OPINION: Fordham University professor gives a good reminder – people can be flawed but not evil and worthy of cancellation
A Fordham University professor has a reminder for proponents of cancel culture – people can have nuanced beliefs reflective of the time and place where they lived.
Professor Angela O’Donnell recently participated in a panel about Flannery O’Connor, an accomplished writer and Catholic who mostly lived in Georgia. O’Connor died in 1964 and her writings are reflective of a Catholic wrestling with issues of race and racism that would be expected of someone living in the South. For example, she uses the n-word in her writings.
“She knows that racism is a sin, and she would call it that,” the Fordham professor said, as quoted in Savannah Morning News. The newspaper quoted O’Donnell ahead of an event about O’Connor’s legacy. The Fordham professor wrote two books about O’Connor.
“She would use the theological term of sin that is destructive to the human soul and to the human spirit,” the professor (pictured) said. “So, in the stories, she is obviously exposing racism for the ugly, horrible thing that [it] is…but in her letters, she’s still working through this inherited racism that she has,” O’Donnell said. The newspaper paraphrased the professor saying this was because of the “time and place in which she was born.”
O’Donnell first came to O’Connor’s defense in 2020, when Loyola University Maryland stripped the writer’s name from a residence hall, following a brief petition accusing her of racism, based on postcards of hers published for the first time. The petition did not cite any specific things from the postcard. However, this being summer 2020, no university wanted to be seen as not being sufficiently woke.
But O’Donnell organized a letter in support of O’Connor that earned the endorsement of black author Alice Walker, author of “The Color Purple.” The letter directly called on Loyola University Maryland president Brian Linnane, a Jesuit priest, to reverse his decision.
The letter garnered a variety of other signatures in support, including from Linnane’s fellow Jesuit priests, as well as Professor Anthony Esolen and Bishop Robert Barron.
It is refreshing to see a professor defend someone against cancellation, particularly when the term “racist” is so casually, but damagingly, thrown around. Furthermore, colleges regularly cancel historical figures for not sharing the exact same values as people in 2025, as documented in The College Fix Cancel Culture Database.
Resisting cancel culture does not mean we have to accept everything someone said or did. Nor does it mean always honoring people in the past just because they lived before us. But truth and justice, which O’Connor would have understood as a committed Catholic, requires us to treat people the way we would want to be treated, taking our virtues and vices as a whole.
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IMAGE: The Christian Century/YouTube
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