On February 19th 2021, I posted about Woke and its widespread current usage to describe a form of social awareness. I also described virtue signalling defined as:
the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue.
The term cancel culture is also now being widely used and this article sheds some light on its origin and meaning.
When something is canceled, it is nulled, ended, voided. Done, over, no longer wanted, like a TV show or subscription. This sense of cancel is the basic idea behind the slang meaning of canceling a person. When a person is canceled, they are no longer supported publicly.
Canceling spread as a term and phenomenon in the public consciousness with the #MeToo Movement , as major public figures—from Harvey Weinstein to Matt Lauer to Louis C. K. and R. Kelly—were getting canceled due to credible allegations of sexual violence in their past. Other figures were getting canceled for past racist and anti-LGBTQ remarks, such as Shane Gillis and Kevin Hart, respectively.
Usually public figures are said to be canceled after it has been discovered that they have done something offensive. It involves calling out the bad behaviour, boycotting their work (such as by not watching their movies or listening to their music), and trying to take away their public platform and power. This is often done in a performative way on social media.
We should note that a variety of earlier slang senses of cancel can be found reaching into the 1990s. (One such vivid sense is “to murder.”) The spread of this slang sense is commonly credited to Black Twitter in the mid-2010s, which often used cancel about issues of discrimination and racism.
These figures—and many more—did lose their careers, reputations, or work opportunities after getting canceled. And with respect to #MeToo, many effectively lost their lives as they knew them. But in 2019, there was growing backlash against what came to be called cancel culture in the late 2010s. Culture refers to the shared attitudes and actions of a particular social group. Call-out culture is used in a similar way.
Criticisms of cancel culture centred on the feeling that people were becoming too keen to ruin lives over mistakes made many years ago. That people didn’t get a second chance. That social media is too quick to pile on and police increasingly high standards of political correctness and do so in a way that simply is virtue signaling and performatively woke. That canceling has gone too far and simply become a way of rejecting anyone you disagreed with or someone who did something you didn’t like. Former President Barack Obama notably criticised cancel culture (though not using the words as such), arguing that easy social media judgments don’t amount to true social activism.
Others, meanwhile, have criticised cancel culture for being ineffective or argue that it isn’t even real—that the likes of Louis C.K. still get a stage and an audience, if less than before, despite the sexual assault claims against him. That people still listen to Michael Jackson’s music despite the sexual and child abuse claims against him.
Yet others object to the name cancel culture, arguing that the label misunderstands that people are simply trying to hold people accountable for their actions.
Cancel culture started trending again in 2020 amid increased awareness of and opposition to racial injustice following the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd. Discussion of cancel culture flared up in the mainstream media after the publication of a letter criticising cancel culture in Harper’s Magazine and President Donald Trump compared cancel culture to totalitarianism.
The ongoing protests also led to renewed demands for the canceling of already controversial things such as symbols of the Confederacy, statues of Christopher Columbus, and the name of the Washington Redskins football team, which announced it would change its name after intense pressure from team sponsors.
From https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/cancel-culture/
At the current time, Dr. Seuss books are victims of the cancel culture and woke librarians are busy removing all copies from library shelves. Even the Sydney Morning Herald ran an article titled The cancel culture that stole Dr Seuss. There are no limits to this madness and anything ever written may fall victim to the purge if it is deemed to offend woke standards. The following excerpt from this article provides a good criticism of this insanity:
The National Library of New Zealand recently decided to dispose of 600 000 books including prized first editions of English literature classics to make way for the growing New Zealand, Maori and Pacific collection.
This may be a budget thing: ’a not enough space’ type of argument but I smell cancel culture and the identity politics creed that has been woodworming academica and bureaucracy for some years now.
The rationale that has become fashionable since black lives now matter, is that policies, laws and icons that stem from the past must be eradicated. This is because the colonists, rulers, inventors and developers of the most successful technological societies in modern history were almost exclusively European males; now invalidated by the lack of indigenous participation.
It is propounded that the general oppression and inability of most people of colour from Africa and the Pacific to get rich, get educated and successfully contribute to society is directly attributable to and caused by these white despots.
Hence the re-writing of history and the toppling of statues, renaming of roads and places with European names.
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My Facebook post even elicited a response from a friend who is normally at odds with my world view.
