It's not just young adult authors who have been caught in the crosshairs. In 2020, Jeanine Cummins published American Dirt, a novel that humanized the plight of Mexican migrants by telling the story of a mother and son fleeing cartel violence. Yet the book ignited a furious backlash, beginning with a distasteful takedown by the writer Myriam Gurba, which went viral: "Penjada, You Ain't Steinbeck; My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature."
Into the fray, like a cancel-brigade commando, leapt David Bowles, a Mexican-American writer and translator who, despite his accomplishments, is also known for a 2020 profane Twitter meltdown in which he called his critics "disgusting worms." Bowles inveighed against Cummins' novel on Medium, in the New York Times, and on NPR. He lobbied against the book in a private meeting with Cummins' publisher, and petitioned Oprah Winfrey to retract it as an Oprah's Book Club selection. It took the journalist Jesse Singal -- a Dispatch contributor and himself the target of online smear campaigns -- to meticulously show that Bowles' review of American Dirt was so "riddled with unfair inaccuracies and distortions" that "he either read it very hastily or is lying about what is and isn't in it." Nevertheless, Cummins' book tour was canceled after violent threats, not only against her but also against booksellers -- tactics that recalled the fatwas hurled against Salman Rushdie.
Often, wokeism's roots are traced to a supposedly august line of theorists -- Foucault on power, Marcuse on repression, Butler on gender, Crenshaw on race. But the lineage really ought to include Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty, the pompous, pedantic, and delicate egg creature, who said a word means "just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." According to the left's moral entrepreneurs, cancel culture isn't real. The Kansas State University English professor Philip Nel called it a "white-supremacist fantasy." Similarly, the author Roxanne Gay claimed cancel culture is just a "boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior" after their transgressions are justifiably punished. Nel and Gay are both talented performers of what Freddie deBoer calls the world's "most annoying discursive two-step": Cancel culture doesn't exist, they argue, except when it does, in which case it's obviously a good thing.