This past week was one of the Cancel Culture’s busiest and most productive to date. It began with country superstar Morgan Wallen getting suspended by his record label, pulled from hundreds of radio stations, and disqualified from receiving country music awards after he was caught saying the “n-word.” It ended with Donald McNeil Jr., famed science reporter and veteran journalist of 45 years, being forced out of his job at the New York Times after a revelation that he had used similar “racist language.” In between, old accusations of inappropriate behavior by another New York Times staff member, Andy Mills, prompted him to resign in disgrace.
In Mills’ case, he had apparently engaged in some inappropriate flirting with women at a previous job several years ago. This was all known and dealt with at the time. But after it was decided by some people on Twitter, and some of his colleagues, that Mills hadn’t received his fair portion of the blame for a separate incident in which the Times had to retract key portions of a hit podcast he’d helped produce, these other unrelated allegations were made to, as they say, “resurface.” As for Morgan Wallen, he did say the “n-word,” but it was uttered drunkenly, in jest, to a friend, and secretly recorded by a neighbor who then sent the tape to TMZ. Donald McNeil used the same word, though it turns out that he said it one time, two years prior, while on a trip with students to South America. And he didn’t so much as “use” the slur as refer to it. He explained in his resignation letter that he was asked by a student “whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur. To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.”
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