as loudly as people ‚like‘, in a more protected manner.
Also there are vast differences in basic values, which were almost always hotly debated, even by the most well spoken, such as religion, equality etc.
When? Where? How? What old debates on youtube? I've seen people throw out this line since the W Bush administration and as far as I can tell it just means most of them have never actually delved into the media they think they're exposed to.
US political officials used to fight each other, physically all the time -- senators bludgeoning each other into comas with canes, the VP of the US shooting and killing the head of the opposing political party in a dual. Andrew Jackson got shot something like 4 times. Dig up some of the terrible things Lincoln used to say about his political rivals -- The Great Emancapator used to spit fire at people. Before we had Rupert Murdoch we had Hearst, who literally caused a war, and is one of the inspirations for the term Yellow Journalism.
There may have been 5 minutes where youtube wasn't complete garbage but I recall Newgrounds being big then and seeing more than a few blatantly pro-nazi vids then.
For a specific example on YouTube, watch some old episodes of Firing Line. Here's one where William F. Buckley (conservative) talks to Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers (quite left-wing). For one, this sort of interaction would almost never happen in the modern media world, and if it did, it would be nowhere near as calm as the Firing Line episode is. Certainly Buckley is not a paragon of civility (see his arguments with Gore Vidal) but again, the overall culture was far more collected. Compare it to today, where every conversation is combative and the only non-hostile forum is something like Joe Rogan, who functions as more of a sounding board than an actual intellectual host.
This is what laws around hate speech and discrimination are for. If some mob seeking social looting doesn’t like the laws and wants to cancel someone based on their mere preferences of what’s abhorrent, that’s just too bad. That’s not how protections of free speech work.