Cancel Culture Eats Its Own: How Black Intellectuals Are Silenced by Black Twitter

In 1964, Malcolm X stood before an audience at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem and said something that would get him canceled today: “I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner.” He was criticizing the civil rights establishment. He was calling out Black leaders who, in his view, had compromised too much, accepted too little, and traded the community’s dignity for proximity to power. He named names. He challenged orthodoxies. He said things that the majority of Black Americans at the time disagreed with. And today, we build statues to him. We name streets after him. We teach his autobiography in universities. We celebrate his willingness to speak hard truths to his own community as the highest form of moral courage. And then we systematically destroy anyone who attempts to do the same thing.

John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, a contributor to the New York Times, and the author of more than twenty books. He is also, depending on which corner of Black Twitter you consult, a sellout, a coon, a white man in Black skin, and a traitor to his race. His crime is holding opinions that deviate from the consensus: that antiracism, as currently practiced, functions more as a religion than a political movement; that the emphasis on systemic racism has obscured the role of personal agency; that the language of oppression has become so elastic that it can be stretched to cover virtually any outcome, rendering it analytically useless. You may agree with him or not. What you cannot do — what the current culture will not permit — is engage with his arguments on their merits, because the apparatus of cancellation does not operate at the level of argument. It operates at the level of identity. McWhorter is not refuted. He is reclassified. He is moved from the category of “Black intellectual” to the category of “race traitor,” and once that reclassification is complete, his arguments need not be addressed, because the arguments of traitors are, by definition, illegitimate.

The Spiral of Silence

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a German political scientist, published her theory of the Spiral of Silence in 1984, and it describes with eerie precision the dynamic that now operates in Black public discourse. The theory holds that people who perceive their opinion to be in the minority will be reluctant to express it publicly, fearing social isolation. As they fall silent, the majority opinion appears even more dominant, causing more minority-opinion holders to fall silent, in a self-reinforcing spiral that eventually produces the appearance of unanimity where genuine disagreement exists. The silence is not agreement. It is fear.

Apply this theory to Black American discourse and the mechanism becomes visible. A Black professional who believes that affirmative action may have outlived its usefulness keeps that opinion to herself, because she has seen what happens to people who say it publicly. A Black professor who thinks that the emphasis on microaggressions diverts attention from macroeconomic problems writes about something else, because he has watched colleagues lose speaking engagements and publishing opportunities for less. A Black entrepreneur who believes that the buy-Black movement is economically unsound stays quiet, because the social cost of dissent — the loss of community standing, the withdrawal of support, the label of sellout that attaches permanently — is higher than the benefit of honest speech. And with each person who stays silent, the Overton window of acceptable Black opinion narrows further, until the only positions that can be expressed safely are the positions that everyone already agrees with, which is to say, the positions that require no courage and produce no insight.

Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University and one of the most rigorous analytical minds in American social science, has written extensively about the cost of this intellectual conformity. Loury, who is Black, began his career as a conservative voice on race and was embraced by the right, then moved toward more progressive positions and was dropped by the right, then moved toward heterodox positions that satisfied no political faction and found himself attacked by everyone. His intellectual journey is a case study in what happens when a thinker follows the data rather than the tribe: both tribes punish you. “The intellectual demands of loyalty to the group,” Loury has written, “are incompatible with the intellectual demands of honest inquiry.”

The Difference Between Accountability and Mob Behavior

Let me make a distinction that the current discourse refuses to make, because the refusal to make it is the engine that powers the entire cancellation machine. Accountability and mob behavior are not the same thing. Accountability is a response to specific, documented harmful actions. Accountability involves due process, proportionality, and the possibility of restoration. Mob behavior is a response to opinion. It involves no process, no proportionality, and no path back. When a public figure is held accountable for sexual assault or financial fraud, that is a functioning system of consequences. When a public figure is destroyed for expressing an unpopular opinion about race, that is a mob using the language of justice to enforce conformity.

Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School and the author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, has been a target of intra-community cancellation for decades. His crime was writing honestly about a word that carries enormous power in Black American life, examining its history, its uses, and its contradictions with the detachment of a legal scholar. He was not celebrating the word. He was analyzing it. But analysis requires distance, and distance, in the current climate, is read as betrayal. To examine something critically is to be accused of insufficient emotional investment, which is to be accused of insufficient Blackness, which is to be excommunicated.

Kmele Foster, a media entrepreneur and co-host of The Fifth Column podcast, has argued that the current framework of racial identity politics is counterproductive, that it reifies racial categories that should be dismantled, and that the obsessive focus on racial identity prevents the formation of cross-racial coalitions that could address shared economic interests. For this, he has been labeled a conservative — a mischaracterization of his libertarian and individualist views — and dismissed as someone who has lost touch with the Black community. The dismissal is not an argument. It is a social sanction designed to make the argument unnecessary.

