We’re Cancelling Jordan Firstman? Neat.
By: Elyse Cizek
Tags: Vogue, Jordan Firstman, Cancel Culture, Racism, Instagram

But first, let me read your Tweets from 2012.

Image via Interview Magazine

During this time of isolation, I find myself filling the void of social interaction with seemingly harmless hours of other people’s voices. Strangers. People I likely will never meet. I spend far too much time on social media, mostly looking for some kind of connection. I want to relate. I want to laugh. I want to learn how to do something cool and creative. But mostly I’m looking for a way to escape the reality of what life is like today in America. I find that connection sometimes, too. It’s almost as if I build a trust in these public figures to give me a safe place to get out of my own head. But sometimes they’re not all I expect them to be.

Maybe the reason we enjoy and eagerly consume creator-made media is because it appeals to something in us that feels relatable, and maybe it’s because it gives us an example of what we could create ourselves. We also enjoy making it. We like the validation and the support that comes from making enjoyable, entertaining, or valuable content. However, simply because we all have the ability to share our stories, jokes, images, and opinions, we should not be mistaken for examples of perfection.

The most-consumed content out there these days is not filtered through a board of executives or PR experts, nor is it necessarily intended to appeal to everyone. For most of us, our content starts with a simple audience in mind: our friends, our peers, our personal demographic, and those whose perspectives are much like our own. We choose who we follow and do not follow. The more views you get, the higher up on the list of billions of posts and videos put out each day that post becomes. Then — without warning — something hits. Suddenly your audience has grown exponentially. Suddenly your likes are in the hundreds of thousands. Suddenly your work is being shared around the globe, all because of other people get it.

Then just as quickly as the notoriety comes, so come the comments. Once a content creator goes viral, they become a public figure, and they are no longer allowed the right to be a person who has ever been anything but the character they portray that led to their sudden fame. They are stripped of their story, denied their evolution, and expected to be only and exactly what we all agree to be acceptable. Otherwise, not only are they unfollowed, not only will they lose the followers they gained, but their entire life becomes worthy of judgement against the expectation created by the relatability of one post that brought the people together. It is what it is.

As the global conversation evolves, so must its art

For social media comedians, actors, musicians, and models, the level of perfection expected by a global audience grows with success. As Jordan Firstman’s impressions led to virtual gigs on talk shows, ads, write-ups in various heralded publications, and most recently a feature in Vogue about his holiday video for Versace, our celebration of his successes became a thirst for flaws. As it does with any celebrity. This is not unwarranted (and in this case not that hard). The more eyes a person’s art reaches, the more facets of the human experience the art is expected to cater to. Evolution of art often evolves with the audience, and in order to continue to grow, the artist must become more conscious of those who will be affected by what they create. As the global conversation evolves, so must its art. But we did not all start this conversation in the place we find it now.

I recently spent a week re-watching all six seasons of Sex and the City. I cringed. Hard. There were over a dozen episodes and storylines that today would get a show cancelled immediately, not to mention a total of two (two!) Black love interests, one which had his race as a defining theme of the plot.

I feel like many of us have had this experience lately. With so much time on our hands and nearly every film and TV show available to stream on demand, we have returned to some of our favorites of decades past. The jokes we loved, the shows we couldn’t get enough of, the comedians who paved the way for so many creators today, the fucking ROLLING STONES — we were all a part of an extremely problematic society. Obviously to varied extent, but it existed and we existed in it. The reason we have been able to get to the place we’re in today, as a global community having a global conversation about what is and isn’t offensive, is that those who had been marginalized by the prominent voices of the past finally have a creator-driven platform to share their stories on a scale previously reserved to the privileged majority…and they’re being heard.

It was not our fault, but it is our responsibility to heal for the generations to come.

The reason we can dig up problematic dirt on every public figure from their early social media posts is that we were still primarily influenced by and reacting to the mainstream white-washed hetero-normative media, entirely devoid of marginalized and minority voices unless they shared a message that white executives approved to put their money behind. All-white movies were the norm. Black cast members were token rappers and criminals. Asian actors had to speak broken English. Gay characters were either flamboyant performers or the victims of violence. Trans characters were something of disgust or the butt of jokes. But no matter the role, non-white non-straight, non-cis roles were rarely the lead whose story got to be shared with the depth and strength of any other white character, unless they were the villain or needed saving by a white person.

