A Sense of Doubt blog post #1954 - What is Wrong with Cancel Culture
I have spent many of the last X number of years in more or less of a news blackout. I say X because I am not sure of how many years. Not that I was ignorant of some of the big things going on. Not that I had my head in the sand without any interest in current events. And it's not like I was not interested in learning things. I am always learning things.
But even before the "election" of Trump in 2016, news media upset me, and I did not tune in to any of them with any regularity. I saw the Internet and social media in particular as a HUGE time sucker, and so I limited my use of these tools and platforms.
And so, in the Fall of 2019, when a student of mine told me he wanted to write his persuasive essay on cancel culture, I had to say: "what is cancel culture?"
I had probably heard of it. But I have a lot going on, and I miss stuff. I do not always RETAIN the information that's around me. This is very much:
Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon, as described here:
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1117 - Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon - Plate of Shrimp - HEY MOM REPRINT
Of course, since then, with cancel culture on my radar, I started seeing it EVERYWHERE.
And so, here we are. Many posts about the Warren Ellis situation.
Yesterday's
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1953 - Men Have to do Better - More unpacking of the thing in comics - sexual misconduct - abuse of power
and the original
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1949 - Warren Ellis accused of sexual coercion
even MUSICAL MONDAY
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1952 - "Let it Be Me" - For Warren
Yeah, okay.
So, cancel culture.
Not a fan.
But I "get" it. Often, the reasons people have for calling to "cancel" someone are very legitimate and well justified.
But the movement itself feels less like social justice than it does like mob mentality. I can't help seeing in my mind Bavarian villagers with pitch forks and torches, storming the vampire's castle, or worse, apprehending the "witch" to burn her alive.
It's disgusting when you see that vision as what it is, though it would be bad in reverse to castigate it with the same over-simplified and sweeping generalization that I am going to argue is one of the problems with cancel culture.
And I am aware that I am publicly trying to work out my thoughts and feelings around what is a very complicated issue in some ways (mostly emotional baggage) and not complicated at all in others (abuse is abuse and it's wrong).
And that's why cancel culture is so complicated. As I have learned from the various sources that I have accumulated here (reprinting two I liked very much), there's a wide gradient in culture that gets canceled. In some cases, it's a minor offense, something some celebrity posts online that rubs people the wrong way but is no more offensive than the man who believes himself to be "president" calling Coivd-19 "Kung Flu." Hey, why not cancel him?
There's other things that are exposed that warrant serious action. Obviously the most overt examples are sexual or non-sexual assault or extreme emotional abuse, racism or violent and vicious rhetoric or actions, basically anything criminal, like the rich history of drugging and raping women that earned Bill Cosby a prison sentence.
And yet despite what Bill Cosby did, I have not been able to "cancel" my affection for his work from The Cosby Show to Fat Albert to his stand up routines or even a good Jell-O commercial. Bill Cosby was part of my childhood. I adored him. Those feeling just don't go away because he's exposed as a vile, serial rapist. They certainly are mitigated by knowing that history, and I had no problem seeing him imprisoned. And yet, part of me feels sorry for him. Not because I want to forgive him for his hateful actions, but because of my long history of affection and adoration for him.
It's why my initial comparison of Orson Scott Card's (OSC) anti-gay-marriage stance due to his religious beliefs seemed in the same arena as the recent exposures of Warren Ellis and other comic book professionals for abuse of power. And yet, different. I may think OSC is wrong (and I do) about gay marriage. I may think his religion (Church of the Latter Day Saint) has no valid Biblical foundation for its hateful views regarding gay people, and even if it can legitimately leverage "Leviticus" and other outmoded Old Testament passages, picking and choosing over ones completely ignored and unobserved, the stance against gay marriage seems to violate Christ's teachings of love and acceptance. And yet, arguably, OSC has freedom of religion as protected by the Constitution, and though I do not feel the founding fathers felt that the First Amendment could be used for gross discrimination, they also conceived these ideas 250 years ago when the world was a much different place.
Though the things Warren Ellis did, the things other comic book professionals did to women, many of the things (though not all) are not technically illegal, BUT the gross abuse of power, the disregard for others, the ethical violations fall much closer to Bill Cosby and those accused of similarly horrid things than OSC's hateful religious ideology.
Yet none of the ART work is hateful.
Cosby's whole milieu was positive, loving, upbeat, and somewhat progressive, for its time. OSC's books may not feature any gay characters, but they are hardly homogeneous and filled with only all white people. And Warren Ellis... his work is difficult to define as it falls multiple places along a wide spectrum, but it's never been hateful, racist, sexist, or vile. At least not in my view, though some are criticizing that it always had the seeds of creepiness.
That said, what about this guy??
