:
The GOP candidate for Governor Glenn Youngkin in Virginia has attempted to censor Toni Morrison’s wonderful and Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. This is coupled with a national GOP effort to suppress the teaching Critical Race Theory in school systems. Actually, what the GOP was objecting to was the teaching of American History, inclusive of black experience of slavery, Jim Crow, some 20 white massacres of black Americans in our history. I was aware of the Tulsa massacre but moving down to Florida, I have become aware of Ocoee massacre (1920) of black residents some 4 or 5 miles where we live. Cancel culture creates genocide an silences its memory..

This “cancel culture become genocide,” is reminiscent of the Nazi practice in 1930s of burning books because they were “un-German,” opposed to authoritarian ideology. This was a prelude to the German holocaust and genocide.
On personal level, I have had some direct experience in cancel culture as a gay professor. For some reason, in my high school year, there was a prediction that my publications would be “banned in Boston.” It was predictive of silencing, not in Boston but several other locations. My first book, Jesus ACTED UP, had several backlashes. The first was from Dignity/Boston where my husband Frank served as President for two years and I as chaplain for six years, prohibited a memorial service for Frank, who died of HIV/AIDS. The reason given for the denial was the blasphemy of placing Jesus and ACT UP in the title. The book has been taught by Dr. Mark Jordan as part of his Queer Theology at Harvard Divinity School.

The same book was vandalized in a hate crime at Webster University when I was chair of the Religious Studies Department by a security officer. He vandalized my office, but took the time to search for Jesus ACTED UP in my bookshelf of hundreds of books and carve out the pages and inserted rotten meet. There was a rotten smell in the office, and the maintenance personnel felt that a rat may have died behind the walls. One maintenance person found the book was reshelved and became the source of the rotten odor in my office. The event was covered up by the Security Office Director as well as with tow Vice Presidents. I had the “dubious honor” to be the first hate crime at the university. It had repercussions for my tenure petition as it became known of the coverup and the need for the administration had to hire a consultant to investigate.

Then the same book was vandalized in the LGBTQ section of the San Francisco library. I replaced the copy at the request my colleague and friend Jim Mitulski. I understand the danger of suppressing and attacking writings that are considered by authoritarianism. What was sad when a student in a theology department of a Jesuit university received an “F” in a paper by his Jesuit professor because he quoted from the book and used it as a source. This is emblematic of cancel culture but minor in comparisons of cancel culture to other targeted peoples.

One of my favorite postcolonial feminist theologians, Kwok Pui Lan, writes “Memory is a powerful tool in resisting institutionally sanctioned forgetfulness.” (Postcolonial Imagination, p. 37) Her quotation on institutionally promoted amnesia used to suppress dangerous memories reminded of my own attraction to the French postcolonial culture critic Michel Foucault during doctoral studies. Foucault described how metanarratives are institutionally sanctioned at the expense of eliding the knowledge and experience of oppressed groups. He argues for a “battle for truth” (which I considered as a possible title for Jesus ACTED UP, by a strategy of the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” It reminded me of the German Catholic priest and theologian Johannes Baptist Metz, who uses the dangerous memory of the passion of Jesus. He argues that the dangerous memory of the terrible passion and death of Jesus are not forgotten but remembered as empowered action against cancel culture and the suppression of the memories of suffering. Metz quotes the theologian Origen (184-253 CE) in an extracanonical saying of Jesus: “Who is close to me is close to the fire; who is far from me is far from the kingdom.” (Love’s Strategy, p. 143) Metz claims this as an authentic saying of Jesus. Metz continues,

It is dangerous to be close to Jesus; it is to be inflammable, to risk caching fire. Yet only in the face of danger does there shine the vision of the kingdom of God, which through him has come closer. Danger apparently is the basic category for self-understanding of the new life in the New Testament. (Love’s Strategy, p. 143)

Some of my favorite contextual and liberation theologians (Diarmuid O’Murchu, John Caputo, Leonardo Boff, Elizabeth Johnson, Shawn Copeland. James Cone and others) develop the notion of dangerous remembering and many oppressed groups (indigenous and LGBTQ+ peoples, migrants, and climate refugees) create narratives that remember their history of passion and death to empower resistance and pursuit of freedom.

As I hear daily about GOP and white supremacist, patriarchal, queer phobic, and ethno-phobic cancel culture and correlative increase of hate crimes and violence against women’s reproductive freedom, I realize that dangerous memories are critically vital part of our education and knowledge because there will be no resolution of the trauma of violence and oppression experienced black folks and others. Their historical trauma and oppression will be refigured in new strategies of cancel culture and amnesia to keep people oppressed, fearful, silenced and disempowered in their place.