But that is where we were. We. Not just the white decision-makers. Especially for those of us who grew up in the 90’s and 2000’s. This is what we allowed and promoted and thought nothing to protest because so many of us didn’t know we could. This was the trauma that we buried deep within ourselves because we did not have a speakable understanding of what we were feeling. And while there have always been people who spoke out against it, those voices weren’t given a public platform anywhere near what we have today to be heard. It felt wrong. We knew it was wrong. But for many of us, we were so young that we let stereotypes define us. We struggled with our identities until we grabbed on to the dissenting voices that emerged through the internet to support us. For many, only then could we reach this point today where we are beginning to heal and share what we’ve learned. It was not our fault, but it is our responsibility to heal for the generations to come.

This is progress. It’s messy.

Now, since social media has given us a public platform that allows us to connect with others like us, to be who we are, and to shift the conversation, we are watching our mainstream media transform with it. We have succeeded in so many little battles and we’re constantly fighting so many big ones. Even in just the past eight years the conversation has changed and the shift is happening rapidly. This is progress. It’s messy. It’s intersectionally tangled. It’s not calculated. It’s incredibly complicated and utterly painful. But it is, at its core, progress.

We make mistakes. We say something without consideration for who it affects. We forget our unlearning and temporarily relapse in our recovery from privilege-blindness. We’re selfish. Our ego’s inflate. Jordan Firstman did this with his bamboo earrings video and handled it badly by taking it down, posting a shitty apology, and moving on. So now, you want him cancelled. Makes sense.

The least-charted part of this journey into a global understanding of the facets of the human condition is how to call-out what needs to be fixed, and how to actually fix it. Hashtags, movements, protests, and countless articles and videos of educated or experienced individuals sharing their knowledge has led to the breadth of understanding. But the ugly side of this progression is the shaming, cancelling, doxxing, and virtual mobs coming for all offenses — micro-aggression to hate crime — with the fevered and unbridled hatred of a public call to hanging.

We’re eager for it right now. And that’s understandable. Because we’re miserable. We’re exposing the darkest shadows of a society we once were taught that we could trust. We’re bringing to the surface the hatred, neglect, and abuse of all of the generations before us, and the trauma it has caused within us today. We’re facing our oppressors head-on and watching them kill, deny, and dismiss us.

The majority of Americans are out of work, unrepresented by our government who seems to care more about their private investors than their own constituents, suffering from a virus that was mishandled by those entrusted with our tax dollars to protect our livelihoods, grieving the losses of hundreds of thousands of our family members, suffering the loss of our own businesses and of those we frequent within our communities, isolated for nearly a full year, unable to live our lives the way we have adapted to, denied our places of entertainment, watching tent encampments of displaced neighbors pop up only to be bulldozed in secret in the night, unable to afford mental health care, unable to afford physical health care, denied the ability to travel, forced to watch as other countries rebuild to thriving while our own neighbors refuse to do the bare minimum to prevent the further spread of an illness we could all be carrying without knowing, and unable to plan for our futures except for opportunities that could come from the content we create at home, on our phones, connecting only with strangers we may never meet who create content without us in mind.

So when someone like Jordan Firstman — a white gay man who uses slang developed by Black women who once tweeted a shitty one-liner in 2012 mocking them — achieves success… why should he get the leg up? Why should he get the write-up in Vogue? Why should he be making an exorbitant amount of sponsorship money? He’s Problematic.

Yes. And so are we.

We have the ability to create the change we want to see in the world and to curate the content and creators that rise to the top by supporting them. We have the ability to publicly own up to our own sins of the past, not as blemishes that ought to be hidden, but as examples of our growth. We have the capability to like and follow and share the people that we want to be our leaders. We have the freedom to laugh at someone’s impressions, but we have yet to be willing to allow them to succeed without expecting them to have never made a poor decision or to have had the insight into what our societal standard would be today since Twitter first launched.