Winona Ryder: Mel Gibson “said to my friend, who’s gay, ‘Oh wait, am I gonna get AIDS?’ And then something came up about Jews, and he said, ‘You’re not an oven dodger, are you?'” https://t.co/7Cu1UbD939— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 23, 2020
Now this IS awful. But do we cancel Mel Gibson? Many say yes. I don't care about Mel himself like I care about some of my other examples, and surely, I join in an outcry for zero tolerance against that kind of hate speech.
But at what point do we destroy someone's career and livelihood for their actions?
As stated in the VOX linked directly below in the quote box and reprinted at the end of this post:
“Mainstream internet activism is a lot of calling out and blaming and shaming,” he told Vox in an email. “We have to get honest with ourselves about whether calling out and canceling gives us more than a short-term release of cathartic anger.”
And so what?“There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day,” comedian Norm MacDonald said in a 2018 interview, referring to canceled comedians like C.K. and Roseanne Barr. “Of course, people will go, ‘What about the victims?’ But you know what? The victims didn’t have to go through that.”So which is it? Is cancel culture an important tool of social justice or a new form of merciless mob intimidation? If canceling someone usually doesn’t work, does cancel culture even exist? Or does the very idea of being canceled work to deter potentially bad behavior?These questions have received more and more mainstream consideration over the past few years, as the idea of cancel culture itself has evolved from its humorous origins into a broader and more serious conversation about how to hold public figures accountable for bad behavior. And the conversation isn’t just about when and how public figures should lose their status and their livelihoods. It’s also about establishing new ethical and social norms and figuring out how to collectively respond when those norms are violated.
What happens now?
All my arguments in favor of NOT cancelling Warren Ellis or OSC are completely selfish and biased based solely on my desire to continue to read their work and front-facing Internet broadcast output (though that last one applies only to Ellis as I do not read OSC's blog: HATRACK RIVER.
What I do counsel is this: people need to take a step back from outrage and think about the complexity of each situation. Some are cut and dried. Apparently, Mel Gibson is a racist and Antisemitic piece of shit. Warren Ellis engaged in a pattern of abuse for years, targeting young women, and that's wrong. But I have to confess that I still care about him as a human and an artist.
And that's the bottom line.
Humans often do vile and disgusting things because humans are vile and disgusting as much as they are bright-eyed and positive. It's both. Yin-yang. Integrate the shadow. Hold the paradox in consciousness. Just because humans are capable of vile and disgusting things does not mean they are wholly unsalvageable and incapable of goodness. Warren Ellis is a good example of this contrast as many of his friends have said publicly since the news broke.
It's not on me to forgive him.
It's also not on me to judge the actions of others, even if I am urging for him NOT to be canceled.
Mainly, I just needed to work through my feelings.
My heart goes out to the women processing theirs.
And, I do not hate to admit that I still kind of enjoy an occasional episode of The Cosby Show.
Now, a whole bunch of exploration and collected material on cancel culture.
Thanks for tuning in. Leave me a comment.
Related:
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2020/06/25/a-statement-about-recent-harassers-in-sff/
A Statement About Recent Harassers In SFF
June 25, 2020
My Twitter account remains locked due to GG-style harassment of me (death threats, doxxing, harassing my followers and repliers) tied to the Internet Archive situation, but those who don’t follow me wouldn’t have seen my recent statements, so I thought it best to put something here, too.
Recently it has come to light that a handful of authors inside science-fiction and fantasy publishing have engaged in various acts of harassment and abuse against women. These authors are authors with which I am friendly, particularly online — Paul Krueger, Myke Cole, Sam Sykes — and I am deeply sorry if that friendliness or if me boosting their work and amplifying their voices has in any way given them cover for their actions or given them unearned trust. I never saw the harassment or abuse in play, but my ignorance of it is not an excuse, and I should be better about actively attempting to make spaces like conventions and conferences safe. Some of the women who were harassed or abused are friends or acquaintances, as well, and that makes me heartsick to realize that I didn’t know or see what they were going through. It’s not enough to simply go along to get along, but rather, to maintain a vigil and to be ever on the lookout for harassment and attempt to call it in when witnessed.
I’ve cut personal and professional ties with these men and will not be signal boosting them further. I’m listening to victims and believe them. The men have apologized but it’s not on me to accept, deny, or judge those apologies.
What's happening now with "cancel culture" is different. A small number of online progressives have appointed themselves a moral vanguard, upholding and attempting to enforce, through the methods of a digital mob, a form of puritanical egalitarianism that is affirmed only by a few. Any writer, entertainer, or other public personality who diverges from this moral standard by demonstrating insufficient sensitivity and deference to the feelings of members of certain protected classes will find himself canceled. The progressives have thereby skipped the step of broad-based persuasion and jumped right to the end point of attempting to enforce a new public moral norm.
