‘MORE SPECIFIC’

100+ Journalists and Academics Sign Open Letter Response to Harper’s ‘Cancel Culture’ Note

“The intellectual freedom of cis white intellectuals has never been under threat en mass,” reads the letter.

More than 100 journalists and academics on Friday released a lengthy response to the controversial Harper’s magazine open letter from earlier this week that decried the threat to “open debate.”

The Harper’s letter—signed by dozens of writers, academics, activists, and some celebrities—lamented the “new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. Beside the cultural debate the letter unleashed this week, it also resulted in several intra-newsroom battles spilling out into public.

The response letter, titled “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate” and released Friday via a Substack called The Objective, argued that the Harper’s letter inaccurately described the cultural debates around “cancel culture,” and criticized its signatories as generally rich, privileged, and out-of-touch. “The intellectual freedom of cis white intellectuals has never been under threat en mass, especially when compared to how writers from marginalized groups have been treated for generations,” the letter said.