Tweets from before 2012 are too often brought up as if they’re how a person “truly” feels deep down, as if they’re something the author keeps as a secret. They’re used to “out” someone as a bad person today, as if we are exactly the same person now as we were then. Jordan Firstman ought to be called out for that tweet. And for the four other shitty tweets he made back in 2012. Because they’re shitty. But being called out needs to be different from being cancelled.

If Jordan were to come out tomorrow saying “Yes! All I have written in all of my life is exactly how I feel today! Ha HA!” then yes, burn him at the stake or whatever. But when does owning up to past behavior, recognizing the harm done, taking ownership of responsibility to do better, being willing to change moving forward, and asking for the allowance of your audience to put the past behind to move forward rightly become an option? Let’s be real, all of the celebrity Tweet discovery apologies suck. Because they’re not willing to acknowledge the power of truly owning up to one’s own harms, being honest about them, and being willing to lose followers in the process of real, genuine, change. Also, the gravity of these Tweets is taken too lightly. They do cause harm to read. But how many of us would be willing to broadcast to the world what we shit-posted in 2012?

…would you be cancelled, too?

No, you probably didn’t Tweet about killing homeless people, but let’s remember that bumfight.com was once a staple of college dorms everywhere, and if not yours, definitely someone you know. You’ve consumed, and probably liked, problematic art all of your life. You’ve supported artists whose political affiliations and hush money you know nothing about. Consider it this way: If you cancelled and blocked everyone who ever said something racist, sexist, ableist, transphobic, homophobic, fat phobic, classist, or generally shitty, would you be cancelled, too?

I am absolutely not saying “don’t come for him.” No. Please do. But be willing to come for yourself with the same force. And if you’re willing to forgive some of your past shittiness, maybe ask yourself why you deserve that compassion but someone else doesn’t.

In 2012 I was blowing lines of cocaine, dancing in blackouts on DJ booths, cheating on my boyfriend, 145lbs, abusing diet pills, making racist jokes, using the phrase “tr*nny fierceness” constantly with my gay best friend, telling people I wasn’t Black because I didn’t like Drake, looking at #thinspo on Tumblr, and using Twitter to drunk-text myself about how much I hated the people I was hanging out with for not sharing their drugs with me.

Photo of author in a blackout in 2012

People change.

We’re experiencing a collective evolution at an unprecedented rate and there are going to be growing pains. Expecting any single individual to embody a timeless perfection of thought and action simply because they are suddenly placed in the public eye is not realistic. We are all guilty of the sins of pre-public-wokeness. Whether it’s because we let someone slide without calling them out or committed it ourselves, we were all alive in a time when harmful judgements and tasteless jokes had a place. They no longer do. We are all experiencing moments of transformation of thought all the time, and in order to learn something new, we have to recognize where we have been wrong. But most importantly, we have to allow ourselves and others the opportunity to grow, and to openly share what that growth looked like, without risk of the same hatred, neglect, and abuse we have already endured. Not for their sake, but for our own.

For if absolute perfection of perspective since birth was a requirement of success, would you allow yourself to succeed?

Our problematic pasts are not to be taken lightly, but to be seen through the lens of what we know today as a benchmark for how far we’ve come — and we have come really far — with an even longer way to go. What if we allowed people the room to mess up and move forward? What if we believed that people could, and did, change, even if our only evidence is the ways we’ve changed within ourselves? I want call-outs to become conversations. I want cancellations to become opportunities to show up. I want to read your Facebook posts from 2009. I want you to tell me when you learned what you did that brought you to where you are today. I want to know who taught you. I want to share their platform.

Looking for perfection in strangers on the internet will not lead us closer to finding the deity we wish would come to save us from the suffering we are experiencing today. And we are suffering. Marginalized peoples in America today ought to be pissed off and absolutely deserve to have the space to be mad as hell. If you want to cancel Jordan Firstman, do it. If you feel that doing so will raise up the voices of those who deserve it more, by all means, go ahead. Then, show me your search history. Show me your drunk tweets from 2012. You deserve to be a success, no matter how shitty your past, as long as you are willing to grow forward and continue to learn. Set an example of having nothing to hide by owning up to what your past looked like. Let these cancellations become the stories of how far we’ve come, not a damning of all of those who have ever been capable of being a product of their environment — as we all once were.

And let he who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.