It's this dynamic — a small minority of ideological activists ganging up on an individual, attempting to compel media companies, book publishers, television shows, movie studios, and corporations into casting the individual into outer darkness — that has prompted columnist Peggy Noonan and others to liken cancel culture to the totalitarianism of China's cultural revolution. In many ways, comparing the experience of being (metaphorically) canceled in the 21st-century United States to a social and political upheaval that may have (literally) killed more than a million people is ludicrous and offensive. But it is valid in at least three narrow respects: both attempt to achieve their moral and political ends by way of public bullying, accusation, and humiliation; both demand public expressions of remorse and contrition by those deemed guilty by the mob; and both ultimately aim to force a thoroughgoing revaluation of public values through their strong-arm tactics.
WIKI: Online shaming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxing
Call-outs[edit]
Call-outs[edit]
Calling someone out online, sometimes referred to as call-out culture or outrage culture, is a form of public humiliation or shaming that aims to hold individuals and groups accountable for actions perceived to be offensive by other individuals or groups, who then call attention to this behavior, usually on social media.[citation needed]
Michael Bérubé, a professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, states, "in social media, what is known as 'callout culture' and 'ally theater' (in which people demonstrate their bona fides as allies of a vulnerable population) often produces a swell of online outrage that demands that a post or a tweet be taken down or deleted".[3]
Cancellation[edit]
The act of canceling, also referred to as cancel culture (a variant on the term "callout culture") describes a form of boycott in which an individual (usually a celebrity) who has shared a questionable or controversial opinion, or has had behavior in their past that is perceived to be offensive recorded on social media, is "canceled"; they are ostracized and shunned by former friends, followers and supporters alike, leading to declines in any careers and fanbase the individual may have at any given time.[4][5]
Doxing[edit]
Doxing involves researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual, often with the intention of harming that person.[6][7][8][9]
CANCEL CULTURE IS TOXIC
Posted by Katerina Tsvetkova
MEDIUM (GEN): Cancel Culture Makes Everything Look Worse Than It Is
Cancel culture is the left’s version of broken windows policing
YOUR VOICE MAG: IF CANCEL CULTURE WAS REAL, WE WOULD HAVE CANCELED BILL MAHER BY NOW
MEDIUM: Cancel Culture Is Not Going to Cancel Culture
There’s nothing stopping any random person on the internet from exposing another, whether they be famous or not.
People can choose to cancel whomever they’d like but if you’re looking for a flawless person with no baggage, it’s not going to happen. People need to establish boundaries on what they can and cannot accept in a person, but no one is going to be mistake-free.
This trend is just that — a trend, but it can have very negative effects on someone’s life. We all make small mistakes and don’t deserve to pay for them for the rest of our lives. When we fail, we learn and then we don’t make those mistakes again. We just have to let some things go and accept when people genuinely want to do better, and help them succeed in that process.
Story by Olivia Malick, UP managing editor
Cancel culture: when celebrity worship goes wrong
The birth of a political awakening is like hearing a song months before it becomes popular. You can’t wait to let everyone know what you only learned the other day. But the compulsion to cancel instead of counsel leaves us fractured. Calling out injustice, sexual abuse, corruption, and industry-protected violence is necessary: institutional oppression thrives off ignorance, so to highlight those ills is a direct threat. But too often we’re aiming at the wrong target.
Where is the line between problematic and ignorance? Most people only care about what they believe affects them: it’s what they’ll have the most research on, the most experience with. But to insult someone who doesn’t live your reality for failing to consider you is to oversimplifying the human experience; humiliating people for insensitive comments they made years ago denies the possibility of change.
Our greatest weapon against power is our attention: where we focus it, and what we choose to disengage from. In light of famous errors, we may learn the value of celebrating people for their ideas instead of their looks and their creative talent. I imagine we’d face less disappointment if we looked more to the work of those committed to addressing our social inequity. But even then, if you were to investigate the histories of even the most prolific activists, you will find chaos. Not because they’re hypocrites – but because they’re human. If the crux of your activism is pointing out the imperfections of others, you may have started spewing some of the very poison you fight against.
Cancel culture falls under the branch of public shaming, as it often spreads on social media. As time passes, however, cancel culture seems to be causing more harm than good in the media. For starters, cancel culture merely serves as a way for fans to boost their sense of confidence. Many people jump at the opportunity to criticize and “call out” seemingly perfect public figures any chance they get-because the less likable someone else is, then the more likable you become, right? For some, perhaps that is the case, but that does not justify blacklisting celebrities for one simple mistake. To set the record straight, serious offenses like sexual assault, racism, and other obscene crimes should not warrant forgiveness. However, everybody says things they regret and with celebrity’s entire life public knowledge, it’s easy for fans to forget how much pressure they endure to satisfy the public’s expectations.
