Ben Burgis - Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique Of The Contemporary Left

My editor Doug Lain patiently helped me brainstorm the idea for this book. At the end of the process, he told me it was an important enough intervention to be worth going ahead with if I was willing to take the heat. Doug, Leigh Philipps, Matt McManus, and Mark Warren all made valuable suggestions about early drafts. My good friend and frequent collaborator Michael Brooks helped shape my understanding of some of the most important arguments presented here over the course of many, many conversations about these topics. Ryan Lake helped me crystalize many of these thoughts during conversations at various Atlanta area Waffle Houses which mostly consisted of my ranting and Ryan making insightful comments. My wife Jennifer isnt obsessed with politics the way I amand she isnt as much of a fan of problematic comedy as I ambut she was, as always, a constant source of love and support while I was writing this book. (Jennifer is enough of an animal-lover that she would be rightly annoyed with me if I forgot to mention that our dog, Lucy, and our cat, Shabazz, are also pretty awesome on the love and support front.) My Dead Pundits Society co-host Adam Proctor and my fellow members of the extended crew of The Michael Brooks Show like David Griscom, Matt Lech, and Daniel Bessner have influenced my overall political perspective in many ways that I realize and probably lots of ways that I dont. The same is true of Bhaskar Sunkara and the rest of the team at Jacobin. Finally, Ive been consistently honored and humbled by the support of my Patreon community. More than a few of the ideas presented in the book were originally hashed out in essays I wrote for my patrons and in our Discord Office Hours group voice chats. Im not always sure that I deserve their support but Im always grateful to have it.

A few months after I wrote that last chapter, New York City DSA was planning to co-sponsor a Zoom lecture by Adolph Reed on racial disparity ideology. The immediate context was the COVID-19 pandemic. Many left-wing commentators and progressive politicians had been pointing out that the pandemic was killing black people at a much higher rate than it was killing the white population. Very few had spelled out the reason why this was the case.

One reason Reed found this trend disturbing was that he was concerned it could give racial medicine a new lease of life. Clusters of genetic features associated with common ancestry that sometimes at least loosely correlate with conventional ideas about race can be medically relevant in some contexts but Professor Reed has long been concerned that an overemphasis on race-based medical explanations can provide allegedly scientific cover to the long-discredited idea that race is a natural genetic category rather than a socially constructed one.

His main complaint, though, was about the ways that racismper-se is an incomplete social and historical explanation of both the disparity in COVID deaths and various other racial disparities. By far the most important reason that black people were dying of the virus at a higher rate than white people was that, due to Americas history of de jure racial apartheid, black people were far more likely to live in poverty than white people and poor people were far more likely than middle-class or affluent people to be killed by the virus for extremely obvious reasons ranging from having worse medical care to being far less likely to be able to work from home. The reasons Reed thought this point deserved emphasis were that (a) an explanation of the disparity that centered on poverty more precisely captured the underlying empirical facts and (b) such an explanation was more likely to be politically useful in assembling the broadest possible political coalition to combat the source of the problem.

NYC-DSA canceled its sponsorship of the event under intense pressure from those members who thought Reed was a class reductionist or somehow hostile to the anti-racist cause. In particular, many of Reeds critics within DSA thought it was outrageous to hold such an event in the middle of the intense nationwide unrest sparked by the police murder of George Floyd.

Floyd was a working-class black man whod lost his job due to the pandemic. He was arrested for paying for cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill and killed by the arresting officer, who held his knee on Floyds neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds as Floyd begged for his life. In the subsequent national outpouring of fury that followed this grotesque act of state violence, a police station in Minneapolis was burned to the ground. Protests spread and police around the country seemed almost to be trying their best to remind everyone of why people were so angry at them. There were innumerable incidents of police teargassing peaceful protestors, trapping protestors on bridges and then brutalizing them for not following orders to go home, attacking journalists even after theyd seen press passes, covering up badges so they couldnt be reported, blinding protestors by firing rubber bullets directly into their faces, and on and on like that in a seemingly endless list of abuses.

Anyone who wasnt the worst kind of apologist for arbitrary power would be outraged by all of this. But did any of it add up to a reason to oppose a lecture by a fierce lifelong critic of racial and economic injustice? No one who knew anything about Reed would think he would be on the side of the police.

Some of Reeds detractors in DSA just called for the event to be turned into a debate, although (i) they typically didnt even bother to say who Reed should debate, (ii) this demand for a change of format was being raised far too close to the planned time of the event to be realistic, and (iii) its extremely doubtful that if Reeds views on these matters were closer to their own they would have found it inappropriate for him to have the online stage to himself for an hour before opening up the floor to Q&As. Im a big believer in the value of debate, but the idea it was only acceptable for NYC-DSA to hear from this allegedly problematic speaker if someone was sharing the spotlight with him and reassuring the audience that hes wrong strikes me as a fairly clumsy attempt to split the difference between those DSA members who would have liked to hear what Reed had to say and those who just wanted him to shut up.

In any case, as far as I know, NYC-DSA never offered Reed the option of turning his scheduled lecture into a debate. They simply pulled their sponsorship. And the online pile-on against Reed and the event organizers had become sufficiently toxic in the hours leading up to that decision that the lecture ended up being canceled outright out of concern that Zoom-bombers would disrupt the event.

The irony of an overwhelmingly white organization canceling a black Marxist academic in the name of anti-racism doesnt need to be labored. But two related points do deserve to be emphasized.

The first is that this incident says a lot about the limits of the politics of deferring to oppressed people. No one took a poll of the non-white members of NYC-DSA to see how many thought the organization should withdraw its sponsorship of the event. It was just taken for granted that those black DSA members trying to cancel a black socialist visiting speaker were speaking for the black point of view on the matter and a great many white DSA memberssurely the majority of the cancelers in this casetook this as a reason to join the pile-on.

This speaks to a larger problem diagnosed by Matt Bruenig in his 2013 essay What Does Identitarian Deference Require? If you want to suspend your own judgment about some issue and defer to the opinions of the oppressed, first you need to figure out who speaks for the oppressed. Bruenig cites a Gallop poll according to which 44 percent of women identify as pro-life and 50 percent identify as pro-choice. Its clearly not possible to defer to women in general on this topic. Is the six-point gap good enough to take pro-choice women as speaking for women as a category? What if the figures were reversed? Its not exactly impossible to imagine political and cultural changes that would turn the 44 percent into 51 percent. Would that mean that men shouldnt have anything to say about abortion, they should just listen to women would now entail that men should just shut up and listen to pro-life women? Of course, you could have a good independent argument for the conclusion that abortion restrictions unjustly oppress womenand to be clear, I believe that we