...and thankfully the longtime feminist critic at The Nation has taken the trouble to document it, given the ostriches on the putative left who pretend it doesn't:
Gillian Philip, one of a group of writers producing popular children’s books under the pseudonym Erin Hunter, put #Istandwithjkrowling in her Twitter bio, for which she was subjected to a storm of online abuse and fired by her publisher. Whatever you may think of Rowling, Philip isn’t her. Without the security that comes with unparalleled wealth and celebrity, she’s just a person with an opinion—right or wrong, that’s what cost her her job. She now works as a truck driver.
Don Share, the editor of Poetry magazine, made its prestigious pages more inclusive and diverse. But that didn’t help in 2020, when he was attacked for publishing a long poem by Matthew Dickman that included a racial slur uttered by the poet’s demented grandmother. (That pesky use/mention distinction again!) Share issued a self-abasing apology and left. I’ve been unable to find out what he’s doing now.
Gary Garrels, the top curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, led the sale of a Rothko to raise funds to buy the work of women and artists of color. He resigned in 2020, after an uproar kicked off when he said, “Don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists” and that to not collect work by white men would be “reverse discrimination.” He is now an independent curator....
April Powers, a management specialist, resigned as equity and inclusion chief at the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Editors after being furiously attacked for a statement condemning anti-Semitism because it did not also mention Islamophobia. She’s trying to make a go of consulting now.
These are just a few of the better-known cases. But then there are the ones you don’t hear about, because the person on the receiving end isn’t well-known, or no journalist picks up the story, or the cancellation is more subtle: the offer never extended, the assignment that doesn’t come through.
You can say these people—and there are many more like them—got what was coming to them....What you can’t say is that no lasting, measurable damage was done to individuals.
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