What interests me here, though, is the attribution of racism. Cluess was branded a racist by an overwhelming majority

Crime and Banishment
While some abuse the term, a Cancel Culture does exist — and sometimes targets minor slips and legitimate opinions
arcdigital.media
What interests me here, though, is the attribution of racism. Cluess was branded a racist by an overwhelming majority of people who first followed the exchange.
I thought the racism charge was entirely without merit. The tweets were harsh, yes — but not racist.
Of course, disagreement about whether something counts as racist is commonplace. What’s so interesting about young adult fiction authors and readers being more inclined to see Cluess’s tweets as racist than I am?

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http://www.repfiles.us/war/video-thunder-vs-nuggets-live-tv06.html

In one sense, it shouldn’t matter so much that a particular subculture is likelier than other groups to ascribe racism to certain behaviors. But it does matter. It matters to the people, like Jessica Cluess, who inhabit these subcultures. And, thanks to the increasingly borderless wonderland that our social media age has ushered in, it matters in the broader struggle over the norms and values that will govern our time together online.
A major focus of mine, as a writer, is the state of The Discourse. I care about the behaviors we find in, and the rules we design for, our shared discussion arena.
The Discourse Wars
On false equivalences between cancel culture critics and cancel culture promoters
arcdigital.media
I care about — God help me — the dynamics of our exchanges there. I care about labels being used thoughtfully and proportionately — so that their mass deployment doesn’t unjustly send into hiding someone who might’ve stomached sharp disagreement, but not being slimed as something they’re not, something terrible and vile, something personally and professionally unendurable.
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Here’s the tweet that set Cluess off.
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Germán is suggesting we “switch it up” from “the classics” because many of them were written “before the ’50s,” the implication being that these books inevitably reflect the dominant cultural values of that pre-enlightened era.
This is a really bad argument for not teaching the classics.
First, while it’s likely Germán only means for her argument to apply in our own case — that is, for the argument to start and end with our generation letting go of pre-1950s literature — the inner logic of her reasoning takes us much further. It essentially calls for each era to be able to ward itself off from accessing the works of prior ones.
Assuming each era will have significant complaints about the eras that preceded it, not just minor complaints but points of considerable disapproval and at times even wholesale condemnation, Germán’s argument would underwrite generational literary myopia.
Another way to put it is that Germán’s approach would enact a pedagogical presentism. This can work for academic subjects whose success conditions are tied to recent work supplanting older work, new studies disconfirming older ones, novel theories improving upon past ones, and so on, but it is disastrous in subjects — like literature or history — that, as a matter of inner conceptual design, don’t and shouldn’t privilege the new.
Morality is not like empirical science in that it uncomplicatedly boasts of a linear progression. To the degree that we do make gains in it over time, to the degree that the arc of the moral universe is in fact bending toward justice, that is precisely because we are vigilantly tracking our current actions through the filter of past mistakes, rather than sending those mistakes, and the eras from which they came, down the permanent memory hole.