The Modern Age of Willful Misinterpretation — How Cancel Culture Has Ruined Us
Without a doubt, we’ve all likely heard the many different arguments over recent years about whether “cancel culture” is a positive or negative occurrence. Usually, these debates end up corrupted into endless circles of reasoning. However, I’ve noticed a very recent trend in how people communicate online that I theorize has roots in the accumulated fear of “being cancelled”, a thought process that has permeated our digital-social atmosphere.
In it’s humble beginnings, “cancel culture” was formed for the sake of holding celebrities and other public figures accountable for their influence on their fans and general audience. Over time, the qualifications for “being cancelled” have expanded beyond having a substantial status in society, and has spread to applying to any person who dares to express an opinion that hasn’t been carefully curated over decades of social-political research, or that doesn’t include as many niche demographic’s perspectives as possible.
By “cancelling” the everyman, a person without any real clout or power has the moral-gates of acceptability opened wide to dangerous levels of harassment, bullying, and anonymous threats. Essentially, the evolution of what was once described as “vigilante justice” has morphed itself into a form of ethically defensible persecution.
There is a healthy difference between being vocal about what - or who -you disagree with, and creating a mob-mentality of subconsciously justified torment against someone or something you disagree with. The viciousness of these attacks speak to a resurgence of moral purity culture, moving to punish the ignorant rather than inform them (or to, god forbid, listen to them).
I, myself, have been a victim of such attacks. Having a single minor instance of miscommunication snowball into hundreds of thousands of people harassing, belittling, and threatening me… I can definitely speak to the depressingly revelatory nature of being on the receiving end of this kind of behavior.
The issue I faced was that I made a video speaking to my interpretation of a song to be especially motivational for young black girls, encouraging them to embrace their natural hair texture. I am biracial, born of a black mother, and appear to many people as white-passing because of this. The miscommunication came through people jumping to the conclusion that I was either 1. appropriating black experiences, or 2. claiming to be transracial. By their own moral-high ground perspective (given the “facts” of their assumption), they had every right to treat me as if I were worthy of endless harassment.
All of the controversy spread so far past my personal profile on social media, that when the “Know Your Meme” website creators made a whole page dedicated to the origins of why people were making fun of me in the first place, they also stated I was an entirely white person who was in the wrong. The miscommunication had officially distorted to misinformation, and I, as a person without the social standing necessary to dispel these rumors and lies, became defunct.
I was forcibly contorted from a human being into just another joke existing solely to help the person making the joke feel like a better person.
Even those confronted with the actual context of the video were quick to defend their callousness, citing that I “was still cringey, so whatever”, or flat-out stating that they believed I was lying about my racial identity to save face. It’s a clear, disturbing example of our developed lack of a sense of responsibility when it comes to the impact of “jumping onto a trend”.
Once again, this is not to say that all assertive disagreement is malicious, but rather to shine a light on the pervasive issue of projecting atrocities onto whoever has been rapidly decided to take the moral fall for our perfectly human differences.
All in all, I just ask that we all take a moment to think of the real cost of casual angry mob-ification before making a martyr out of an everyman.
