Cancel Culture — A liberal Critique
By: Bayo Awesu
Tags: Culture, Liberalism, Progressive, Cancel Culture, Free Speech

Image by: 22Images Studio

At the 2002 Academy Awards ceremony, there were two winners who did not attend in person. The first was Eminem. The reasons as to why vary, but a reasonable conclusion is that it simply wasn’t his crowd. Winning an Oscar for a rap song is of course a rare achievement, but yet unlikely one that any Hip-Hop artist would want their legacy defined by. Eminem, by his own admission just didn’t “get” the nomination. And even if he did, it’s hard to imagine that the “angsty disrupter” persona he cultivated at the time would have played well in that forum. Something I suspect he was more aware of than he let on.

The second person not to attend was Roman Polanski, whose reasons were far more clear-cut. He had fled the US to escape sentencing for the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl.

In what is now 44 years since Roman Polanski pleaded guilty to this crime, he has gone on to make 14 more films. A number of these starring Hollywood A-listers, including the 2002 multi-Oscar winner The Pianist. In 2009 when he was arrested in Switzerland and an attempt was made to return him to the US for sentencing; over 100 industry peers and even the French government petitioned his release. A petition which was ultimately successful. He remains a free man.

So…when we think about “cancel culture” in the year 2021, it’s important that we never lose sight of the society it was created in response to. A society where talent, power, and influence had allowed any and all evils to be swept under the carpet. A society where we were encouraged to separate the art from the artist. Where men of established good standing could rape, abuse, and assault women at their leisure. Where active racism was fine just as long as it was kept out of the public eye. Where consequence was entirely aligned to your status and achievements. A society that had existed unchallenged for decades. Centuries in fact.

Any right-minded person would surely believe that this was no good thing. That toppling this kind of system would be essential for the fulfilment of any fair and just society. And this person would be quite correct. And at least for a while, it seemed like this could well be working. Roman Polanski has gone from having an entire industry petition his release in 2009, to being removed from the Film Academy of Motion Pictures and Arts in 2018. Harvey Weinstein is in jail, Donald Sterling is no longer an NBA owner. And good riddance to them all.

But like with most righteous journeys there will always be a fork in the road. A grey area that starts out small and grows over time. And in this case, that area begins with one simple question: how do we accurately distinguish between systemic nefarious actions like the ones detailed above and very human mistakes? Especially very human mistakes committed many years ago by a very different person that may exist today. I would argue at this point we have struggled to reach this balance to a degree that reflects the fair and just society that cancel culture sought to create. Rape is not a “very human mistake.” Tweeting something dumb in 2011 perhaps is. This waltz between accountability and redemption and the distinction between a history of abuse and a “bad tweet” is what I would like us to explore. If we can all agree that there can be no excuses for the former…then what do we do with the latter, and should the professional implications really be like for like?

For the record; Xennials are often far more worried about internet footprints than millennials. And the reason for this is that people born in the early 1980s started using the internet at “frat party” age, where dumb jokes were standard practice. Most Xennials honestly had no idea that the stuff being said online would be there forever. Offensive comments that would make someone in their late 30s cringe, quite possibly exist somewhere in their name on the internet in the mid-2000s.

Now chances are this won’t really matter for the vast majority of those people. It won’t stop them from getting a regular job and it’s not going to impact their credit rating. Instead, it just sits somewhere deep in the furthest corners of the internet buried beneath graduation pictures, wedding hashtags, and comments about the last season of Game of Thrones.

Unless of course somebody really looks for it. And unless the person in question reaches a level of success where it becomes a matter of public interest. Politicians have of course accepted this for a long time. The vetting of their personal and professional history is expected. It seems fair that you don’t get to literally make the rules about how people should live their lives; if you’re not doing likewise to an impeccable standard.

But the question remains, should the bar really be this high for everybody else? And what actually happens long-term if it is? If there is no community agreed statute of limitations for saying something stupid on the internet then we do put ourselves at great risk that those who truly deserve to be held accountable for the crimes their status allowed, get lumped together with everyone else. Dare I say; the rest of us. And in that world, the ability to remove those that always got away with it from their positions becomes weakened as being “cancelled” holds no meaning if it is happening to everyone.

There is a certain type of hard-right conservative that is rooting for this scenario. They want progressive social policies and initiatives to crumble under their own weight. They want moderates to be so scared that they will be cancelled themselves, that they don’t get behind any attempts to purge the abusers. They want the racist books, the inappropriate sexual advances, and the old boys club back. And right now there is a very real danger that we are playing into their hands.

One of the principles of liberal values has been that of rehabilitation. We have seen too often in the Black community young Black women and men criminalised from an early age by aggressive policing or youthful mistakes that land them in much greater trouble than their White middle-class counterparts. These children grow up to find that no matter what their efforts are to turn their lives around, the pull of systemic racism they experienced early in their life is always going to hurt them via way of their criminal conviction. They have been “cancelled” from a level of achievement they would have otherwise reached.

If we do believe in rehabilitation and that society is not a cut and dry split between good and evil, then we also have to believe that we all have the potential to err every once in a while. And if we do in fact believe that, then an infinite database of these indiscretions being available does create a real sense of anxiety. It has been proven by psychologists that the human mind was quite simply not meant to deal with global shaming in the way that is frequent today and the correlation between mental health and fear of being “cancelled” is firmly established.

This is not to say, however, that every bad tweet should get a pass based on when it was written. People at times simply do not change and are equally non-repentant for their actions many years later. If something problematic said a decade ago is consistent with behaviour that is still prevalent to this day — then we should not be afraid to demand answers.

This distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of consequence is often misunderstood. While we should not look to silence views that differ from our own; there is no travesty in someone’s opportunities being limited by unrepentant positions that cause injury to other groups. As an example: if a person were to land a job as a tour guide, only to then express a deep-seated vocal dislike for the location they guided people around; they are not subject to being “cancelled.” They are simply subject to having made their position untenable.

So while our efforts to bring down the rapists, the abusers, the racists, the homophobes must remain absolutely unapologetic. We should also think carefully about the permanence of penalties for everybody else. Again, I dare say it….the rest of us.