The "Culture" in Cancel Culture
An overlong, undeserved review of Ernest Owens, The Case for Cancel Culture: How this Democratic Tool Works to Liberate Us All, St Martins Press, 2023.
Whether something has changed, and two-step answers
Has something fundamental changed in our culture over the past ten years? What is this change, and is it desirable? These are questions which self-styled progressives punt on with regularity. On the one hand, Of course things have changed. Social media and social justice have altered our private, everyday senses of what’s acceptable and what’s not, and this is progress. On the other hand, Don’t be silly, we’re still fighting the same battles against conservative hegemony. Little has changed, and it’s a shame.
When questions are vague, ambivalent answers are reasonable. But when the questions are pointed, progressives dither still: No way are vaccine passports in the works, that’s paranoid Trumpist demagoguery / Of course we need vaccine passports and should welcome their inevitable arrival. Likewise: Critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools, what a pathetic culture-war canard. / Naturally, schools’ anti-racist mission necessitates teaching critical race theory. And even more brazenly: It’s a Putinite conspiracy theory to suggest that the United States is using Ukraine in a proxy war against Russia. / Our proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is obvious and just.
Since 2020, many have quietly and discreetly opted out of progressive politics because of this rank dishonesty, routinized by professionals and amateurs alike. (In its inverted form, this routine sounds like the old joke from Annie Hall about the restaurant where the food is terrible and the portions are so small; used in the past tense, it has long been the house speciality of genocide denialists: It didn’t happen, but they had it coming to them!) “Cancel culture,” a diffuse concept, triggers the same two-step: No, it’s not happening, what a paranoid and problematic notion. / Yes it is happening, and it’s long overdue. Even people identifying as journalists do it, and having democratized their moves on social media, they invite ordinary people to mimic them.
Owens dances the two-step
In his book, The Case for Cancel Culture: How this Democratic Tool Works to Liberate Us All, Ernest Owens dances this two-step with neither grace nor inventiveness. His “case” is an awkward series of cliches, truisms, self-contradictions, and just-so anecdotes. It is a profoundly frivolous book, free-associating between talking points which are repetitive, narcissistic, and superficial. This is a pity, because the task of defining cancel culture and analyzing its relation to democracy is both interesting and urgent. Rather, his “case” is of a different sort: an instance of cancel culture’s ethos, not a forensic argument for it. For this reason, it’s worth identifying the key rhetorical moves of his book, which are typical of the culture he claims to justify.
Resisting cancellation
The Case for Cancel Culture escaped the canceling effects of rigorous editing, fact-checking, or even second thoughts. He tells us “I love live-tweeting” television twice in five pages, suggests that Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March was staged against the British East India Company, and implies that American slavery persisted through the 19th century. He dates bell hooks’s “mainstream” feminism as contemporary with Phyllis Schafley’s campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment (this is very unkind). American Christianity in his book figures as an exclusively “conservative” force, by ignoring the religious dimensions of both abolition and the Civil Rights Movement. He describes historian of religion Anthea Butler as a “theologist.” He applies the ungainly bureaucratic neologism of “LGBTQIA” to individuals in past historical eras where it is inapt. He even wonders if Noam Chomsky ever tried “to push back on how the actions of those in power had adversely impacted those with less power” and concludes that “the short answer is no” (because he signed the Harpers letter, of course).
Defining cancel culture: a historical pageant-play
Owens’s opening anecdote about a 2016 Twitter tiff with Justin Timberlake sets the tone for the rest of the book. “Annoyed” by a tweet from Timberlake about the BET Awards in which he “appropriates” the African-American Vernacular English word “tho,” Owens decides to “call Timberlake out”: “So does this mean you’re going to stop appropriating our music and culture? And apologize to Janet too.” Timberlake’s reply: “Oh, you sweet soul, the more you realize that we are the same, the more we can have a conversation. Bye.”
Is there a better example of the high-handed, peremptory Twitter “dunk”? In his retelling of this incident, Owens feigns bitterness that JT declined his invitation to “engage in a genuine conversation about racism in the music industry.” He characterizes JT’s reply as “homophobic” and “Southern shade” but at the same time an attempt to “whitesplain” his concerns. Owens then claims that Timberlake’s response triggered a series of bullying messages from anonymous accounts, though to his credit, he later advises: “Being attacked by someone or some group on Twitter? Block them. Problem solved.” Instead, he tweets, and then feels victimized by his tweets being exposed to public ridicule in the media, where some “refused to so much as name me or state that they came from a legitimate journalist”!
