For my sins, I'm going to do a @HeerJeet-like thread on the topic of Aunt Jemima, racist tropes, and the shifting bounds of acceptable mainstream discourse. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1273271985863307266

The fact that Aunt Jemima is a hodgepodge of racist tropes was never lost anyone, let alone on racists. For instance: Back in 1974, William F. Buckley invited William Shockley to be a guest on Firing Line.

As the inventor of the transistor, Shockley was a genuinely eminent physicist, but he was also a vile eugenicist. He supported mass sterilization and justified his position by claiming that mass sterilization would increase net happiness.

Buckley's retort to this was: "There's no reason at all to suppose that somebody like Lincoln or Hamlet are more happy than Aunt Jemima."

This was both a comically racist thing to say and somehow the less racist half of the polite argument about eugenics playing out on national television.

Buckley was very comfortable with the view that whites were "the more advanced race" and long supported disenfranchising black voters on those grounds, but drew the line at sterilization. Swell guy.

So there's Buckley articulating the Aunt Jemima trope, out loud, on television, almost 50 years ago. It took that long for Quaker to make the crude economic calculation that the Aunt Jemima brand was no longer a winning value proposition. But a lot else changed in the meantime.

For instance: It is impossible to imagine a mainstream television network in the year 2020 giving two racist white men an hour to politely debate the merits of eugenics.

It's actually hard to imagine this happening even on Fox News. Vile as Tucker Carlson is, I don't believe he will ever invite Richard Spencer on his show to discuss the merits of mass sterilization.

That isn't to say the ideas disappeared or even that they've been banished from media. Charles Murray remains a conservative eminence. His admirers have op-ed columns. A lot of work remains to be done. But the Buckley-Shockley conversation would not happen on national TV today.

I don't know when this became unthinkable. But whenever it happened, there were surely public intellectuals who would have expressed outrage at the thought of blacklisting a Nazi like Shockley. That kind of thing should be left to the MaRkEtPlAcE oF iDeAs, after all.

But of course, there's nothing illiberal about deplatforming eugenicists. What happened is (slowly, unacceptably slowly) things got better, the bounds of acceptable discourse shifted in a healthier direction, and the rationale for not giving megaphones to Nazis became clearer.

There has been slippage in the Trump years as mainstream news outlets have bent over backwards to try to "understand" his hateful supporters. But there has also been righteous backlash every time.

The Tom Cotton imbroglio, the end of the Aunt Jemima brand, the toppling of Confederate statues. All of it is a reminder that the process of creating a discourse that demands all people be treated with equal dignity never stopped. It's ongoing, continuous, and a good thing.