If you spend time on social media, you’re bound to eventually find controversy about public figures and conversations about how their work should be treated. Some take an apathetic stance and refuse to compromise what they enjoy and support, but others are more critical of said figures and conscious of their own power as consumers. A subset of these people band together and organize to bring some sense of justice with ends ranging from atonement, social ostracization, deplatforming and career-ruining. This cancel culture, while not necessarily completely bad, needs to evolve and focus more on accountability instead of ostracization.
The act of canceling in its modern form began as an online humor trend poking fun at others. It then became serious when used by people from Black Twitter and #MeToo to socially critique others who they deemed offensive for a variety of reasons.
Cancel culture only spread and evolved with time. It has spread across many circles regardless of politics and identity and even infiltrated the physical world. The targets now are not only corporations and celebrities, but also normal people in their social lives for reasons that depend on the cancelers, and not just strictly progressive reasons, despite what some right-wing people would like to push.
Cancel culture spreads the word about not only pasts that may be controversial, but also the power of support, affiliation and the lack thereof as well. This should allow people to come to their own conclusions as to whether they should continue supporting these people or not. However, cancel culture can also have some drawbacks, such as encouraging dogmatic hypervigilance and tunnel visioning on destruction rather than construction to achieve a progression from these fault.
People are capable of changing. Shedding light on people’s past actions could be beneficial for understanding how we got to this point and how people have— or haven’t — changed. Learning, after all, is a continual community effort that can change how we view and interact with the world, informing our values.
The allure of cancel culture is holding others accountable socially for doing things that accusers find problematic. Being problematic — while it may differ based on who you talk to — could be distressing and is something you’re allowed to combat. You can combat ‘being problematic’ by educating beyond the surface-level awareness, but also where the offensive actions stem from and why they’re harmful. Every person is different, but this communication should be the first step before progressing the intervention in different ways according to the reaction.
If cancel culture’s goal is to change rather than to destroy, listening to what the person being canceled has said about the controversies and observing their current actions in reaction to them could be beneficial. People can be redeemed, or at the very least, change from something worse to something better.
Still, some things are way harder to forgive than others and as such it should be the task of the individual to determine what to do next about this. This is, again, subjective. People don’t need to be forgiven for what they did, but the baseline should be changing for the better either way.
Though there are inflammatory ways to call out others that are often done in bad faith, there are also more educationally-slanted ways that could inspire change (whether or not that was the intention) through open-minded and critical processing. This includes what you’d find in your typical college history class that doesn’t spare from emotionally distressing information. Instead of fighting to ban almost everything that seems offensive or wrong in your eyes, erasing access to this history, teaching the faults of these expressions and ideologies presented could be more constructive to humanity more naturally.
This doesn’t mean these bigoted aspects of the artifacts should be honored, though; it should be the exact opposite. Although we cannot ignore the past, we need to learn from it instead of pretending it never existed. In order to get people to avoid the road to proverbial hell, we have to get them to first understand it through learning critical ideology.
Perfection is a myth we shouldn’t subject anyone to, not even the critics who have persisted throughout history. Some people do deserve to be ostracized for their past actions — especially if they haven’t learned anything from them — but determining those people should depend on your personal moral compass instead of dogma. To not use your voice and body as catalysts of change would be wasteful, but there are more constructive ways to do it than to give all people who messed up in the past full ostracization without the willingness to see if they’ll change. Accountability is infinitely more important than ostracizing people since we’re all guilty of deviating from what’s deemed wrong to various differing degrees. But regardless of if you’ve faced backlash or not, learning and ultimately changing for the better should be a universal truth for all involved instead of staying in a static mind.
Even some broken strings can play a few chords. Regardless, you’ll never see nor hear them the same way again.