The petty self-importance of this anecdote is almost camp, and if the rest of the book concerned itself with small-bore celebrity potshots, it might handle its subject with precision. But instead, Owens invites us to see this spat as an episode in the long struggle between the powerful and the oppressed—a struggle stretching back to the dawn of human civilization itself. (If nothing else, it became a defining feature of Owens’s “media empire” brand.) The massive scalability of any dispute, however small, offered by Twitter is nothing less than an affordance for our collective “liberation.”
The Case for Cancel Culture shuttles between two contradictory definitions of its main term. Firstly, “cancel culture” refers to all oppositional political opinion expressed in speech:
“From the beginning of society, humans were given the ability to make choices. At the most basic level, the origins of cancel culture began at that moment—the ability to make decisions and express dissent has been key to our very existence. By deciding what we stand for, we also decide what we won’t stand for. Our decisions are statements about what stays and what goes. Cancel culture hasn’t gone anywhere, and it won’t if people exist. [...] Cancel culture is nonpartisan, individual, collective, religious, agnostic, political, and radical all at the same time. The act of canceling can be inspired by all these things without it being defined by any of them at the same time.”
Secondly, “cancel culture” is
“the new digital wave of individualized protest and a way to demand change in a society that has yet to grant liberation to all. While previous iterations of protest and public outcry were more traditionally coordinated, in person, and institutional, cancel culture is more personal and is carried out on social media. Such online combativeness from individuals speaking their truth to power is unlike anything we’ve ever witnessed, because cancel culture invites us all to fight back—a consequential feat and rare opportunity that social media has given us at a time when we need it the most.”
These definitions differ in time, form, and substance in irreconcilable ways. His book shuffles these definitions several times, usually within a few paragraphs of each other. It is nothing short of bold for Owens to expect the reader’s indulgence. The intended effect is to gaslight the reader into thinking that they must have missed some subtle step in his argument.
Once the reader has been hypnotized into accepting a definition of “cancel culture” as both all political contestation ever, and the oppressed speaking truth to power on social media, one can witness Owens’s pageant show of historical progress: an uneven but ever ascending trajectory of “inclusion” and “diversity,” brought about by “progressives,” over the resistance of “conservatives” who seeks to dominate “marginalized communities.” From the American Revolution to the election of Joe Biden, every major event is explainable in this dynamic, with occasional catalysis by “technology.”
In short, everything, to Owens, is cancel culture. His list includes: the Pilgrims’ separation from the Church of England; the 1773 Boston Tea Party and the Tea Party movement of the 2010s; the movement to abolish slavery; the formation of the Confederacy (“cancel culture in its purest—albeit twisted—sense”!); the NAACP shutting down screenings of Birth of a Nation; Gandhi’s Salt March; McCarthyism and its later repudiation; Jim Crow and its undoing; the Civil Rights Movement’s sit-ins and boycotts (“nothing short of the golden era of cancel culture”); the Stonewall riots; the boycott of and divestment from apartheid South Africa; Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11; Reagan’s and Trump’s promises to “Make America Great Again”; the War on Drugs, the Colorado baker’s refusal to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple; a hypothetical Black baker’s refusal to make a cake with white supremacist slogans on it; Jerry Falwell calling for a boycott of Teletubbies; veganism; the March for Our Lives after the Parkland school shooting; the media suppression of the Dixie Chicks after their criticism of the invasion of Iraq; and, of course, “MeToo” and “Black Lives Matter.”
Let me offer four additional instances of “cancellation” that would scramble his progressive/conservative shaggy-dog story: First, analyzing Prohibition and its repeal would entail looking under the hood of “progressivism” in uncomfortable ways. Second, in his account, Monica Lewinsky was slut-shamed and cancelled before un-cancelling herself, but the Paula Jones investigation into which she was drawn was a partisan effort to cancel the electoral success of Bill Clinton; no matter, it is instead more pleasant for Owens to think of Clinton as cancelled much later by MeToo retrospection. Third, he makes no mention of large parts of the African-American political class’s support for the War on Drugs’ and the carceral state’s “cancellation” of its less privileged constituents. Finally, the case of Salman Rushdie would exhaust Owens’s definitional facility: “canceling means different things to different people, which is why it can show up in different ways, depending on power dynamics.”