Like a dad kicking-off because his daughter took a class in gender studies and now refuses to watch Top Gear (2002–ongoing), the 2010s have been a decade of the old hurling insults at the young. Their slur of choice? Snowflake: a liberal who melts at the first sign of racism, transphobia, misogyny or environmental catastrophe. Generation snowflake, however, turned out to have venom in their ice crystals. Ok boomer, they retorted, channelling the combined energy of Frozen (2013) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). We’ll use the skills we learnt spending the best years of our lives on the internet to mobilize a troll army and cancel you. The battle lines were drawn for a decade of moral warfare: millennials found a new bloodsport, nuance was about as fashionable as the plastic straw and nobody was considered too big or too small for public shaming.
POP CULTURE DICTIONARY
cancel culture
[ kan-suhl kuhl-cher ]
WHAT DOES CANCEL CULTURE MEAN?
Cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming.
MORE TWITTER ABOUT THIS ISSUE
— Lorua_ ✨ (@lorua_) June 23, 2020
Not to be a bitch, but I take this as seriously as virginity pledges. pic.twitter.com/NS6PI6vmuX— Cheryl Lynn Eaton (@cheryllynneaton) June 23, 2020
Dear @CBLDF board, I would like to be legally released from the conditions of my NDA. It was issued to me by Charles Brownstein and was done so with immense pressure. I look forward to your response. pic.twitter.com/Eu0RGsfB4F— Shy Allott (@1horseshy) June 23, 2020
why does comic dudes doing that no harassment pledge just sound like this pic.twitter.com/GGlr14ene8— ᴰᵉᶠᵘⁿᵈ ᵗʰᵉ ᵖᵒˡᶦᶜᵉ Jenn St-Onge (@princess_jem4) June 23, 2020
If you want to help build and support a better comics community, y’all need to stop giving Bl**ding C**l your stories and clicks.— Stephanie Cooke (@hellocookie) June 22, 2020
That site is run by a person who feeds on our pain and exploits it for whatever gets the most clicks, and it has to stop.
AND OTHER ABUSING MEN IN SF&F:
I want to make sure all of you lining up to let Sam Sykes off the hook see this, and add that while I’ve never encountered the dude in person myself, I have at least a dozen friends with similar stories of him negging and making unwanted sexual comments to them over the years. https://t.co/chQ9xcipLr— Matt Wallace (@MattFnWallace) June 25, 2020
sam sykes has wholesale straight up stolen shit i said about artists being at the forefront of comics like almost word for word. this is the smallest thing in a sea of bullshit but i'm feeling petty tonight— wendy xu (@AngrygirLcomics) June 25, 2020
Part of the rape culture in male dominated creative fields is dudes not calling out their pals for being creeps at bar events/else. A friend expressed disappointment at Sam Sykes and Chuck Wendig not calling out Myke Cole at cons, and I have to agree. Don't be silent enablers.— ✨Anabel Vengeance 🔜 ? (@anabelsays) June 24, 2020
tw // sexual harassment— rachel (@typedtruths) June 25, 2020
in case you aren’t aware yet, the following authors have been shown to be serial sexual harassers and generally awful to women.
- paul krueger
- myke cole
- sam sykes
- mark lawrence
listen to & believe survivors. ty to everyone who has spoken up x
https://www.criticalhit.net/gaming/how-did-we-arrive-at-the-point-of-cancel-culture/
I’ve written in the past of how polarised we have become & how that polarisation is fuelled by many for their own agendas. Increased views. Pushing products. Fame. Whatever the reason, getting people outraged or being outraged is a highly successful way to accomplish a goal.
A story that is currently unfolding as I write this is around an “influencer” who goes around trying to frame white women for doing wrong, jumping on the now popular meme “Karen”, a term used for white women who do awful things which usually stem from a bigoted mindset, and in doing so ended up doxxing a woman IRL.
That tweet putting this woman on blast has recorded over 82K retweets and over 176K likes. This just shows the power of outrage and how it fuels social media in many ways, particularly on Twitter.
Watching how outrage culture morphed to the point that it is today has been both terrifying and fascinating to watch. I’d be remiss if I didn’t state that I too have been caught up in it at one time or another and that is what makes it so terrifying. It takes so much work to see if something is a ruse versus when it’s a real issue worth fighting about.
The rise of cancel culture
What could be said to have risen from the birth of Outrage Culture is Cancel Culture. This is another wave that swept up social media and has also grown into a behemoth that is hard to describe or put labels on.
