Canceling someone often happens based on group hysteria and the bandwagon fallacy. The claims made are often used as a distraction from the real issue at hand and innocent people who by all measure are advocates for equal rights get sidelined and the fight for equal rights is derailed. Cancel culture is more than just a group of people doing their own critical analysis of the information available and coming to the conclusion that they don’t approve of the person’s chosen actions so they refuse to support them. The way the author of the reddit topic: “cmv: anti cancel culture is famous peoples way of complaining about consequences for their actions” thinks of cancel culture is that it is organic and coming from a place of genuine introspection, who could argue with that?
But that is absolutely not the case with most cancellations coming from this culture of race-baiters who can turn anything someone does that in any way can remotely be thought of as having anything to do with race into a ideologically and intrinsically racist statement of identity. Once the claim has been exaggerated and picked up by this mentality, there is no way to defend yourself or your actions and God forbid you apologize for any harm that may have happened. That is the death knell of cancel culture.
It is hard to articulate the compounding effects that cancel culture creates for society in general, those who are canceled specifically, and minorities most of all. Members of this culture leverage appropriated oppression for their own benefit without regard to the harm they are causing. If anything, the more harm they can cause, the better. These people are not just boycotting someone because they disagree with their politics or don’t like their last album, they are going after these people by attacking them at home, at their place of work anywhere they can to demonstrate their intent to destroy the person’s credibility and their life.
These actions are morally reprehensible and often silences someone who otherwise may have been an influential voice in the struggle for equality. There are countless examples of people who were canceled not because of their intent, but because someone decided to leverage cancel culture to get out of being held responsible for their own actions.
Example 1 – A business professor who was loved by his students and who had been teaching the same class for years without incident was suddenly canceled by a group of black students who attacked him and his credibility in a manner most heinous.
Though there are various accounts of this story, the underlying premise is that a girl in his class felt anxiety over a lecture he gave on filler words. Because in the course of the class, the Professor brought up the fact that every culture has a way of saying, “um”. You know, um, like when someone, um, pauses between sentences. Well, if you are going into international business and have business with Chinese people, the word they use for “um” sounds very similar to the only word in any language that can cost you your life and livelihood if you are white and make the mistake of even referencing it by it’s first letter abbreviation (see example 2). He explained that they would often say, “ne ga, ne ga, ne ga” which was “that that that”. His obvious intention was to alert students of possible offensive nature of the word and diffuse it before anyone got hurt.
Instead, one girl who hadn’t prepared for an upcoming quiz used his pronunciation of the word in class to claim that she felt unsafe. This was then picked up by the Black Student Union and resulted in getting this professor canceled.
Why would she do this? Partly for the financial gains she could receive by filing suit against the University knowing they would settle out of court to avoid the negative press. But even if she didn’t, you can imagine that she got straight A’s on the rest of her quizzes whether she deserved them or not. When a professor is at risk of losing his tenure because one girl felt unsafe, you can rest assured that no one else is going to make the mistake of holding her accountable for learning the material. It would be less risk to give her and her friends an A and send them on their way.
This lowered expectation puts her and her peers who engaged in this culture at a serious disadvantage moving forward. It creates a situation where these students leverage fear to avoid having to learn the information they need and yet they still graduate. When they enter the workforce, they are the pariah of the workplace because they don’t have the skills they should because cancel culture got them a degree they don’t deserve.
This affects not only the unscrupulous lying group of students who got this professor canceled for no reason whatsoever, but it also affects all students of the same race. Now, if you weren’t a part of cancel culture and you are black, you are going to face future discrimination. People are going to call you the diversity hire and assume that you don’t have the skills because some kids leveraged cancel culture to get by without putting in any effort. If you put in the effort and are great at what you do, you sill bear the scars of misfortune created by terrible people leveraging appropriated oppression for false gains.
This is the problem with cancel culture–it affects everyone negatively and makes it impossible to tell real acts of overt racism from willful intent to prevent harm through education and understanding. It makes everyone a racist and leverages fear that is the basis of the the culture’s power. Cancel culture has never educated someone about racism or sexism, it has never turned someone who was racist or sexist around and has never let anyone see the error of their ways. All it has done is leverage group hysteria to viciously attack people without discretion.
Example 2 – Redacted Testimony
In another example, a law professor handed out an exam that had written testimony from actual court records on it. In the written transcript, someone used the forbidden word while on the stand and rather than include the word in the transcription, the test simply included N*****.
When a black female student read the abbreviation N****, she began to half heart palpitations and had to be treated by the nurse. That, of course, made the student feel unsafe and the professor was penalized and canceled. The beloved professor, upon providing redacted testimony in a test for future attorneys. was canceled without recourse for not being more cautious with this one student. This girl, in law school, will be exposed to much more direct and hateful language in the course of her career. If reading the first letter abbreviation of a personal pronoun that is prominent in the majority of black music today was enough to make her heart flutter, she should not be an attorney. The professor was canceled for making someone feel unsafe.
This is the cancel culture that people who are anti-cancel culture hate so much. Now, nobody gets to study under this amazing professor who has long been an outspoken supporter of equal rights and racial justice.
One last example of the nefarious nature of cancel culture. When a world-renowned black economist who grew up in poverty and won award after award for his amazing economic analyses published his report on the prevalence of the use of fatal force in cases involving minorities, he was distraught. After setting up his study to objectively analyze data from numerous sources, his findings conflicted not only with the narrative the public was being fed by the media, but also by his own beliefs. He wanted to demonstrate that cops were more likely to kill a black person than a white person. Empirical evidence said otherwise.
So when Roland Fryer went to publish his findings, he was told by his academic peers that he shouldn’t rock the boat. Even though his data showed that cops in general are more physically and emotionally abusive to black citizens than white citizens, they aren’t killing black citizens as often as they are white citizens. In fact,you are much more likely to get shot if you are white, but much more likely to get beat up if you are black.
When he published his findings, there was a bunch of chaos and controversy and the cancel culture cult swung into action. They recruited a girl from his lab that he had fired and given her a severeance. He lobbied the school to get her more money, but they turned him down. The cancel culture got her to claim that he was inappropriately sexual to her. He had never touched her, he just flirted with her on two occasions.
Granted she would send suggestive photos of herself to him when she was a party and got drunk, but that’s all it took and Fryer, the award winning economist, lost his lab, lost his classes and was forced to take a break. It destroyed his career and all of the work he was doing with young students who were eager to learn. He was uniquely poised to revolutionize education by empowering eager young black minds and the establishment wasn’t having it because he rejected the belief that black people are helpless victims. He was canceled for presenting the facts that nobody wanted to hear. And the woman in charge of the proverbial lynching, who tried to strip him of his tenure was no other than the now infamous plagiarist Claudine Gay. If there was ever a justified reason to cancel someone, Claudine Gay should be at the top of the list.
Cancel culture is based primarily on the bandwagon of social hysteria, masquerading as righteous retribution while obscuring the fundamental damage caused by false claims and misrepresentation by members of that culture. It benefits no one and harms everyone it touches. Please quit believing that cancel culture is an organic response to the facts when it is not. We have had a long history of people falling out of popularity because they had made poor decisions, but now, cancel culture is used as a weapon for which there can be no defense. It’s not justice and it is hypocritical of SJWs to wield this weapon while complaining about injustice themselves. sorry for the tldr;