Alexi McCammond’s Firing from Teen Vogue Is Preposterous and Illiberal Charles Cooke
Alexi McCammond has been fired from her new position at Teen Vogue, a week before she was set to start:
Alexi McCammond, who made her name as a politics reporter at the Washington news site Axios, had planned to start as the editor in chief of Teen Vogue on March 24. Now, after Teen Vogue staff members publicly condemned racist and homophobic tweets Ms. McCammond had posted a decade ago, she has resigned from the job.
Condé Nast, Teen Vogue’s publisher, announced the abrupt turn on Thursday in an internal email that was sent amid pressure from the publication’s staff, readers and at least two advertisers, just two weeks after the company had appointed her to the position.
“After speaking with Alexi this morning, we agreed that it was best to part ways, so as to not overshadow the important work happening at Teen Vogue,” Stan Duncan, the chief people officer at Condé Nast, said in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.
This is utterly preposterous — the latest flare-up in an ongoing cultural riot that leaves room for neither growth nor redemption, and does so in the name of an “accountability” that can be demanded by strangers and has no discernible expiry date. McCammond wrote the tweets in question when she was just 17 years old. Not only has she apologized for them profusely, she proactively brought them up while interviewing for the position and was told that they posed no obstacle. Now, as the result of “pressure from the publication’s staff, readers and at least two advertisers,” she’s out.
That pressure, I am sure, was real. But that it was real does not make it worthwhile, and it does not make it any less deserving of resistance from people who should know better. What, one must ask, is the standard that these “staff, readers and at least two advertisers” hoped to establish? That if one erred a decade ago, while a minor, one cannot hold a position of authority as an adult? That if one is expected to “lift up the stories and voices of our most vulnerable communities,” one is obliged to be without sin oneself?
That second question may sound hyperbolic, but I’m not so sure that it is. Condé Nast’s HR chief, Stan Duncan, wrote in a statement co-signed by the company’s “chief diversity and inclusion officer” (there are a couple of people begging to be fired with prejudice out of a cannon) that given McCammond’s “previous acknowledgement of these posts and her sincere apologies, in addition to her remarkable work in journalism elevating the voices of marginalized communities, we were looking forward to welcoming her into our community.” But then, after a few ill-adjusted people complained, they just . . . fired her, lest her being less pure than Jesus Christ himself “overshadow the important work happening at Teen Vogue.” And they did so — get this — in the name of being “equitable and inclusive.”
Written down, the position is self-evidently absurd: Condè Nast believes that it has struck a blow for “marginalized” communities by preventing a black woman from editing a lightweight teenage magazine because she made a few mistakes as a teenager. At least the Grand Inquisitors gave their victims the chance to atone.
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