Cancel culture, I used to believe, was driven by righting wrongs and putting a stop to anyone who is deemed to have done something socially unacceptable. Issues arise everywhere from inappropriate jokes, sexual assault, racism and more and are dug up and presented for the public to judge.
If the consensus is that they are in the wrong, they are in a sense “cancelled”, which is to be shunned by society. Any brands affiliated with them remove themselves to avoid blowback or do so due to public pressure and thereafter society moves on to the next person.
It is prolific on social media, which is evident by the fact that almost daily someone is “falling” when you look at the latest hashtags trending locally. Cancel culture was something that was driven by “leftist” politics with a modicum of success, but for the most part the accused is dragged through the mud for a time & then as is the fickle nature of online, the world moves on.
Right wing followers saw the power of cancel culture and they too began to use it as a weapon to bludgeon those that called out their beliefs. Popular figures had their past thrown out into the open for the world to judge with the intention of silencing their voices.
Staying quiet around sexual harassment, wearing blackface in younger days, saying racial slurs. What it turned everything into was a mudslinging contest which resulted in a race to the bottom. People learnt to post things out of context and blatantly omit nuances to paint someone in a clearly bad light. With how fast social media moves, by the time innocent people could correct things, it was too late and the online world had moved on.
Is cancel culture a necessary evil?
I’ve been deliberating for some time how we got to the point we have with Cancel Culture and if it was a good thing, and that is where my train of thought was going. That line of thinking and my general view to Cancel Culture came from a place of privilege and then I was asked not focus on why it has become so toxic but why the need to cancel people online still prevails.
I started to think more about this and then I realised when you have no other avenue to deal with a problem, the anger, frustration and hurt has to be let out somewhere. We see this happen in gaming time and time again, on Reddit when gamers have no other option but to put a company on blast before the problem is corrected.
Gaming itself has had a reckoning in recent days, with countless women coming forward to detail the sexual, emotional and verbal abuse they’ve experienced in gaming culture. Reading the litany of stories is sobering and a reminder of how anti-women gaming culture can be. Those stories often detail how the issues were brought up through proper channels and were dismissed or outright ignored.
Its been two years since Cecilia D’Anastasio broke the story around the sexist culture that permeated Riot Games. How many of those raised issues were swept under the rug, aggressively dismissed and in some cases retaliated upon by management at Riot Games?
Racism is also an issue that has always plagued gaming culture and something I have written about at length. It took #BlackLivesMatter going global more than once before gaming studios came out in support against racism and started taking active steps to combat it. In those instances, I too felt there was no avenue to challenge these issues but the frustrations boil over and what else can you do but turn to social media in a cry for help?
Gender-based violence is a pandemic that has ravaged the women in our country and when you look at the statistics on how reported crimes are handled, the despair is overwhelming. Of the over 2 300 calls registered by the police department around GBV, only 148 suspects were charged. That is 6.43%. (Source) Those are just suspects charged, not even successfully jailed.
I do not presume to know what those affected by GBV feel whatsoever, but when you see the statistics and the stories that come out about how nothing is done, you begin to understand why Cancel Culture is where it is today.
When you look at how hard black people have had to shout to be heard and respected and even then, the most people do is pay lip service, you begin to understand the anger that is felt and expressed on social media. Cancel culture is here because society has failed the oppressed at every step and every turn.
You look at LGBTIQA+ communities and how every day so many are fighting for their lives, protesting to be viewed as equals and yet despite all the literal blood & tears, there are still a multitude of countries who do not recognise them, many of those on our own continent.
From my place of privilege I wanted to debate a symptom instead of acknowledging the disease that led us to this point. I am no saint and every day I’m trying to learn more and do better but that’s not enough. Men are not doing enough and the world is broken because of us.
When videos are posted on gaming of women being harassed on voice comms, why is it that all the other men in the video stay silent or laugh nervously? Those same men are the ones clamouring “Not All Men” and victim-blaming.
White people have not done enough to help society. White people that stay silent but post a black square on social media thinking that they have played their role. They believe because the worst thing they’ve done is say nigga on a Kendrick track in their bedroom, they’re absolved of all the crimes. Those same people are out here screaming “All Lives Matter” and discussing race using imaginary colours.
The inaction of so many of us, myself included, is why Cancel Culture exists and why it remains. We need to dismantle a system that does not care for people of colour and especially does not care for women.
If you don’t want politics in your games, stand up and actually speak out. Call out friends with bad behaviours. Don’t just silently disagree with sexist or racist actions you see around you.
Gaming culture is so prolific in the world, we cannot live in our digital bubbles and pretend we have no influence on the real world. What we allow in gaming has real world consequences whether you want to believe it or not. Stop being outraged at Cancel Culture until you help address the inequalities and injustices that it stems from.
