THIS ARTICLE WAS PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN AND PUBLISHED BY TAYLOR ON ANOTHER WEBSITE IN MARCH, 2019.
Picture this: You are about to release your first movie. In trying to capture a whole story in two hours, you could not pay attention to every small detail. As the release date nears and private showings begin, a savvy viewer noticed that on your trailer, you barely mistook the appearance of a native American headdress. They demand you cancel the movie because of your ignorance. This call picks up steam, and millions call for the cultural refusal of your art because of a minor detail. Is this morally virtuous or only a ridiculous case of virtue signaling?
What is cancel culture? A quick search on Wikipedia gives you this definition from Lisa Nakamura, a professor at the University of Michigan: an agreement not to amplify, signal boost, or give money. People talk about the attention economy – when you deprive someone of your attention, you’re depriving them of a livelihood. Wikipedia points out the backlash towards Logan Paul in 2018 as an example of cancel culture. Cancel culture is, like all things, supported and attacked by various viewpoints. Wikipedia continues, saying that cancel culture is ineffective, and its existence is contentious.
Chidera Eggerue, a British writer, said cancel culture is an outcome due to intense idolatry that removes humanity from an individual because they are not allowed to be wrong.
A New York Times article from June 2018 says much of the same, adding the label “cultural boycott” from Lisa Nakamura. An opinion piece (that inspired this episode) published in the New York Times on March 8, 2019, about how a sensitivity reader got canceled for their book. Irony at its finest, I love it.
Taking a step back, what is cancel culture? Well, it sounds like capitalism in action. In a marketplace of ideas, individuals take up ideas they like, ideas are criticized, applauded, and at some point, ideas rise and fall. I don’t know why we must create a new term for a culture taking aspects of capitalism to its extremes. (Even more ironic, the people doing it the most embody intersectional ideas, a component of post-modernism, derived from Marxism, which incorporated massive critiques of capitalism. You can’t make this up, folks.)
Is “cancel culture” going too far? Probably, people never reading a book should not judge the said book. People going back decades to find “dirt” (or ideas that were perfectly fine at the time, but not in the present, that the subject may not even still hold) are absurd and need a life. The more this happens, and the more people “Cancelled” for stupid instances or utterances, to harder it will become to be truly rejected by society because the silent majority will see through the veil. If we can cancel anyone for anything, what is an offense strong enough to cancel their public legitimacy? Why is it that society is going down a path where public figures can never make mistakes? You grow from mistakes. The community grows from mistakes; celebrities are no different.
Those who seem angry about cancel culture look to be truly angry at intersectionality, and I can’t blame them. I hesitate to condemn a movement of boycotting on the merits of boycotting, so I do not think it is wrong to “cancel” somebody for their actions. I think we need to be much more selective. In theory, intersectionality is a beautiful concept, a world where we are looking at the aspects of all individuals to see how the environment affects their lives. However, intersectionality doesn’t work. It isn’t accurate. It enables victimization and oppression. I understand the push back because I am part of the push back against entrenching it in our society. I hope we don’t have the pendulum swing as significantly towards the other direction, as there is nothing wrong with cultural boycotts. I have companies, celebrities, and ideas I do not support, and that is for reasons I hold, but if enough people agree with me that a person is a dirtbag based on CURRENT events, then I’m not sure there’s a problem with them catching some hell. If that person redeems, we must learn to accept that, as a path to redemption needs to be present for others.
If you are blindly attacking cancel culture, I have a warning. If you are fighting others from canceling you, others cannot be canceled. We need to find a balance, which I know is nearly impossible, but if we want to solve this problem, we must look at other underlying issues. We need to find out why sections of society are entirely unforgiving. We need to find out why we can’t believe somebody “learned their lesson” and grew from the backlash.