I don’t know Alexi McCammond, but I know people who knew her in college, and they all agree that she is a wonderful person: hardworking, kind, the sort of classmate and sorority sister who makes others smile. She was going places.
Just a few weeks ago, the executives at Condé Nast evidently thought similar things, because they hired her to be the editor in chief of Teen Vogue. McCammond was just 27, but had broken stories and put together an impressive byline at Axios, where she covered politics and the 2020 election. She was named an emerging journalist of the year by the Association of Black Journalists, and appeared on NBC and MSNBC.
Biracial and at home in media old and new, McCammond seemed like the perfect choice to helm a magazine whose past was rooted in the nearly bygone era of the glossy and whose present was fully committed to the woke and online. Anna Wintour, the chief content officer and the global editorial director of Vogue, was a supporter. She seemed set to takeoff.
And then there were the tweets. Fired off in 2011, when McCammond was 17, they were crude and insensitive, using derogatory terms to refer to Asian-Americans and gays. They never should have been sent, and in 2019 McCammond deleted them and apologized. A renewed apology was needed, given, and necessary in the wake of the current wave of horrific anti-Asian violence.
Condé Nast knew about the tweets when they hired her, and her fit for the position was discussed widely within the company, including among executives of color. With all of this information in hand, they decided to bet on her.
That bet didn’t last very long. Screenshots of the tweets were leaked again, which precipitated an internal staff revolt that has become all too common. Social media pressure, advertising pullouts, and righteous indignation from within the building all proved too much for management, which pulled the plug on McCammond. She was supposed to start work on Wednesday.
Many on the right are enjoying the schadenfreude of a magazine that has become a proud standard bearer for woke sensibilities axing one of its own for alleged racism. There is something to that irony: purges of the inner circle are always the most vicious, and heretics are usually punished with more verve than non-believers.
But make no mistake: McCammond’s fall is bad news for all of us. Jonathan Swan, a colleague at Axios, said it exactly right: "I was just really sad to see this happen. I worked with her for four years. She doesn't have a racist bone in her body. If we can't as an industry accept somebody's sincere and repeated apologies for something they tweeted when they were 17 years old, what are we doing?"
Here is what we are doing: precluding the possibility of forgiveness and growth and distorting a mistake into a sin. The notion that tweets a decade old, apologized for and deleted, should preclude someone from continuing their career, is a moral obscenity. A culture that has no mechanism to forgive will be a terrible place to live, because none of us, not a single one, has never erred. Any ideology more committed to being punitive than gracious should forfeit the right to our support.
I suspect McCammond will land on her feet, but the downstream message that this sends is what is truly troubling. It enforces a view of character that is reducible to social media screenshots and will make future hiring committees even more fearful and risk averse, ever more straitjacketed to the whims of Twitter commentators rather than the interests of their readers. It creates a culture of a viciously enforced conformity at exactly the moment when our pandemic blasted world needs new thinking and risky ideas.
The scary thing is that even if your politics are right, as McCammond’s were, the sheer array of things you might get cancelled for is seemingly endless. Everyone wears a target as big as all the things they have said and done. If we want to live in a world where it is acceptable to be messy, we can’t sit in pitiless judgment of the messes of others. Let’s help them clean up, as best we can. And we should certainly expect that our colleagues should have our back, not knife us in the back.
How to resist? It starts by speaking up. I wish Condé Nast would have had more courage. Standing by McCammond would have sent a message that social media blackmail does and should not always get results. Teen Vogue subscribers should cancel their subscriptions in protest, and all of us should realize our mutual interest in a culture that appropriately forgives and forgets. Those who hire and fire should not capitulate to virtual vetoes over who they want in their companies. People who want to boot others from the workplace need to be told ‘No,’ at least occasionally.
Everyone, from the C-suite to your group of friends needs to be braver, less afraid of the mob. The fortunate thing is that all this bravery requires is an insistence on being human, with everything awkward that entails. Arguing that McCammond shouldn’t have been fired doesn’t mean endorsing her teen tweets: it means believing her when she apologized for them. It means looking at all the available evidence and coming to the conclusion that she is not a racist, and that an outreached hand is usually a better gesture than a blow to the kneecaps.
We live in social media glass houses these days, and the next stone thrown might very well shatter yours or mine. And glass cuts, even if you have thick skin.
A
P.S. Check out my two pieces in the Forward this week, one on the Amanda Gorman translation controversy, and the other on Andrew Cuomo’s present and future.