Owens hails the fame of the YouTube video Kony 2012 as “the first sign of progressive cancel culture as we currently know it.” This is a striking example for many reasons. The video appeared after US attempts to “cancel” the Lord’s Resistance Army were well underway. The LRA was designated as a terrorist organization after 9/11, Joseph Kony himself was labeled a terrorist in 2008, and in 2010 and 2011, Obama enjoyed bipartisan support for funding and troop deployment to drive out the LRA. Owens, who identifies as a journalist, provides none of context, nor any details of the film’s shortcomings. If Kony 2012 is an example of cancel culture, it is an example of its operation downstream of institutional politics, not rather than at the vanguard. To wit, Kony 2012 helped spead awareness of slacktivism, a term which conveniently escapes Owens’s attention. What he notes about the video’s viral effects—its celebrity fashionability, its usefulness for dubious fundraising, and its ultimate futility at capturing its target—serves more as a satire of modern cancel culture than its inspiring inauguration.
Like many other defenders of cancel culture, Owens is quick to point out the frequency and speed with which “cancelled” figures have been able to bounce back from controversy and carry on. But it is hard to know what this evidence is supposed to prove: that cancel culture doesn’t really exist, so there’s nothing to worry about; or that the cancellation campaigns they champion are so often ineffective. Is it good or bad, that problematic celebrities can ride out a social media-driven cancellation campaign and return unchanged? The point is always: If you’re suggesting that cancel culture might be bad, then the resilience of problematic figures should be a relief, because no lasting harm is happening. But the opposite case is rarely stated: If cancel culture is good, then the resilience of problematic celebrities is bad, because it shows a lack of the meaningful “consequences” they claim to champion; we would therefore need to cancel harder—a rallying cry which even Owens does not make quite so directly.
Whether cancel culture is generational or not depends on momentary polemical expediency. On the one hand, "Cancel culture has emboldened a younger generation of people to speak truth to power.” On the other hand, when this is observation is made by a critic, such as Jay-Z saying “Imagine having a microphone, and you’re asked about social justice questions at 18 years old,” casting cancel culture as generational is “rooted in ageism and paternalism.” Generational progress for me; ageism for thee.
As for more substantive cases, Owens praises the debacles of Bill Cosby and R. Kelly as cancel culture at work. This makes little sense, as both figures were the subjects of criminal legal proceedings, in which they were shown to commit acts which, once proven to the public’s satisfaction, no one tried to excuse or explain away; they weren’t “cancelled” in the cultural sphere for their expressions or points of view. But no matter, Owens herds the enforcement of laws against sexual violence, and widespread contempt for its perpetrators, into the to all-inclusive “cancel culture” pageant.
Owens’s favorite iteration of cancel culture is Black Lives Matter, and no discussion of Black Lives Matter is complete without a no-true-Scotsman dissection of what is and isn’t the real BLM. This desperate brand management forms the better part of progressive journalism’s advocacy for BLM, given its inconsistent and largely symbolic results.
Owens re-hashes the exhausted discourse of Antifa and BLM. He correctly points out that “conservative media outlets used the actions of Antifa to frame cancel culture as something that’s gone too far—even conflating the Black Lives Matter activism with that of the troublesome group.” However, his defense against this conflation involves a rhetorical sleight of hand which does his case no favors:
“Yes, there had been violent acts that included property destruction and theft, along with reports of cops and activists having been seriously injured and killed. But the federal officials had offered little evidence that proved Antifa was behind the Black Lives Matter movement that has inspired millions of Americans since the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.”
In a moment like this, we can see the fusion of “journalism” and public relations sophistry. Rather than addressing the fact of violence and destruction that occurred under the auspices of BLM but not Antifa, Owens implies that any violence must have been Antifa, because the only issue at hand is explaining how conservatives are exploiting its unpopularity. In case you missed it, the logic goes: The millions who marched in BLM were not motivated by Antifa; there is no proof that they were; therefore, any “violent acts” warrant no scrutiny in connection with BLM. Because this implication is so patently specious, it is tacitly performed rather than asserted, in hopes that the reader will be buoyed along by progressive self-assurance. And to keep the reader from pressing for more specificity, Owens is quick to remind us that BLM is “more decentralized and less attuned to a hierarchical structure” that other “movements,” and its “leadership is more about individualistic expression than conformity.” (This definitional shell-game is all too familiar to those of us who survived the anarchist vortex of Occupy.) Owens’s description is a dereliction of journalistic duty. The BLM brand has clear leaders, hierarchies, and networks of influence and patronage. They just don’t work for, and are therefore not accountable to, any particular constituency outside of themselves.
