I gotta say a few words about what Ta-Nehisi Coates attempted to do in this piece on cancel culture and where, I think, he really misses the mark. Short thread. https://nyti.ms/33aMgqL 

1. First, he attempts to identify the origins of "cancel culture" beyond the current moment. This is typically an instructive exercise.

Yet he begins by placing the stories of Americans who were blacklisted as social pariahs alongside victims of racist and sexist violence.

2. You can't put what happened to the Dixie Chicks in the same historical tradition as what happened to Sarah Good (accused of being a witch and hanged) or Ida B. Wells (driven from her home and had her press burned to the ground) and call both "cancellation."

3. Similarly, the Compromise of 1877 didn't "cancel" the Black South, as Coates asserts. It destroyed it. It didn't simply impugn the character of Black Americans or dismiss them from social life. It marked the beginning of a new apartheid, Jim Crow.

4. There is a critical distinction between an individual receiving public reprimand and receding (or being banished) from public life and an individual being oppressed, violently excluded, and discriminated against. Conflating the two does a disservice to both.

5. Almost every example Coates' lists is a problem.

Trump didn't endorse Hillary Clinton's or Ilhan Omar's "cancellation." He called for the jailing and repatriation of political rivals to bolster his misogynist and white supremacist base. It incited violent threats.

6. And Colin Kapernick isn't fighting "cancellation," he is fighting the most entrenched interests in America - racial capitalism - on the main stage in which profiting off racial subjugation is openly acknowledged - the NFL.

7./End So while debate about the potential harms of cancel culture is important, we cannot confuse the stakes. While cancellation costs valuable social capital (and work) in the influencer-driven, celebrity-obsessed culture of social media, oppression costs people their *lives.*