Let us start off with the basics.
Cancel Culture is a form of online shaming, vilifying and ostracizing someone by members of a community that the person might or might not belong to. This distinction is important to note because it is often used to cancel prominent activists when they say or do something wrong in a public space, like social media. Cancel Culture uses statements made by generally high profile people and call them out on their wrongdoings, in an attempt to hold them accountable for their actions.
This sounds well and good - because the world being a place full of mirrors and smokescreens and people with too much capital to get away with anything, we almost need speaking up and calling out the ones at the top. But the way it has started to pan out now, is something rather detrimental and harmful than what it was imagined to be.
Urgency + Cancel Culture
Cancel culture feeds off on our instinct of immediacy or the idea of reacting instantly to whatever has happened. We have turned social media from a place for cat and dog videos to a propaganda pumping machine and a news source, which it is clearly not meant for. There is something happening everywhere and all the time, and we feel the need to react. We feel the urgent need to do something. As it turns out, the something we do is rage and “call out the wrong-doings”. We call for mob justice and add in to the buzz in desire of being relevant.
There needs to be a side for you to be on: Left or Right, Believing the Accused or the Victim, the Pineapple-on-the-pizza or the No-pineapple-on-the-pizza lot.
There is something that needs to be said, some opinion to be formed - regardless of how under-researched that might be.
Writing for The Times of India in her weekly piece, she talks of this as being a sense of contribution to the justice of the victim:
“...our manufactured sense of urgency is harnessed into making us click “share” or “retweet” or “forward” on calls for justice.
Our principles of justice, meanwhile, are at their least reliable. Every place of strong emotion is necessarily a place of weak reason, and it’s that weakened reason that settles for high-tenor sentiments like bloodlust and public shaming where the less sexy slogs of research and personal reflection and structural change are called for.”
Hold on to the last line...
Humanizing + Cancel Culture
Take the case of James Charles, who was “cancelled” as recent as last year for things he did not and did do.
Charles, a 21 y/o is a beauty guru and a YouTube celebrity.
He once tweeted a racist statement. Twitter had a field day and was eager to call him out, for all the right reasons. He later apologised for his insensitivity and took full responsibility for his actions. He recognised the privilege he has as a white cis male and said he understood that his actions have been offensive and ignorant. He took the tweet down. But Twitter being the priest and judge of moral high ground, did not accept it entirely. Some did, some didn’t. James Charles was then “cancelled” for his actions and received serious threats and was now labelled as a racist person.
Last year, when he got into a feud with Tati Westbrook wherein she made allegations of Charles tricking “straight men into thinking they are gay” which soon ascended and blew up into Charles being a sexual assaulter, previous racist tweets like the one mentioned above started being shared and hung around as displays of his lack of general awareness expected from him as a privileged person and his show of insensitivity.
James Charles was “cancelled” yet again.
Dehumanizing + Cancel Culture
Combined with an urgency to pick a side and define and declare our ideals of justice publicly, we have little to no time to analyze and find out for ourselves whether the allegation is true or not.
What Cancel Culture does is expect humanity (for all right reasons) in terms of sensitiveness and awareness and a degree of wokeness from people of privilege. But the process to that awareness that leads to it is ignored - the process and space to be human and make mistakes and correct the mistakes, learn from them and move on. Cancel Culture trivializes or nullifies apologies when made by mocking them and continuing to holler about their wrongdoings. This closes up the space for discourse and more meaningful learning and ends up being a place where many are scared to say anything at all, in fear of being burnt at the public square.
In the thick of this panicky mob justice, we provide inconsiderable room for us to grapple with the knowledge we have learnt, the space and time to find the truth and confirm the allegations and believe that the most important thing to do is to cross the border and not linger on it. This lingering, we neglect. This lingering, is in fact the primal thing to do.
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