An award-winning author has claimed that young people are growing up afraid to ask questions for fear of asking the wrong questions and that cancel culture is “unconscionable barbarism” which “nobody deserves.”
According to the BBC:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said she worries society is suffering from an “epidemic of self-censorship”.
In a BBC lecture on freedom of speech, the writer said young people were growing up “afraid to ask questions for fear of asking the wrong questions”.
Such a climate could lead to “the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity”, the award-winning Nigerian author warned.
“No human endeavour requires freedom as much as creativity does,” she added.
Adichie, known for novels including Half Of A Yellow Sun and Americanah, was speaking in the first of the four annual Reith Lectures for Radio 4, all this year on themes of freedom…
She said literature was increasingly viewed “through ideological rather than artistic lenses”.
She continued: “Nothing demonstrates this better than the recent phenomenon of ‘sensitivity readers’ in the world of publishing, people whose job it is to cleanse unpublished manuscripts of potentially offensive words.
“This, in my mind, negates the very idea of literature.”
The 45-year-old also expressed concern that some people don’t speak up for fear of vicious criticism or becoming the latest target of cancel culture.
“We are all familiar with stories of people who have said or written something and then faced a terrible online backlash,” she said.
“There is a difference between valid criticism, which should be part of free expression, and this kind of backlash, ugly personal insults, putting addresses of homes and children’s schools online, trying to make people lose their jobs.
“To anyone who thinks, well, some people who have said terrible things deserve it – no. Nobody deserves it. It is unconscionable barbarism. It is a virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken, but to create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking.”