Last Updated: June 24, 2020
GLENN KISELA
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/30/20879720/what-is-cancel-culture-explained-history-debate
Why we can’t stop fighting about cancel culture
Is cancel culture a mob mentality, or a long overdue way of speaking truth to power?
One of the odder ideas to snowball its way into the zeitgeist during the decade’s turbulent second half is the idea that a person can be “canceled” — in other words, culturally blocked from having a prominent public platform or career.
Within the past five years, the rise of “cancel culture” and the idea of canceling someone have become polarizing topics of debate as a familiar pattern has emerged: A celebrity or other public figure does or says something offensive. A public backlash, often fueled by politically progressive social media, ensues. Then come the calls to cancel the person — that is, to effectively end their career or revoke their cultural cachet, whether through boycotts of their work or disciplinary action from an employer.
In 2019 alone, the list of people who’ve faced being canceled included alleged sexual predators like R. Kelly; entertainers like Kanye West, Scarlett Johansson, and Gina Rodriguez, who all had offensive foot-in-mouth moments; and comedians like Kevin Hart and Shane Gillis, who each faced public backlash after social media users unearthed homophobic and racist jokes they’d made in the past.
But actually ending someone’s career through the power of public backlash is easier said than done. Few entertainers have truly been canceled — that is, they haven’t had their careers totally shut down by negative criticism on the internet. For example, in 2019, Hart withdrew himself from hosting the Oscars, but his movies and stand-up specials were still successful after the backlash against him died down. Gillis was swiftly dropped from the cast of Saturday Night Live over his offensive humor, but he’s since been greeted warmly by crowds at comedy shows, defended by fellow comedians like Ricky Gervais and David Spade, and invited for a heart to heart with Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang — turning his use of racial slurs into a teachable moment.
And though many of the most prominent examples of cancellation have arrived in the Me Too era, most of the men who have faced accusations have also dodged long-term consequences. After multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against him in 2017, Louis C.K.’s career hiatus lasted only around 10 months before he returned to stand-up comedy and performed dozens of sold-out, controversial shows. After high-profile documentaries exploring allegations of decades of sexual assault against each of them were released earlier this year, both R. Kelly and the late Michael Jackson saw increases in streams of their music, rather than decreases.
Continued support for those who have been canceled demonstrates that instead of costing someone their careers, attempting to cancel someone can encourage sympathy for the offender. Yet to hear Gillis and many others talk about cancel culture, you might think it’s some sort of “celebrity hunting season” — an unstoppable force descending to ruin the careers of anyone who dares to push society’s moral boundaries. This framing frequently portrays the offender as the victim of reckless vigilante justice.
“There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day,” comedian Norm MacDonald said in a 2018 interview, referring to canceled comedians like C.K. and Roseanne Barr. “Of course, people will go, ‘What about the victims?’ But you know what? The victims didn’t have to go through that.”
So which is it? Is cancel culture an important tool of social justice or a new form of merciless mob intimidation? If canceling someone usually doesn’t work, does cancel culture even exist? Or does the very idea of being canceled work to deter potentially bad behavior?
These questions have received more and more mainstream consideration over the past few years, as the idea of cancel culture itself has evolved from its humorous origins into a broader and more serious conversation about how to hold public figures accountable for bad behavior. And the conversation isn’t just about when and how public figures should lose their status and their livelihoods. It’s also about establishing new ethical and social norms and figuring out how to collectively respond when those norms are violated.
“Canceling” came out of the unlikeliest place: a misogynistic joke
Given how frequently it’s been used to repudiate sexism and misogyny, it’s ironic that the concept of “canceling” shares its DNA with a misogynistic joke. Possibly the first reference to canceling someone comes with the 1991 film New Jack City, in which Wesley Snipes plays a gangster named Nino Brown. In one scene, after his girlfriend breaks down because of all the violence he’s causing, he dumps her by saying, “Cancel that bitch. I’ll buy another one.” (We owe this witticism to screenwriter Thomas Lee Wright.)
Jump to 2010, when Lil Wayne referenced the film in a line from his song “I’m Single”: “Yeah, I’m single / n***a had to cancel that bitch like Nino.” This callback to the earlier sexist cancel joke probably helped the phrase percolate for a while.
But canceling seems to have gotten its first big boost into the zeitgeist from an episode of VH1’s reality show Love and Hip-Hop: New York that aired in December 2014, in which cast member Cisco Rosado tells his love interest Diamond Strawberry during a fight, “you’re canceled.” Even with zero context, it’s a hilarious moment:
The quote began to appear on social media shortly after the episode aired.
From there, the idea of canceling began to disseminate from Black Twitter throughout 2015, used as a reaction to someone doing something you disapproved of — either jokingly or seriously.
