#eric deggans

Jason Campbell at MMFA: 

On June 13, NPR published an op-ed written by TV and film critic Eric Deggans in response to Tom Hanks’ recent guest essay for The New York Times about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Right-wing media quickly pounced on Deggans’ piece, using it to fearmonger about “cancel culture” and other manufactured conservative grievances.

Deggans begins his piece with high praise for Hanks as an actor, and the praise continues throughout the remainder of the article. The point of Deggans' well-written article, framed around Hanks’ recent op-ed for the Times, is more about how Hollywood, as an industry, too often raises the perspectives of white Americans to the exclusion of Black perspectives -- and not about Hanks personally.

Deggans admires how Hanks “stepped forward to advocate for teaching about a race-based massacre.” He specifically states that Hanks is not a racist and that he is also an advocate for gay rights and environmentalism. Deggans’ professional criticism of Hanks revolves purely in the context of how Hollywood filmmakers, generally, “have made fortunes amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism” at the expense of Black Americans. Instead, his piece is a call for Hanks to change this trend.

Conservative media, however, is wholly bereft of nuance and argumentative generosity. Using Deggans’ piece as another lightning rod in their obsession over so-called “cancel culture,” figures throughout right-wing media began claiming that Tom Hanks had been “cancelled.”

Happy Birthday to my buddy Eric Deggans​, NPR​ TV critic and author of "Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation"! 2012 VIDEO INTERVIEW by Bob Andelman

ERIC DEGGANS podcast excerpt: "Bill O'Reilly​ is special to me because he is so big, he so dominates his field, that it is odd to see that he would take so much time to pay attention to what I say or think or who I am... The discussion has moved to the point where the things he said on race, while they trouble me sometimes, are not nearly as extremely as other people have done. “