In a section on celebrity cancellations—the Dixie Chicks, Paula Deen, Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Kanye West, Morgan Wallen, Russell Simmons, Kodak Black, Floyd Mayweather, and others—Owens performs a paint-by-number “intersectional” analysis of the different outcomes of each case, concluding that it’s all a reflection of “power,” “identity,” and “status.” But should this indelible pattern give progressives pause in embracing cancel culture as a tactic? The opposite: “The more that bigotry is highlighted—through all kinds of activism, including cancel culture—the more level a playing field we’ll all be on.” Both symptom and cure!
Owens does not define cancel culture; he runs interference for it: If you find cancel culture a new development and suspect that it’s torqued by one side of the political spectrum, then you need to remember that it’s timeless and universal, so settle down. But if you think cancel culture is high-minded combativeness that’s been accelerated by social media, then you need to recall that it’s an index of democracy itself. Likewise, cancel culture is an epiphenomenon of power relations and identity politics: biased garbage in–biased garbage out. However, it’s also the undoing of power relations and the liberation of diverse identities.
After numerous examples of cancel culture which undoubtedly suppressed people’s speech, Owens insists that cancel culture is not suppression of speech, and that suppression of speech is great, actually:
“The notion of suppression is a myth: Those who fear cancel culture may claim they fear suppression, but it’s accountability that they want to avoid at all costs. It’s essential to ask the question of what, if anything, is being suppressed and why. When we hear critics of cancel culture either try to suggest that everyone makes mistakes or that cancel culture is an infringement on free speech, we should simply push back that no one’s actual rights are being taken away. Cancel culture has never taken away anyone’s rights; rather, it has publicly shamed people into reconsidering what they have decided to do with such freedoms. [...] Many people have real concerns that they’ll be shamed or even fired for missteps or mistakes in their pasts. In an age where your digital history is permanent, it’s wise to be thoughtful about what you put out there. Not just from a covering-your-ass perspective but from the point of view of accuracy, civility, and harm reduction. It’s not phony to consider how your words might affect others. Isn’t how we live, communicate, and behave a reflection of our character and our morals? In more plain language: Don’t be a jerk.”
This infantilizing condescension—typical of cancel culture apologia—is having it both ways: Cancel culture doesn’t inhibit any speech at all, just the speech which ought to be inhibited. And which speech ought to be inhibited? Naturally, the speech targeted by progressive cancel culture. How do you tell which is which? Just be nice. Owens openly affirms cancel culture, but in his accounting of it, performs an elaborated form of the progressive two-step: It’s not happening, and it’s good.
It’s worth noting that Owens does not hesitate to endorse cancel culture-fueled firing of non-elites for lawful speech outside their workplace. Because of employers’ prerogative, it’s “the predictable consequences of their own actions.” This crawling adoration of the most prevalent “power dynamic” in our society—at-will employment—is typical of the journalist–activist class who seek to “liberate us all” through social media morality plays. Would Owens tell the Dixie Chicks or Paul Robeson that “it’s wise to be thoughtful about what you put out there”? Of course not. These were instances of bad cancel culture, not good progressive cancel culture, which is, conveniently, the real cancel culture.
Erasing “culture”
Behind Owens’s absurd terminology lies a long-term intellectual project which is shared by the academic left and social justice media activists alike—the elimination of all commonsense distinction between certain different but related concepts: speech/action, controversy/debate, critique/competition, scandal/problem, fame/power, representation/liberation, identity/belief, and most of all, culture/politics.
