After the Harper’s Letter
by Maria Bustillos
On July 7, 2020, the CDC reported that more than three million confirmed Covid infections were raging throughout the United States. George Floyd had been killed only a few weeks before, sparking the Black Lives Matter protests in which tens of millions of people would gather that summer in perhaps the largest mass demonstration ever in the history of the U.S.
And also on that day—coming up on six years ago, somehow—Harper’s published the infamous “Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” known colloquially as “the Harper’s letter.” This open letter, signed by 152 academics, media professionals, and other notables, while paying lip service to calls for “greater equality and inclusion across our society,” issued a stern rebuke to what signatories deemed to be the increasingly “stifling atmosphere” of public debate, with its “intolerance of opposing views, and a vogue for public shaming and ostracism.”
Harper’s letter co-author Thomas Chatterton Williams endured a particularly robust Chotinering at The New Yorker a few days later, in which interviewer Isaac Chotiner (resembling, even more than usual, a seal with a beach ball), demolished Williams by requesting evidence that Williams could not supply, because there wasn’t any.
Keep us breathing fire!
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