Shifting from Cancel to Accountability Culture

During a December 2014 episode of the critically unacclaimed VH1 reality show, Love and Hip-Hop: New York, cast member Cisco Rosado, exhausted and finished with the actions of her love member, tells Diamond Strawberry during a fight, “You’re canceled.” Shortly after, a surge of social media members took up the ethos of Cisco, and “cancelling” people became a larger part of the internet lexicon.

Since then, ‘cancel culture’ — an uncoordinated effort to mute, shame, or indefinitely exile a public figure who has acted heinously or espoused offensive rhetoric — has become a common tactic to assign blame. Various comedians, actors, musicians, celebrity chefs, and politicians who committed language malfeasance have experienced attempts to nullify their cultural cache or to squash their careers. Recently, this tactic has catapulted into the mainstream with efforts to can bakers, electricians, professors, and data scientists.

The number of Americans jumping on the woke wagon, coupled with others making genuine efforts to rectify their ignorance of this nation’s injustice, will undoubtedly proliferate ‘cancel culture’. The allure of being pious with a clapback is high. Displaying digital scorn over someone’s ignorance, as a sign of doing one’s homework, is way too seductive. The shaming and blaming is too great a weapon to pass up in our raging cultural tribal wars.

And that is why this type of social justice warrior makes me a social justice worry-er. This is not the right way to make progress on our most plaguing issues. The shame game of cancel culture is an all-around losing strategy for social reform.

First, cancel culture simply fails. It does not speak truth to power. It does not deter bad behavior. And, it doesn’t shove out obscene practices or harmful rhetoric. Nor does it actually remove someone from the spotlight. Cancel culture results in zero change.

Aaron Rose is a corporate diversity and inclusion consultant who had been a supporter of neutralizing bad actors, until he realized that the method was futile.” I used to think that those tactics created change, but I realized I was not seeing the true change I desired. We were still sad and mad. And the bad people were still bad,” he noted.