In this blinkered idealism, social change is the result of conflicting worldviews arriving at an ever more democratic consensus through their expression. “Patriarchy” and “tradition,” like “progress” and “liberation,” are transcendent concepts, instantly recognizable across time, for they are nothing more than the generalized effects of political will, rather than material processes, or the interplay of events and institutions. Cancel culture “is simply the latest manifestation of an ongoing battle between the oppressed and the oppressor that we’ve witnessed throughout history.” This reductive abstraction allows for a uniquely self-congratulatory, vapid progressive confidence, in which everything is a question of “culture,” while “culture” names nothing in particular. Or, in Owens’s characteristically slack formulation: “I would argue that a cultural practice and a political practice are one and the same. And in the case of cancel culture—it is political because it is cultural. It’s a tool used to shape culture.”
This muddled notion demands clarity: Different segments of society can have distinct modes or periods. One such period might be a phase of high censoriousness and politicized moralism which overshoots its mark. That this phase does not bring down the existence of the media establishment is no sign that it is not in effect. Defenders of cancel culture point to the continuity of institutional media as proof that cancel culture doesn’t exist or isn’t as bad as critics say. But cancellation need not end careers and publications; cancellation can, as Owens knows perfectly well, be their sustenance. A community, profession, or group can have a “culture” which tends toward “cancellation.” But in Owens’s formulation, this is only true when it’s good, and only good when it’s true—except when it isn’t, in which case it doesn’t count.
The world of young adult fiction and its Twitter hive-mind prove that cancellations for identity-politics transgressions can be integrated into a subculture’s self-understanding: virtuous approaches to representing “marginalized communities,” and shaming others for failing to do sufficiently, are not secondary activities which distract from a YA career; they can constitute a YA career. Likewise, if we follow Owens’s lead and see DEI as a formalization of cancel culture’s liberating function in higher education, then “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are not correctives on the marginalization that occurs in universities; they are self-sustaining engines of a whole professional class. As has been shown recently, commitments to diversity do not stop at practicing the principles of DEI in one’s work; they must culminate in contributing to the DEI apparatus itself.
Just as Owens’s narrative of progress proceeds through individual conflicts of worldviews, his model of cancel culture lacks discussion about the institutions where cancellations occur. The only institution whose functioning he looks at in any detail is one social media platform, Twitter which he presents as an open, democratic platform for speech. (This a dubious description at best.) But any notion of a “culture” must also examine corporations, political parties, publishers, publications, production companies, record labels, television networks and streaming services, studios, universities, arts funding agencies, awards committees, churches, museums, theaters, and so on—in other words, cultural institutions. For Owens, these are incidental places where the primordial energy of cancel culture spends itself, lately in reaction to social media. But any attempt to define and defend cancel culture must take careful stock of how “cancellation” happens in different institutional paradigms, and how different institutions may overlap, conflict, or operate independently of each other. Instead, Owens gestures toward “intersectional” analysis of different cancelled and uncanceled individuals in the stock matrices of oppression.
But more crucially, the “culture” in “cancel culture” also refers to the downstream effects of high-profile cancellation: the ways in which relative nobodies adapt to what they see happening to somebodies. Owens refuses to see any connection whatsoever between what he calls “cancel culture” and bullying: “it’s been all too easy for people to paint cancel culture as a form of bullying.” Why has this been easy? Not because bullying and cancel culture have any resemblance to each other whatsoever, but because “the most powerful want to avoid criticism—it’s convenient for them to equate any form of online criticism (which inappropriately conflates bullying, trolling, and harassment as forms of accountability) with cancel culture.” It is hard to know who or what precisely “conflates” in Owens’s parenthetical aside, and this is by design. Owens knows better than to say outright, but his point is that If you think cancel culture is anything like bullying, you’re either an oppressor, or an oppressor is pulling your leg.
Owens knows better than to say that cancel culture and bullying never resemble each other. Instead, he appeals to question-begging axioms of what each is “rooted” in: “Bullying is rooted in causing deliberate harm, nothing more. Cancel culture is rooted in causing transformative change—something more is being demanded.” Cancel culture is absolutely unrelated to bullying, except when Owens himself may have been the target of it: “I’ve experienced firsthand the ways that cancel culture can be used both for the greater good, and to harass and bully.” If cancel culture can be easily used for something other than its highest aspirations, then it is a whole ethos and not a tactic—in other words, a culture.
