Last week, Harper’s published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” in which they censor the Movement for Black Lives. The signatories include a wide array of writers, scholars, activists, artists and cultural critics, Their letter says, “Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform.” On the surface, this looks like an affirmation of the movement, but it is not. The Movement for Black Lives is not calling for police reform. The demand is for police defunding and abolition because reforms have failed.

The most obvious form of censorship is to prevent something from being said publicly. But a more insidious form–particularly for a major institutional platform like Harper’s–is to distort what is being said.

The letter–signed by Wynton Marsalis, Gloria Steinem, Noam Chomsky, JK Rowling, Malcolm Gladwell and Salman Rushdie among others–says the “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society.” Police reform is also the lifeblood of our liberal society. A position that has proven a failure time and time again. Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck while on duty in the Minneapolis Police Department, one of the liberal departments that had put in place all the reforms that people are calling for. Eight minutes and forty-six seconds later, we have concluded that reform does not work.

I am here for cancel culture to be applied to the police. The movement for Black Lives has three main demands:

• Defund Police
• Invest in Black communities
• Remove Donald Tr*mp

Our movement leaped forward in June when the Minneapolis city council, in a veto-proof majority, voted to end the Minneapolis Police Department. They don’t know yet what will replace it. But this is the type of creativity and dynamic exchange of ideas that our nation needs—totally new possibilities.

Why didn’t any of this letter’s scholars, writers, and cultural critics catch the fact that the letter itself was editing, distorting and censoring the demand from the movement that is rising in our nation right now. Have any of them even read the demands of the Movement for Black Lives? Overall, the letter poses liberalism as our hero and illiberalism as our enemy. But for those of us who work for an end to police violence, liberalism has proven a cunning enemy indeed

The letter informs us that “censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture” as if censorship has not always been an integral part of liberal culture. The letter cites “higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts,” all liberal institutions that are plagued with racism—liberal racism.

In particular, the censorship in higher education is long and well-documented. Departments routinely deny tenure to extremely well qualified faculty who are female and/or of color for the flimsiest of reasons. The censorship takes place at the committee level, in private, and the judgment of those institutions is rarely questioned. Even though that judgment has led to statistics like the following: only 5.2% of tenured faculty are African American, when we make up 13.4% of the population. Which would mean that the institutions must be racist, unless you believe that people of color are simply inferior scholars and don’t deserve to be proportionally represented. The liberal approach leaves all these institutional disparities intact. It forms committees, publishes papers and wrings its hands while nothing changes. The same norms apply in publishing, which has cycles of outrage and promises to do better but very little changes.

The letter says the free exchange of ideas “is daily becoming more constricted.” This is decidedly ahistorical. Many of us—women, people of color, poor people, LGBTQIA folks, people with disabilities—have traditionally been silenced and excluded. In some ways the current configuration has given us more visibility, a larger platform, and a clear path to participating in public debate. This is particularly true when the gatekeepers of traditional media keep us woefully underrepresented. As Julia Serano put it very concisely on Twitter: “‘open debate’ is a wonderful platitude, but it ignores the reality that some groups (especially marginalized ones) are always shut out of the debate a priori. signatories seem concerned w/bottom-up pressures (cancel culture) but not top-down (institutional suppression/exclusion).”

I find it deeply disingenuous that none of the 532 words of the letter bothered to mention the biggest silencing happening on social media: the targeting of feminists who speak out about issues like sexual violence, birth control, or abortion rights. Trolling, including threats of death, rape, doxxing and harassment, have been out of control for years. Where is the outrage about that? About racist harassment? How is it that years of brutality didn’t inspire you to speak out, but now that things are getting too politically correct from below, these signatories are suddenly moved to action?

The letter says “as writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.” When have writers of color had this? We have watched story after story of white men allowed to fail miserably, squander resources and be given second, third, fourth chances. Isn’t our president a product of this tendency? The hashtag campaign #PublishingPaidMe was the openly crowdsourced equivalent of the shitty media men list. We heard story after story of writers of color who had to prove ourselves to be twice as good to get half of the resources. When white authors don’t earn out their advances, they might get higher advances. When POC authors don’t earn out, we might get dropped.

I won’t lie. I have some unpopular opinions that I keep under wraps because they have certain nuances of questioning the party line in a few areas of my progressive circles. I am certain they could be misunderstood, taken out of context and lead to some people wanting to cancel me. Which is why I don’t make those points on social media. I talk about them in person, when I can sit down with someone and could have a long conversation. Even when we have a major difference in perspective, I’ve been able to find common ground with people and we can respect each other’s opinions. But yeah, fear of provoking outrage does silence me about those issues on social media because there’s a hot-button reaction to certain ideas. I keep those 280-character tweets to myself. I don’t like staying quiet. But you know what? That doesn’t keep me up at night. What keeps me up is the fear of my family being killed by police, or the frustration of being a Black/Latina female author watching mediocre white people (especially but not always men) suck up a supermajority of the resources and accolades in publishing. The fear of pissing off some people in progressive circles is a small price to pay to have loud progressive circles where people are steadily going off about racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, sexual violence, and militarism. And overall, I’m here for it.

The letter says, “The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.” But if this free exchange is “daily becoming more constricted” then aren’t you saying you want to “make the liberal exchange of ideas great again”? For many of us who speak from the margins, this is the best it has ever been.

Yes, I know there are women and people of color and transgender signatories on the letter. But clearly, some of them are backpedaling because they weren’t aware of the full spectrum of the company they’d be in. The overall idea seemed great when they read the letter out of context, but they were dismayed to find themselves on a list of people who have been called rape apologists or who have come under fire for comments and stances that have been called transphobic. Overall, trans politics are deeply implicated in the letter, although it’s never mentioned. Which is another typical liberal approach—vague and indirect communication.

The Movement for Black Lives is the latest in the US lineage of Black liberation. One of the biggest ideological differences from previous generations is the explicit inclusion of gender and sexuality in our demands for police accountability. Previous generations of Black political struggle have centered men and shied away from unapologetic queer leadership (although LGBTQIA folks have always been in leadership and women have always been the backbone and much of the muscle of the movement). But our current uprising was midwived by three Black queer women. A key part of the ideology has meant shining a spotlight on the targeting of Black women (“Say Her Name”) and insisting that ALL Black lives matter, including Black trans folks, Black sex workers, Black people with disabilities, and other folks who have been considered particularly disposable in our society. Say what you need to say. Please don’t dog whistle your trans politics.

Another complaint in the letter is that “institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.” They blame those who put pressure on the leaders, but this is really a failure of leadership. As the society gets further and further polarized, intellectual leadership is needed. People need to know what a given organization or publication stands for and against. They need backbone. If they don’t have it, they’ll cave when people yell at them. But that’s not a failure of the yellers, it’s a failure of the liberal leaders. How are you asking for everyone to just play nice right now? The country is sliding toward fascism. Black people are being lynched in the street. Journalists are being beat up by the police. But these signatories are worried about Twitter mobs?

To be clear, I don’t like the attack patterns of the Left and have been trolled and targeted from both sides. But this is 2020. Siberia is burning and people are risking the pandemic to protest against killer cops. COVID is surging alongside domestic violence on lockdown. We face an eviction crisis and the president is insisting that people go back to work and school, marching them to their deaths to keep enriching him and his cronies. In this context, I can’t understand how the big emergency that needed our attention was cancel culture

The biggest censorship issue of the moment is voter suppression. We are facing a November election with widespread plotting to disenfranchise poor people and young people and people of color. That is the speech that needs the most protecting right now.