What Healthy Communities Do Differently

The Jewish intellectual tradition is instructive here, not because Jewish experience is identical to Black experience, but because it demonstrates what a community looks like when it values internal debate rather than punishing it. The Talmudic tradition is, at its core, a record of disagreement. Two rabbis examine the same text and reach opposite conclusions, and both conclusions are recorded, because the tradition holds that truth emerges from the tension between competing interpretations, not from the enforcement of a single one. Hillel and Shammai disagreed about virtually everything, and both are honored, because the disagreement itself is considered sacred.

The Catholic intellectual tradition, similarly, has a long history of internal debate. The Jesuits and the Franciscans argued about the nature of grace for centuries. Thomas Aquinas was condemned after his death and later canonized. The tradition produced its own heretics and its own orthodoxies, but it maintained a space for disputation that was understood to strengthen rather than weaken the institution. You could argue with the Church. You might lose the argument. But the act of arguing was not, in itself, grounds for excommunication.

Black American discourse, by contrast, has built a system in which the act of disagreeing is itself the offense. It does not matter what you disagree about, or how carefully you frame your dissent, or how much evidence you bring to bear. If your conclusion deviates from the consensus, you are not a thinker who has reached a different conclusion. You are a traitor who has chosen a different side. And the punishment is not intellectual refutation — which would require engaging with the argument — but social death, which requires only a hashtag.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
— James Baldwin

The Cost: Self-Censorship Prevents Problem-Solving

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in The Coddling of the American Mind, documented the broader cultural trend toward intellectual safetyism — the elevation of emotional comfort over intellectual rigor, the treatment of disagreement as harm, the conflation of speech with violence. Their analysis, while not specific to Black discourse, describes the exact mechanism that operates in the cancellation of Black heterodox thinkers: the community has adopted a framework in which certain ideas are classified as harmful regardless of their empirical validity, and the expression of those ideas is treated as an act of aggression against the community rather than a contribution to its intellectual life.

The practical cost of this intellectual closure is incalculable. Every problem that Black America faces — wealth inequality, educational underperformance, health disparities, criminal justice overrepresentation — is a complex problem that requires multiple perspectives, competing hypotheses, and the willingness to discard approaches that do not work. Self-censorship prevents all of this. When the only permissible analysis of the wealth gap is systemic racism, the community cannot discuss the role of financial literacy, entrepreneurial culture, or investment behavior — not because these factors are more important than systemic racism, but because they are part of the picture, and a community that refuses to see the full picture cannot solve the problem it is looking at.

Pippa Norris, in her comprehensive analysis of cancel culture, documented the chilling effects of social media mob behavior on intellectual production. Academics reported self-censoring their research, avoiding certain topics, and softening conclusions to avoid online backlash. The effect was strongest among scholars who studied race, gender, and inequality — precisely the topics on which honest inquiry is most needed. The people most capable of producing the knowledge that could help solve the community’s problems are the people most constrained from doing so.

The Paradox We Must Resolve

Here is the paradox at the heart of this crisis, and it is one that the community must resolve if it is to move forward: the same community that celebrates historical figures who spoke hard truths — Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells — punishes contemporary figures who do the same. The veneration is retrospective. We honor the dissenters of the past and cancel the dissenters of the present, failing to recognize that the dissenters of the past were the canceled people of their own time, and that history’s judgment fell on the side of the speakers, not the silencers.

The resolution requires a cultural shift that no algorithm can produce and no policy can mandate. It requires the community to decide that it values truth over comfort, inquiry over orthodoxy, and the strength that comes from honest debate over the fragile unanimity that comes from enforced silence. It requires building institutions — publications, podcasts, conferences, salons — where heterodox Black thought is not merely tolerated but celebrated, where the quality of the argument matters more than its conformity to the consensus, where a thinker can be wrong without being evil and can disagree without being a traitor.

This is not a call to embrace every heterodox position as valid. Some positions are wrong, and they should be refuted — with evidence, with argument, with the intellectual rigor that the community’s problems demand. But refutation and cancellation are opposite processes. Refutation engages with an idea and demonstrates its weakness. Cancellation refuses to engage with an idea and destroys the person who expressed it. Refutation makes the community smarter. Cancellation makes the community smaller. And a community facing the challenges that Black America faces cannot afford to get smaller. It needs every mind it has, including — especially — the minds that think differently.

Baldwin wrote that the purpose of art — and, by extension, the purpose of intellectual life — is “to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” The cancellation machine does the opposite. It buries the questions under a mountain of enforced answers and calls the burial justice. Every Black intellectual who self-censors, every heterodox thinker who stays quiet, every young person who learns that the safest position is the popular one, is a question that will never be asked and therefore a problem that will never be solved. The community that needs debate the most has built a system that punishes debate the most severely, and every year that system operates, the problems it prevents the community from discussing grow larger, more entrenched, and more expensive to solve. The choice is between the discomfort of hearing things we disagree with and the catastrophe of never hearing the truth at all. Malcolm would not have hesitated. Neither should we.