Nevertheless, there is nothing to worry about for “average people, who are rarely ‘canceled’ in the same vein. Sure, there are outlier situations in which everyday people can go viral for problematic behavior, leading to them losing a job or being publicly criticized by large groups of people, but these are highly unlikely in the grand scheme of things. Cancel culture usually comes for the most powerful individuals and institutions.” One of the troubling things about “culture” and institutions is that it is not always clear who has “power” and of what type. Like many academics, activists, and journalists who make heavy weather of “power dynamics,” Owens propounds a model of power which is static and reified. Like many fans of social media social justice discourse, he only acknowledges the potential of platforms like Twitter to empower and amplify the weak many against the strong few. But the same volatile scalability of social media can corrode the sensibilities of “average people.”
Moreover, Owens denies the possibility that a “powerful” person or institution being cancelled might happen for wrong reasons, or might have undesirable consequences for others. Their status as “powerful”—which is a synonym for bad—dispenses with these possibilities in advance. Rather, in Owens’s progressive pageant-play, the only actually existing reasons for and consequences of cancel culture are those which are, by definition, progressive.
This is one of the subtler double-standards in this argument. If one accepts “cancel culture” as a tool of the right as well, using Owens’s more expansive definition, then it is natural to see a continuum, not a break, between expressions of political principle and unprincipled bullying. This is especially easy to perceive once you recognize that in Owens’s “case for cancel culture,” conservatism is the ideology of bullying itself. “Progressive cancel culture,” on the other hand, is wholly distinct from bullying, because in its essence, progressivism is the opposite of bullying. It is therefore logically impossible for a progressive bullying to exist as such. The single exception to this that he admits is—what else—“Bernie Bros.”
And as for cancel culture’s effects on comedy, we have nothing to fear: “Do you need to be able to offend people to be funny? ... On Netflix alone, you can find over two hundred comedy specials right now”!
Excluded from this account is any idea of “culture” as informal habits or tendencies that move beyond the justifications and limits of their origin. While Owens and others deny the possibility of progressive advocacy devolving into priggish sanctimony, they simultaneously insist on the pervasive effects of “unconscious bias” among everyone else. Likewise, the progressive activism-journalism complex attributes tremendous power to “representation” of different demographic groups in media: what we see can influence our treatment of others, in pervasive, insidious, unconscious ways. But simultaneously, it is inconceivable that public spectacles of “accountability” might ever falter by incentivizing shame and punishment for mere clout, rather than for a higher cause. A mood or mode of speech may migrate from one contextual purpose to another; this is in part what a term like “culture” refers to.
However, the theoretical and activist progressive pose of taking “culture” seriously rarely does so in practice, beyond glib equations of “culture” to “politics” in moments of self-congratulation.
Cui bono?
Ending systems of oppression is both a tall order and a recognizable one. To pick two of his favorite examples: In the case of MeToo, what has changed, structurally? Arguably, the best defense against sexual harassment in the workplace, and the best way for working people to prevail over the predations (sexual and otherwise) of their bosses, is a union. Unionization has declined in the era of identity politics-based, social media-driven cancel culture. In fact, progressive cancel culture’s first vanquished enemy was class politics itself.
Or, in the case of Black Lives Matter, it seems that police and their guilds still hold all the cards. The correlation between police forces’ unofficial go-slow campaigns and higher crime rates (especially homicide) in certain areas shows their profound resilience to reform. Moreover, these campaigns reveal a tendency for retaliation against the public’s challenges, by deliberately withdrawing from routine deterrence duties. And what is BLM up to? In what is supposed to be a laudatory account of BLM’s eight major accomplishments, a recent report by the Brookings Institution lists implicit bias trainings, street painting, and “a new crop of elected officials and political actors” among them. The singularly incoherent and unpersuasive campaign for police “abolition” has made BLM itself, rather than police conduct, an object of growing public skepticism—which in turn justifies the endless discourse of defining BLM.
What MeToo and BLM have produced, however, is a growing class of consultants, bureaucrats, merchandisers, self-appointed “community” activists, and “educators.” This professional class forges its careers on people’s justified sense that things are not as they should be between bosses and subordinates, and between law enforcement and the public. Unfortunately, MeToo and BLM are branding campaigns by professional activist-entrepreneurs, not movements which are accountable to their constituencies for winning. The only gains this class has won are distinctly cultural: commodified signs and symbols which demonstrate awareness, and which must be continually refreshed and enhanced with professional expertise.
It is to this class of professionals, and to no one else, that Ernest Owens has rendered a service, by collecting platitudes for easy recitation.