Cancel Culture: From useful Boycott Tool to a Political Weapon
My understanding of Cancelling Culture is that it is another way to boycott certain people, companies, or ideas by calling to people to not engage celebrities or prominent public people, and to publicly call out that their ideas or rhetoric are no longer welcome in their camps.
Cancel culture reaches back to the 1950’s in the Civil Rights movement, when it was essentially an extension of boycotting certain products or services, like bus lines or products that supported the suppression of Black civil rights. Like boycotting, “cancelling”, or calling out people that go against their core values, was a way to fight back by identifying people and ideas that were contrary to what they were fighting for. It was a way for a group to unify and push out hurtful agendas, and was a way to organize their members to align on what people, products, services, and ideas that they support or wished to reduce their impact within their movement.
In present day, this concept has become increasingly defined as a tactic/issue involving a variety of cultural issues. I think of celebrities that were called out during the #metoo movement for sexual abuse, the removal of Confederate statues in the South, to the broad accusation that “American culture is being cancelled” as a political platform for Republicans in the 2020 elections. Surprisingly, all three of these topics are wrapped in cancel culture, but they have different stakeholders, incentives, and victims.
If I am understanding “cancel culture” correctly, the perpetrators of sexual abuse at the beginning of the #metoo were publicly called out for their abuses, and in turn they were publicly shamed. The effect on social media caused these celebrities to be negatively impacted financially through cancellation of public appearances and/or products. If this is “cancel culture”, then I don’t see an issue with that (if they truly were guilty of the crimes they were accused of). To me, this seems like a powerful boycotting tool that the public now has available. Because of the instantaneous ability for users to share news, it is a way for people to protest and call out wrong doing, and is a way for people to know who to not support if their actions or words are against someone’s core beliefs; if they do not want to support a racist or sexual predator, the public should know the facts and be able to make their own decisions about who they include in their purchases.
The danger, of course, is if people are wrongly accused, and their careers suffer from misinformation. This is truly tragic, and brings immense shame for the wrongly accused, and may take years for the wrongly accused to recover from the shame caused. This has more to do with people hungry to exploit someone for monetary gain, and there is no place for that. It is truly sickening that people are okay with wrongly accusing someone, and the public needs to have cooler heads before they boycott someone.
I think generally there is usually enough spotlight on these cases to reveal the truth. For example in the Jussie Smollett scandal, he attempted to accuse Trump supporters of beating him up, and I suppose tried to “cancel” the MAGA movement. Of course, it was eventually understood that the story was completely fabricated. So this is an example of the truth coming out, even though the story was initially believed publicly. The culture at large then “cancelled” Jussie Smollett because they found out that he was lying, which is apt.
There are a lot of examples of people being falsely accused, and their life ends up in shambles, and has real effects on these people’s lives. I think that we can definitely be better about not believing everything we hear under the truth of the matter actually comes out.
Societally, we are getting carried away with calling everything “cancel culture”. In the example of Confederate statues, and the argument their base uses to counter is that Liberals are attempting to cancel the culture of people with Southern heritage. Would it be “cancel culture” if there were still Hitler statues in Germany and Jewish people called for them to be removed? Would Germans claim that Hitler was a part of their heritage and label it “cancelling their culture” to remove them? I would say not, because there is an appropriate sense of shame for this period, which I would think there would be for Confederate generals who fought for the continuation of slavery in the US.
My belief is that this tactic to call the removal of Confederate statues “cancelling culture” used mainly by Republicans (who I assume are the ones who want to keep the statues) to show their base that they want them in their party. I really don’t believe that Republican leaders feel the removal of these statues is fundamentally changing the culture of the South by their removal, rather it is a way to indicate to their base that they are working on issues their constituents care about. Now it seems like there has been enough of a feedback loop to tangle the actual issue (having racist monuments proudly displayed as the ancestors of the victims of these Generals look upon them) with it equating that White Southerns will have their culture cancelled if they are removed.
This seems to be happening a lot, and President Trump has used this as a technique to rally his base. “”The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it,” Trump said in his acceptance speech of the Republican nomination for president this year. He uses this term to state that the Radical Left is trying to cancel all the good things about America, but then contradicts himself by literally trying to cancel certain brands and publicly supports others. In the Goodyear example this year, Trump tweeted “Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES — They announced a BAN ON MAGA HATS. Get better tires for far less!” This was so funny to me, because it was so on the nose to try to get the public to boycott a product because of personal political reasons, and (perhaps) inadvertently told Americans to buy foreign products (the other main tire brands are not made in the USA).
Another example of this being used by Trump, while simultaneously saying it is the left that is cancelling culture, was his tweet about the NFL: “If NFL fans refuse to go to games until players stop disrespecting our Flag & Country, you will see change take place fast. Fire or suspend!” So, stop peacefully protesting for equal rights and against police brutality against African Americans otherwise we will cancel you — got it. Nothing contradictory about that at all…
This is where I find “cancel culture” the most dangerous and contradictory — The term is being weaponized against political adversaries when it is beneficial, but the active use of attempting to “cancel culture” is ignored when it is implemented by the same party.
Overall, “cancel cultures” has its dangers in that people can be wrongly accused and swept into a realm of shame, financial impacts, and families being broken up. This is obviously terrible, and we need to be better as a society to hear all sides of an argument and look at the facts before jumping to conclusions. That being said, I think this nuanced way of boycotting is effective if used appropriately. Where my main issue is with this is that both sides politically are accusing one another of “cancelling culture” for political gain, when it should really be used as a way to inform the public of actually wrong-doings of an individual or company to let them decide on how they use their capital.