As it caught on, however, the term began to evolve into a way of responding not just to friends or acquaintances, but also to celebrities or entities whose behavior offended you.
And even early on, canceling someone often involved boycotting them professionally, as the tweets below demonstrate:
Even though these early examples are largely independent and distinct from one another, they contained the seeds of what cancel culture would become: a trend of communal calls to boycott a celebrity whose offensive behavior is perceived as going too far.
It’s common to compare cancel culture to “call-out culture” — but its real roots may lie in the civil rights movement
As cancel culture caught on, many members of the public, as well as the media, have frequently conflated it with other adjacent trends — especially “call-out culture.” Cancel culture can be seen as an extension of call-out culture: the natural escalation from pointing out a problem to calling for the head of the person who caused it.
Cancel culture and call-out culture are often confused not only with each other, but also with broader public shaming trends, as part of a collectivized narrative that all of these things are examples of trolling and harassment. The media sometimes refers to this idea as “outrage culture.”
But while these ideas seem interchangeable at a glance, they’re different in important ways. Call-out culture predates cancel culture as a concept, with online roots in early 2010s Tumblr fandom callout blogs, like Your Fave is Problematic, and spreading from there. Call-out culture is a term that arose within fandom, used by fans of all kinds deploying criticism of pop culture or public figures, in inherent opposition to toxic online harassment mobs like Gamergate. Meanwhile, cancel culture arose within black culture and appears to channel black empowerment movements as far back as the civil rights boycotts of the 1950s and ’60s.
“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,” Anne Charity Hudley, the chair of linguistics of African America for the University of California Santa Barbara, told Vox. Hudley, who studies black vernacular and the use of language in cultural conversations like this one, described canceling as “a survival skill as old as the Southern black use of the boycott.”
Charity Hudley pointed out that canceling someone is akin to a boycott, but of a person rather than a business. What’s more, it promotes the idea that black people should be empowered to reject the parts of pop culture that spread harmful ideas. “If you don’t have the ability to stop something through political means, what you can do is refuse to participate,” she said.
Thanks to social media, black culture in particular has become more widely recognized as the dominant driving force behind much of pop culture. Platforms like Twitter give a louder collective voice to black citizens and other marginalized groups who have traditionally been shunted to the edges of public conversations, while platforms like YouTube and Netflix help to diversify and expand the types of media and pop culture we consume. And in a society where cultural participation is increasingly democratized, the refusal to participate also becomes more important.
“Canceling is a way to acknowledge that you don’t have to have the power to change structural inequality,” Charity Hudley said. “You don’t even have to have the power to change all of public sentiment. But as an individual, you can still have power beyond measure.
“When you see people canceling Kanye, canceling other people, it’s a collective way of saying, ‘We elevated your social status, your economic prowess, [and] we’re not going to pay attention to you in the way that we once did. ... ‘I may have no power, but the power I have is to [ignore] you.’”
Cancel culture, then, serves as a pop culture corrective for the sense of powerlessness that many people feel. But as it’s gained mainstream attention, cancel culture has also seemed to gain a more material power — at least in the eyes of the many people who’d like to, well, cancel it.
Very few canceled celebs actually suffer career setbacks. But witnessing cancel culture backlash seems to send some people into panic mode.
Some celebrities, whose crimes have encompassed allegations of rape and sexual assault and became impossible to ignore, like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Kevin Spacey, have effectively been canceled. Along with Roseanne Barr, who lost her hit TV show after a racist tweet, their offenses were serious enough to irreparably damage their careers, alongside a push to lessen their cultural influence. And though it’s still early for author J.K. Rowling, her very recent transphobic tweet was so upsetting to Harry Potter fans that large segments of the fandom started openly claiming that Rowling wasn’t the author of their beloved series at all; she was no longer part of the equation.
Rowling hasn’t responded to the outrage that fans of Harry Potter have expressed over her transphobic stance, but the level of publicity it has received has been damning. And tellingly, as of late December, Rowling has not returned to Twitter since the initial offending tweet. It’s impossible to truly ignore public scorn at the level that Rowling received. And therein lies cancel culture at its most powerful.
“I think it’s clear that a ‘cancel’ campaign is more effective if there is significant embarrassment [involved],” Catherine Squires, author of The Post-racial Mystique and a professor of communication studies at the University of Minnesota, told Vox in an email.
With that potential embarrassment, however, comes a high degree of alarm. A recent piece in Digiday about cancel culture’s effect on brands and businesses framed it as “mob rule,” with one anonymous PR executive declaring, “even good intentions get canceled.” In September, the New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu observed just how frequently media outlets have compared cancel culture to violent political uprisings, ranging from ethnocide to torture under dictatorial regimes.
