By David Klion, The Nation

What’s most striking about the Mailer contretemps is how it embodies so many aspects of the current discourse around cancel culture and free speech.

The first “cancel culture” episode of 2022 began just three days into the new year, when the journalist Michael Wolff reported that Random House would not be going ahead with a planned collection of political writings by the late Norman Mailer. According to Wolff, the publishing house cited “a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, ‘The White Negro,’” as “the proximate cause” for the book’s being pulled. Wolff, while acknowledging that Mailer was always a controversial figure—among other things, in 1960 he stabbed his wife with a penknife—made clear in the piece that he regarded Random House’s decision as a representative and regrettable development in a publishing industry that lives in constant fear of running afoul of a younger generation of easily offended staffers and readers.

On Twitter, the usual voices decrying this trend were quick to promote Wolff’s narrative. “A junior staffer can get a book cancelled over a controversial, 60-year-old essay that sparked a brilliant, nuanced and thoughtful response from James Baldwin when it was published,” tweeted the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who went on to acknowledge that while he was not a fan of Mailer’s “White Negro” essay, he thinks it should “absolutely be republished.” “Publishing continues its cowardly woke descent,” proclaimed Jordan Peterson. “The censor, er, staffer, should identify his/her/themselves and explain their reasoning,” sneered James Kirchick. The essay paints an unflattering portrait of the archetypal beatnik hanging out in Greenwich Village cafés in the 1950s, who, per Mailer, “had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” Today it reads as a bit of a mess, but there’s certainly a valid case that, as a part of existing American cultural history, the essay deserves to be studied and situated in its context rather than censored for its antiquated racial language.

READ MORE