If you consume any mainstream or social media you’ve probably heard at least one story about someone being “cancelled”. That’s when someone says or does something, or someone finds out they said or did something years ago, then lots of people criticize them on social media and something of theirs gets taken away.
The #metoo movement resulted in a bunch of people, mostly white men, being cancelled like actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Louis CK and movie producer Harvey Weinstein. Although most of the high profile cancelling (as far as I can see) came from the left, people on the right do it too. In 2018, some of them attacked Asian New York Times journalist Sarah Jeong for her satirical tweets about white people she posted in response to tweets like these that she got from white people:
Right wing critics of cancel culture say it’s political correctness on steroids (like, they literally say that.) Political correctness, or PC, is one of those terms that’s often used but poorly understood. Wikipedia describes it as, “a term used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. In public discourse and the media, the term is generally used as a pejorative with an implication that these policies are excessive or unwarranted.”
In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then U.S. President George H. W. Bush used the term in his speech: “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.”
The term PC, as we know it today, emerged in the 1970s and folks on the right have used it since then to target everything from policies against hate speech to affirmative action hiring policies for disadvantaged groups. But the term was used earlier than that. In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits “only to pure ‘Aryans’ whose opinions are politically correct”. This is particularly relevant since some folks on the right sometimes label those they see as being PC, as Nazis. This includes former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson. As a Republican presidential candidate in 2012, Buzzfeed quoted Carson saying, “political correctness has caused Americans to fall silent, very much like the people in Nazi Germany were silent.”
Calling people Nazis is the clearest expression of something about the term PC that’s rarely discussed: it assumes that those being PC have both the desire – and power – to control others’ thoughts and actions. This idea is also behind the term “thought police” covered in the Dec. 1990 Newsweek article, Taking Offense: Is this the new enlightenment on campus or the new McCarthyism? Thought Police. The irony of the right using the term “police” is they’re equating folks on the left with a state institution that has the actual power to enforce behaviour, up to and including killing people. And, even in the U.S., I can’t think of one example of folks saying the police were run by the left unlike what they often say about the media. It’s not folks on the left yelling Blue Lives Matter.
The right also has more power to influence thought, and thus action, through conservative think tanks which include the most influential ones in the U.S. and are about equal in number with progressive ones in Canada.
The conservative American John M. Foundation funded books like Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus in which D’Souza used “[PC] terminology for a range of policies in academia around victimization, supporting multiculturalism through affirmative action, sanctions against anti-minority hate speech, and revising curricula (sometimes referred to as “canon busting”).” Books like D’Souza’s, combined with social media misinformation and conservative talk radio that both overwhelmingly lean to the right, clearly give the right the upper hand when it comes to thought control.
One of the quotes that has stuck with me from my journalism degree is, “The media doesn’t tell people what to think but it tells them what to think about.” The more media “your side” has the more they shape what people think about.
So what other power does the left have?
The left has activists who put their security – and often lives – on the line every day by organizing to expose injustices that show that people in power aren’t following the principles in the documents upon which their organizations are based. The dream that Martin Luther King articulated in his most famous speech was basically that the United States would one day live up to its own constitution. When I was with the Federal Black Employee Caucus, which I co-founded, we spent our time trying to get the federal public service to follow government policy and treat Black employees equitably. We faced a lot of backlash for what we did…and we all know what happened to MLK…
Folks on the right imply that folks on the left have the power to get people cancelled but it’s not the tweeters who cancel people. In most of the high profile celebrity cases at least, it’s massive media corporations that cancel them. And I would argue that it’s the years of personally risky work of activists organizing and raising the issues that makes the companies decide that not cancelling the people could be a risk to their profits because viewers might move to their competitors. One thing backing up my argument is that Facebook and Google, both of whom essentially have no real competition, don’t cancel anything – ever.
In my rabble.ca article COVID-19 could mean we lose and surveillance capitalists win — again, I talked about how Shoshana Zuboff argues in her 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, that Facebook and Google’s business models lead them to aggressively fight against any law or regulation that would require them to remove anything from their platforms. That especially includes misinformation and fake news like conspiracy theories as they generate massive amounts of engagement – and massive profits.
Luckily, most companies have competition and are still very sensitive to anything that might damage their brand, especially ideas spread via social media. But folks taking to Twitter to shame the latest celebrity raises some key questions – if you buy my argument that decades of organizing by activists has been key to causing companies to cancel people. Do those calling for people to be cancelled live their lives each day in ways that actively support activists’ work or do they make that work harder through their own inaction? And if those same people aren’t doing anything in their own lives to address systemic inequities but tweeting, then isn’t demanding apologies from those they shame letting society (of which they’re a part) off the hook for creating the conditions that allowed the people shamed to think that their comments were OK in the first place?
If you really want to show you’re down with the cause, get off the cancellation bandwagon and sign up for monthly donations to a local group working to improve Black and Brown lives.
Note: I took much of the PC info from Wikipedia’s Political Correctness post.