Two wrongs do not need to be indistinguishable

The story of a person who did a dumb thing and the people who are really upset about the consequences he faced

When you’re constantly arguing in bad faith, it’s impossible to acknowledge that others might operate in good faith. At the very moment you consider that possibility, your entire worldview falls apart.

Let’s go back to a few weeks ago.

A story in the The Daily Beast revealed that the lead science reporter at The New York Times had used the N-word while chaperoning an NYT-organized “Student Journey” to Peru in 2019. At the time, Donald McNeil Jr. was reprimanded by NYT editor Dean Baquet and a notation of some sort was added to his personnel file.

When The Daily Beast resurfaced these allegations in late January, Baquet defended his initial response by saying McNeil’s actions were regrettable, but that he was still deserving of another chance: “It did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious.”

Intent was important.

Then, 150 of McNeil’s colleagues wrote to express their consternation. McNeil resigned shortly after. In explaining McNeil’s departure to staff, Baquet wrote, “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”

Intent was suddenly irrelevant.

As a term, however, the importance of “intent” is undeniable because it’s long been the heavy-lifter for faux apologists everywhere. “If anyone was offended by the (often objectively) offensive thing I did, I am sorry,” is the templated standard for allaying public outrage while denying personal responsibility for one’s actions. Get caught doing anything terrible, and the road to public relations redemption will always include a denial of intent — or at least an admission of ignorance. I see you, Justin Timberlake.

By eliminating intent from the equation, not only are these spurious atonements rendered obsolete, there is no longer any acceptance for white people using the N-word at all (not in reference, not in quotations, nothing at all). And that bothers some.

The “some” in question here inevitably point to an overriding principle — free speech, academic freedom, poetic licence, giving too much power to a single word, etc. — for why they should be “allowed” to use the term. Further support of their argument usually depends on a slippery slope fallacy and almost always leans heavily on bad faith arguments like what word will “they” come for next?

For decades, the argument against using the term has been simple: it hurts a group of people and most of that group has asked others to not use it. That doesn’t require a deep dive into history to convince. That should really be enough.

But for the unconvinced, it’s easy to go further: the entire point of language, of the words we use is to communicate easily and effectively. Has anyone under the age of 50 heard that word spoken publicly and not been so jolted by its use as to forget everything else that was being said?

Still, in the wake of the NYT’s handling of the McNeil affair, some have suggested that by eliminating the relevance of intent, all context and distinction have been removed as well; that someone who uses the slur against another is now deemed just as bad as referring to its use at all.

It’s a wicked exaggeration that attempts to diminish the point of no longer accepting a lack of intent as an excuse.

Here’s Jonathan Chait, writing for Intelligencer:

It would be one thing to decide that not only is it unacceptable to use a slur but it is also unacceptable to utter or mention in it any form. It is another thing to treat those two different actions as completely indistinguishable.

No one is doing that, though. This is merely a scarecrow tilt to the slippery slope arguments from before. If McNeil had referred to a student as the N-word, there would be no further conversation at all. He’d have been dismissed by NYT immediately, and there would be no Daily Beast article to bring this incident to our attention.

McNeil had an “out” here that he didn’t take.

According to Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo:

There was also a strong and protracted effort to get a public apology from McNeil, starting with when the Times’ communications team was putting together its response to the Daily Beast. McNeil was resistant, according to my sources who know how all of this played out.

Before resigning, McNeil’s only public response was to tell a Washington Post reporter, “Don’t believe everything you read.” 

It stretches credulity to even entertain the notion that the apology hatch would be an option for McNeil had he used the racial slur against someone, and not in reference. Eliminating intent doesn’t mean removing distinction. Both can be wrong without being equally so.

And this is part of the larger issue that bothers me about cancel culture fear mongering. It’s often dependent on extending a single absolute — don’t use the N-word — across the board to everything, as though the application of one certain principle must escalate to absolute lines everywhere: “Beware! This means you will be fired from your job and ostracized online if you ever read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to yourself.”

Critics of social progress seem incapable of empathizing with trauma. They’ve perhaps been privileged enough to remain blissfully unaware of true emotional wounds or psychological scarring throughout their life, and therefore doubt its validity. This prompts them to assume ridiculous bad faith arguments, because to their mind, they’re fighting fire with fire: “You’re pretending to be traumatized, so I’ll escalate your claims of trauma to be traumatizing to me.”

The result is an attempt to condemn a system — one, unfamiliarly out of their control — rather than a person who did a dumb and potentially hurtful thing and then refused to acknowledge or be the least bit contrite about it until it was too late.

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Photo by Jakayla Toney on Unsplash