This hyperbole might feel reasonable to someone faced with a social justice mob, but to proponents of cancel culture, it seems more like a disingenuous slippery slope that really only works to marginalize victims. For example: In 2018, feminist performance artist Emma Sulkowicz designed a protest performance in response to a New York Times article. The article, as she later explained to Teen Vogue, had asked museum directors if they would remove works by famed artist Chuck Close from their galleries, after Close was accused by multiple women of sexual harassment.
“I got so upset that survivors’ voices weren’t included in the conversation,” Sulkowicz said. “One museum director was like, ‘If we go down this road, our museum walls will be bare.’ And I thought, ‘Do you only show work by evil men?’”
The debate around cancel culture is partly about how we treat each other, and partly about frustration with the lack of real consequences for powerful people
All of this dramatic rhetoric from both sides of the debate shows how incendiary cancel culture has become. As ideological divides seem more and more insurmountable, the line between the personal and the political is vanishing for many people. Even though cancel culture seems to generate few lasting consequences for celebrities and their careers, some people seem to view it as part of a broader trend they find deeply disturbing: an inability to forgive and move on.
Aaron Rose, a corporate diversity and inclusion consultant, used to identify with progressives who participate in call-out and cancel culture. But now, he says, he’s focused on objectives like “conflict transformation,” motivated by the question of “how do we truly communicate [and] treat each other like humans?”
“Mainstream internet activism is a lot of calling out and blaming and shaming,” he told Vox in an email. “We have to get honest with ourselves about whether calling out and canceling gives us more than a short-term release of cathartic anger.”
Rose “used to think that those tactics created change,” he said, but eventually realized “that I was not seeing the true change I desired. ... We were still sad and mad. And the bad people were still bad. And everyone was still traumatized.” He says he now wants to “create more stories of transformation rather than stories of punishment and excommunication.”
Loretta Ross is a self-identified liberal who’s come to hold a similar position. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, she wrote that as a black feminist, she finds cancel and call-out culture a “toxic” practice wherein “people attempt to expunge anyone with whom they do not perfectly agree, rather than remain focused on those who profit from discrimination and injustice.”
In Ross’s view, “most public shaming is horizontal” — that is, it’s not done to justifiably criticize people who are seriously dangerous, but to score brownie points against people who mean no harm. The people doing the canceling, she argues, “become the self-appointed guardians of political purity.”
But among proponents of canceling is a sense that any losses that the canceled person suffers are outweighed by a greater cultural need to change the behavior they’re embodying. “Forgive me if I care less about the comedian who made his own bed versus the people affected by the anti-queer climate he helped create,” wrote Esquire’s Michael Arceneaux in response to Hart’s homophobic comments in 2018.
“[W]hat people do when they invoke dog whistles like ‘cancel culture’ and ‘culture wars,’” Danielle Butler wrote for the Root in 2018, “is illustrate their discomfort with the kinds of people who now have a voice and their audacity to direct it towards figures with more visibility and power.”
But to progressives like Rose, rejecting cancel culture doesn’t have to mean rejecting the principles of social justice and the push for equality that fuels it. “This does not mean repressing our reactions or giving up on accountability,” he told Vox. “On the contrary, it means giving ourselves the space to truly honor our feelings of sadness and anger, while also not reacting in a way that implies that others are ... incapable of compassion and change.”
To Rose, and for many opponents of cancel culture, the bottom line in the debate is a need to believe that other people can change, and treat them with according optimism. The difference between cancel culture and a more reconciliatory, transformational approach to a disagreement is “the difference between expecting amends and never letting a wound close,” he said. “Between expressing your rage and identifying with it forever.”
“I get that, but that’s a really middle-class, white privilege way of coming at this,” Charity Hudley countered when I summarized Rose’s viewpoint for her. “From my point of view, for black culture and cultures of people who are lower income and disenfranchised, this is the first time you do have a voice in those types of conversations.”
Charity Hudley’s point highlights what seems to many to be the bottom line in the conversation around cancel culture: For those who are doing the calling out or the canceling, the odds are still stacked against them. They’re still the ones without the social, political, or professional power to compel someone into meaningful atonement, to do much more than organize a collective boycott.
“I think that’s why people see [cancel culture] as a threat, or furthering the divide,” she said. “The divide was already there.”
As we head into a new decade, that divide seems to be widening and growing more visible. And it isn’t purely a divide between ideologies, but also between tactical approaches in navigating those ideological differences and dealing with wrongdoing. The view that a traditional approach — apology, atonement, and forgiveness — is no longer enough might be startling. But to those who think of cancel culture as an extension of civil rights activists’ push for meaningful change, it’s an important tool. And it’s clear that, controversial as cancel culture is, it is here to stay.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2006.24 - 10:10
- Days ago = #1818 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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