I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom

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Meanwhile, her book White Fragility has sold almost a million copies and has had quite an influence on woke culture, helping to instill a collective fixation on—incidentally—the same idée fixe of Ta-Nehisi Coates (according to Cornel West): the almighty, unremovable nature of white supremacy. A poor condition book can still make a good reading copy but is generally not collectible unless the item is very scarce. One problem with Kendi's and our culture's promiscuous, indiscriminate use of the label "racist" is that the concept becomes diluted: "to be a racist ceases to be what it ought to be: a scarlet badge of shame… [W]hat information is conveyed by a label that collapses the distinction between Frederick Douglass [whom Kendi considers a racist] and the Grand Wizard of the K. With over 6 million of the world’s best eBooks to choose from, Kobo offers you a whole world of reading.

Issues of online content moderation, too, come into play in any debate over censorship, and Finkelstein doesn't say much about these. Her palette comprises two colors—white and black… What an unremitting, remorseless, insufferable bore! He situates his personal story within broader debates on academic freedom and poignantly concludes that, although occasionally bitter, he harbors no regrets about the choices he made. Originating as a response to the 2020 publication of "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate" in Harper's, Finkelstein's new book I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It takes aim at both "cancel culture" and "identity politics".But John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is the text he primarily grounds his argument in, and he quotes from it liberally in his chapter on the right of even Holocaust deniers to make their case in public forums such as a college campus. But if the likes of Marx wouldn't qualify for a tenured appointment at a first-rank university, isn't that a reductio ad absurdum?

His "economic reductionism," according to Angela Davis, prevented him from "developing a vocabulary that allows him to speak…about the persistence of racism, racist violence, state violence. Eugenics and forced sterilization were once considered a very enlightened movement, being supported by progressives like Bertrand Russell, Helen Keller, Jane Addams, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Finkelstein knows cancel culture from the inside, and it is unsurprising that he resolutely opposes it.As Finkelstein says, Kendi embraces the woke conceit that, over four hundred years, "African-Americans haven't registered any progress in the struggle against racism. Shouldn't one aspire to transcend the 'inevitable' part—the color of one's skin—so as to be judged by the 'free part'—the content of one's character? Identity politics has distracted from and, when need be, outright sabotaged a class-based movement [viz.