EDITOR QUITS AS FREE SPEECH DEBATE ROARS ON
Jonathan Kay resigned as editor-in-chief of The Walrus at 5:59 p.m. Saturday — 24 hours after a column he wrote appeared on the National Post website blasting the “equity task force” at The Writers’ Union of Canada for attempting to “shame” Hal Niedzviecki.
Niedzviecki, the former editor of the organization’s in-house magazine, Write, wrote: “I don’t believe in cultural appropriation ...” while calling for an “Appropriation Prize” to be awarded in literature to a writer who writes about people who aren’t like them, an opinion he shared in a special issue of the magazine dedicated to Indigenous writing.
Niedzviecki has since resigned. Kay, meanwhile, was still editor of The Walrus on Friday, when he waded into the cultural appropriation maelstrom.
“What takes priority,” Kay wrote for the National Post, “the right of artists to extend their imagination to the entire human experience, or the right of historically marginalized communities to protect themselves from possible misrepresentation? Personally, I land on the free speech side.”
Kay provided an explanation Sunday.
“In recent months especially, I have been censoring myself more and more, and my colleagues have sometimes been rightly upset by disruptions caused by my media appearances. Something had to give, and I decided to make the first move. I took no severance.”
Kay added that he felt he had a free hand in terms of running the magazine and the website — and the support of his publisher, Shelley Ambrose — and that the “pressure” he felt to censor himself was “related to articles, opinions and comments that I made under my own byline or on broadcast media.”
Neither Ambrose nor Kay’s former editorial colleagues responded to a request for comment Sunday.
Kay tweeted Thursday that the “mobbing of Hal Niedzviecki is what we get when we let identity politics fundamentalists run wild.”
Ken Whyte, the former Rogers executive, the CBC’s Steve Ladurantaye, National Post editor-in-chief Anne Marie Owens and other influential — and white — players in the media, joked on Twitter about donating money to fund the “Appropriation Prize.”
The joke fell flat on social media. Most, including Owens, have since apologized.
It was in this climate that Kay, The Walrus editor, appeared on CBC TV Saturday afternoon with Jesse Wente, an Ojibwa CBC columnist and indigenous activist.
Kay reiterated his defence of free speech, arguing that there was a legitimate debate to be had around where a marginalized minority’s right to own and protect its identity ends and where artistic freedom begins.
“My community has been without drinking water for 15 years,” Wente said in reply. “I wonder if there were senior indigenous journalists in all these locations, if the dialogue around some of these issues facing my community on a daily basis would have been elevated in the dialogue.”