Cancel Culture: the practice of withdrawing support for (or canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. [dictionary.com]
Talk of the Cancel Culture dominates much of what we hear and view these days. And although we’ve more recently given it an official name, it’s been around for a long, long time. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who isn’t intimately familiar with the act and art of cancellation. Talk to kids who’ve perfected the act of covering their ears and babbling nah, nah, nah. They’ve been doing this for years, selectively canceling their brothers and sisters, their neighborhood friends and classmates, their parents and teachers. If you press your hands tightly to your ears, squeeze your eyes shut, and babble loudly enough, you can get the job done, they’ll tell you. Annoying little brother who complains that you’re not playing fairly, canceled. Parents who command you to take out the trash, clean your room, eat your vegetables, canceled. The kid across the street who whines about getting a turn on your new bike, canceled. All you really need is two hands and a mouth, and you, my friend, can be in the cancellation business.
In a recent New York Post article, Brooke Kato cites Dr. Jill McCorkel, Villanova University professor of sociology and criminolgy, who argues that the roots of cancel culture have been present throughout human history. McCorkel said:
Cancel culture is an extension of or a contemporary evolution of a much bolder set of social processes that we can see in the form of banishment.
In a 2019 Vox article, Aja Romano quotes Anne Charity Hudley, chair of linguistics of African America for the University of California Santa Barbara:
While the terminology of cancel culture may be new and most applicable to social media through Black Twitter, in particular, the concept of being canceled is not new to black culture. . . [It is] a survival skill as old as the Southern black use of the boycott.
Charity Hudley maintains that canceling someone(s) is a means of acknowledging that you lack the power to change structural inequality, but as an individual you can still have power beyond measure.
Those of us who’ve used the hands-over-the-ears method of cancellation most likely had no intentions of banishing or boycotting anyone. We probably wouldn’t have even understood what banishing or boycotting meant. And our actions would’ve been less about survival and more about an immediate–albeit temporary–solution to the problem at hand. We didn’t really want to ruin the other person, to discredit or to remove them permanently from the family, the neighborhood, or the school. We just wanted them to shut their mouths, so that we didn’t have to listen to what they were saying. Even as we clapped our hands over our ears, we generally understood the childish nature of our actions and that the very words we were desperate to cancel would invariably be back again to chip away at our resolve.
Today, however, canceling a person may be truly tantamount to ruining them. Cancelers aim to get people fired, to destroy their reputations, and to discredit their life’s work. In The New York Times article, “High School Students and Alumni Are Using Social Media To Expose Racism,” writers Taylor Lorenz and Katherine Rosman explain that students have repurposed large meme accounts, set up Google Docs and anonymous pages on Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, and wielded their personal following to hold friends and classmates accountable for behavior they deem unacceptable. They quoted one young woman who reported that some students made a Google spreadsheet that identified names, school information, social media profiles and contact information of students who post racist comments on social media. Another student wrote, Someone rly started a Google doc of racists and their info for us to ruin their lives. i love Twitter. And yet another argued that if you prevent these young racists from advancing beyond high school, you’re helping to stop the spread of racist lawyers or doctors or people who make it harder for the black community. For these Google Doc creators and others who’ve harnessed the shaming power of social media, cancellation really does mean ruining someone–or at the very least making it extremely difficult for them to survive in their high schools, colleges, and communities.
Having taught high school and college students for 40 years, I have no doubt that there are those who hold biased, even bigotted views and who speak and act in morally reprehensible ways. I called one young man into my office after overhearing what he’d said about another student. I could’ve called him out in class, could’ve shamed him publicly in such a way as to make his life in our school extremely tough. But I chose to speak to him privately. After confronting him, we had a productive conversation that resulted in genuine remorse and an admission that what he’d said was hurtful and wrong. I’ve been thinking about what might have happened if either his classmates or I had tried to cancel rather than talk with him. Truthfully, it’s hard to imagine positive results.
Certainly, there are legitimate times for public criticism and exposure. If a person, group, institution or corporation has been confronted–individually, collectively, or legally–and continues to speak or act in ways that are generally agreed upon as harmful, then most people accept that public confrontation is necessary and morally responsible. But defining what is harmful and therefore deserving of this type of public exposure is dicey. What is harmful in one person’s eyes may not be in another’s. What some insist should be canceled, others do not. And the fact that cancellation has now evolved from largely targeting celebrities and high profile people, groups, or companies to targeting ordinary people should give us pause. The thought that someone may perceive my words or deeds as harmful and consequently might put all my contact information on their Google Doc/hit list is truly frightening. And the thought that someone may someday try to cancel my granddaughter or grandson is the stuff that nightmares are made of.
Dr. Jill McCorkel explains that cancellation creates a sense of shared solidarity, a sense that you are a part of something larger than yourself, but others like corporate diversity consultant Aaron Rose believe that it may give us little more than a short-term release of cathartic anger. For Rose, rejecting the cancel culture doesn’t mean that you have to reject social justice principles. For him and others who oppose the cancel culture, the real issue is whether or not you believe that people targeted for cancellation can change. Rather than being primarily concerned with expressing outrage and working collectively to destroy someone, he argues that we should adopt a more traditional approach, one that, according to Vox writer Aja Romano, includes apology, atonement, and forgiveness.
Still, we are as divided on the issue of cancel culture as we are on so many other issues. There are those like Aaron Rose who maintain that real and lasting change comes through helping people learn to genuinely communicate and to treat each other humanely; there are others who, as Vox writer Aja Romano argues, regard cancel culture as an extension of civil rights activists’ push for meaningful change.
After my attempts to cancel one of my siblings by covering my ears, most often I was promptly reported to my mom who asked me to apologize. And within moments, all was well. Our country needs a cosmic mom right now, a compassionate yet powerful mother to call us into the house, to lovingly confront us, and to ask us to atone. We need a mom to cry and vent to, to wisely rebuke and encourage us. Above all, we need a mom who truly expects us to change and to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves.
Actually, this job is much too big for one mom. We need a tsunami of moms who sweep over us, washing away all our desires and attempts to cancel each other. This would be a welcome storm, for in its wake, we might find opportunities for real and lasting change.
