Cancel Culture
And the fickle nature of celebrity status.
By Ishika Roy
If you’re on stan twitter (Stan Twitter, according to Wikipedia, is a community of Twitter users that post opinions related to music, celebrities, TV shows, movies and social media), chances are that you’ve already come across the phrase “cancel culture” on your timeline.
According to dictionary.com, it refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for public figures and corporations after they’ve done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. It is mostly a social media phenomenon, the Generation Z way of publicly bullying individuals and companies so as to get an apology or reform out of them. Cancel culture goes hand in hand with “call out culture”, a similar practice of holding individuals and institutions accountable for their actions.
The origin of this slang phrase is credited to the black community on Twitter (or Black Twitter) back in the mid-2010s, who often used the term with regard to issues of racial discrimination. Cancelling spread as a term in response to the #MeToo movement, where major public figures such as Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Louis C.K and R. Kelly were getting “canceled” due to credible allegations of sexual violence they had commited in the past.
Others like Kevin Hart and Shane Gillis were called out for making racist and homophobic remarks. As a result, they lost a better part of their work opportunities, their reputations, and even so far as their careers.
Criticisms of cancel culture came to the forefront when people started becoming keen on ruining the present lives of people over mistakes they made way back in the past. Social media is a tricky platform, too quick to blame and police increasingly high standards of political correctness, and doing it in a way that hints at virtue signalling (the act or practice of expressing one’s opinions with the intention to demonstrate their good character or moral correctness on a particular issue) and performative wokeness (a superficial show of solidarity with minorities and oppressed bodies to look good in the eyes of the society).
How far that categorises as true activism depends on the intention of the person doing so. It has often been argued to be ineffective and just a farce, since a lot of celebrities continue to go about their lives as if none of the allegations made against them were true in the first place. They keep performing for a willing audience, and the public still listens to their music or watches their content, just like in the case of Michael Jackson (who, in 1993, was accused of child sexual abuse by a 13-year-old boy, Jordan Chandler.).
Cancel culture started trending once again in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement, amid increased awareness and protests against the racial injustice sparked by the killing of George Floyd. Notable personalities claimed that cancel culture was nothing short of an expression of totalitarianism in an otherwise democratic society. The ongoing protests led to renewed demands for canceling already controversial symbols and statues in America. An article in the Atlantic explored the book-buying habits of the American population and found an interesting correlation to performative activism — showing just how far white supremacists would go to shrug the blame off their shoulders by doing the bare minimum to satisfy their own guilt:
“In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, and the protests that followed, White Fragility, a 2018 book by Robin DiAngelo, returned to the top of The New York Times’. The author is white, and her book is for white people, encouraging them to think about what it’s like to be white. So the American book-buying public’s single biggest response to the Black Lives Matter movement was to buy a book about whiteness written by a white person.
This is worse than mere navel-gazing; it’s synthetic activism. It risks making readers feel full of piety and righteousness without having actually done anything. Buying a book on white fragility improves the lives of the most marginalized far less than, say, donating to a voting-rights charity or volunteering at a food bank. It’s pure hobbyism.”
It goes beyond saying that the major critique to this culture delves deeper into the instant and immediate power in the hands of the regular public to end a person’s career in as short as 140 characters — call outs that are not only emotion-driven, but also have undemocratic mob mentalities. From a wider lens, one can attach a performative aspect to the act of canceling, and since it requires publicly sharing and broadcasting information about the act, people often find themselves as the subjects of attention. Thus, it becomes more about them rather than about the wrongness of the act and the denial of a public figure’s cultural cachet.
It is also incredibly interesting to note that white cisgender and heterosexual men have a far greater comeback rate post-getting cancelled compared to women, the LGBTQ+ community and BIPOC (Black/Indigenous People of Colour) public figures, exposing the deep rooted misogyny, homophobia and racism still prevalent in our society.
It’s like our forgiveness comes with a terms and conditions asterisk, and if you don’t fit into the boxes labelled as socially acceptable, you have to work triply hard to deem yourself worth noticing once again.
Popular beauty gurus Jeffree Star and Shane Dawson have been caught in the midst of many scandals for passing racist and sexist remarks; Dawson having been accused of pedophilia as well, and several Twitter storms have resulted in them getting cancelled over and over again in the last few decades. However, that doesn’t mean that their Youtube videos fail to garner any less than a few million views on a weekly basis, while far more talented and unproblematic creators of colour have to build their viewership base from scratch after a comparatively minor mishap.
In the end, it really is up to us to mindfully consume the kind of content created by artists and corporations. Cancel culture is aimed at educating and making a person realise their faults, and should never come at the cost of their mental health or bodily safety. Aggressive bullying is not the way to go about in holding someone accountable. We are humans after all, and to err is completely normal as long as one acknowledges and owns up to their mistakes. The internet isn’t a kind place, but we can always do our best to make it safe for the others.
References:
- dictionary.com. (n.d.). cancel culture. (Retrieved from: s://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/cancel-culture/#:~:text=Cancel culture refers to the,the form of group shaming)
- Kornhaber, S. (2020, June 16). How Callout Culture Reinforces Street Protests. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/06/callout-culture-black-lives-matter-adidas-bon-appetit-lea-michele/613054/)
- Lewis, H. (2020, July 14). How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture. Culture and problems of Woke Capitalism. The Atlantic. (Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/cancel-culture-and-problem-woke-capitalism/614086/)
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). What It Means to Get ‘Canceled’. cancel culture words were watching. (Retrieved from: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/cancel-culture-words-were-watching)
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Originally published at http://lighthousemh.wordpress.com on October 12, 2020.
