Cancel Culture: Time’s Up?
By: Maathangi Mohan
Tags: Metoo, Social Media, Justice, Cancel Culture, Opinion

Cancel Culture: Time’s Up?

With largely complicated and extremely different situations getting grouped under this one phrase, is it finally time for us to rethink our approach towards Cancel Culture? Maathangi Mohan Follow Nov 21, 2020 · 6 min read

Image Source: Getty Images/ Jonathan Aprea

Cancel Culture, which was already the rising political and cultural force of 2020 has been further accelerated during the pandemic owing to a surge in social media use. Jimmy Fallon found himself in the middle of a scandal in spring this year when pictures of him in blackface from an SNL skit (where he was impersonating Chris Rock) from 20 years ago resurfaced on the internet. The Twitterati were quick to start a campaign demanding that Fallon be canceled and soon #jimmyfallonisoverparty began trending all over social media. Fallon issued a public apology, stating that he was both sorry and embarrassed by what he had done, and went on to acknowledge that it was “a terrible”, and an “unquestionably offensive decision” to do an impression of Rock in blackface. When I later read Rock’s response to the whole episode, I was mildly surprised when he acknowledged what I believe is crucial when we deal with issues such as this —understanding the intention. “A lot of people want to say intention doesn’t matter, but it does”, Rock said, before proceeding to add that Fallon “doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.” Rock later appeared on the Tonight Show with Fallon where the two of them chatted virtually.

So, why do I believe it is crucial to acknowledge that intention matters? When we start a movement demanding the canceling of a person, it becomes imperative to understand their historical behavior and evolution. In this case, for instance, it becomes important to observe and understand Fallon’s behavior over the years — whether he has been an ally, an anti-racist, consistently. Because #jimmyfallonisoverparty intends to do far more than just demand an apology from Fallon and hold him accountable for his actions — It also demands he be fired from his job. In the second part of a two-part podcast on Cancel Culture, journalist Zeeshan Aleem breaks down the case of the viral video of a Florida man at Costco flipping out on an elderly woman who asked him to wear a mask, and the outrage it received on Twitter. Daniel Maples, the man in the video, was fired from his insurance job after the video received heavy backlash on Twitter. A couple of interesting things to note here would be how it took Ted Todd Insurance, Maples’s previous employer, less than 24 hours from the video going viral to terminate his employment, and then taking to Twitter to announce his termination. We could trace this behaviour to the general expectation on the internet that demands wokeness and awareness from not just one’s friends or celebrities like Fallon, but from brands and organizations as well. If one isn’t woke enough, then they are putting themselves at risk of being canceled.

Now would be a good point for us to stop and think, what next? If Fallon and Maples and the dozen others whom the netizens cancel on a daily basis get boycotted on the internet and are fired from their jobs outside it, do the broken systems stop failing us? Long-term reforms require a nuanced understanding of the complexities of systems that need fixing, and something as reactionary as canceling falls short and can even be counter-productive. When we cancel someone as a reaction to one isolated incident, not only do we let them be defined by a single action, but also fail to acknowledge that (if) the person is capable or even willing to work on themselves and change for the better.

Cancel Culture has been effective in holding people of power and influence accountable when they say and do inappropriate things, when they commit actions that are racist, sexist, harmful to a community or a larger group of people, and make people feel unsafe. It has made fighting for and bringing about real social change much more accessible to the average person, especially those who have been historically oppressed. When justice systems increasingly began to fail those who relied on them, cancel culture came to the rescue. Mass movements gained momentum and we witnessed the undeniable impact of cancel culture on judicial systems during the Time’s Up movement when Harvey Weinstein was finally charged with rape and several other counts of sexual abuse after dodging lawsuits for over two decades. A key takeaway from the #metoo movement for me, especially as a woman, was that, in a society where there is a significant imbalance in the distribution of power, it becomes important to invent and use avenues that help us shake the foundations of how these power blocks are distributed.

Then where exactly does Cancel Culture begin to get unjust and ugly? When we look at what canceling someone entails, we realize that CC is more punitive in its outlook than transformative. Often, we demand that the target be punished in a manner that their current and future opportunities be revoked. This further propagates a culture of fear where the individual gets wary of anything they have to say and ends up not saying anything at all lest they get into trouble. Fallon later revealed that he was advised by his legal team not to issue an apology because he could get into trouble and would only make things worse. But he anyway ended up issuing an apology. In that, he says, “I was horrified — not at the fact that people were trying to cancel me or cancel the show, which is scary enough. But the thing that haunted me the most was, how do I say I love this person? … I’m not a racist. I don’t feel this way.” This takes us back to the point about intention: if a person gives in to the fear culture and holds back something they have to say — a clarification, an apology, anything at all — then we are allowing the one incident that sparked all the reactions against them to define them and their values. Fear culture gives rise to another harmful by-product, performative wokeness. The collective cultural expectation to be woke on social media is at an all-time high and when one is at the risk of experiencing woke bashing, it gives rise to situations where people perform wokeness simply to fit in and avoid getting canceled. Not only does this result in individuals trading their authenticity for being accepted, but also creates an unsustainable and harmful environment with superficial wokeness and activism rather than a deeper, more sincere and critical engagement with progressive concerns and streams of thought.

Although it is important to acknowledge that the platforms on which these discussions take place function to incentivize the kind of communication that rewards emotion rather than reason, the onus is ultimately on each one of us netizens to take a step back and rethink what Cancel Culture started out to be versus what it has become today. It also becomes imperative to re-imagine our approaches to largely complicated and extremely different situations that get grouped under this one phrase, because while some instances of canceling leads to destruction as opposed to fixing, in other instances we simply forget that it is the broken systems that need fixing, not only the individuals.