How Cancelling Can Uphold Injustice
When instant deplatforming silences already marginalised voices
I f you’ve spent any time around progressive areas of the internet, I’m sure you’ve witnessed discussions of cancel culture. You may even have seen it in action. It’s an extension of the concept of deplatforming. When someone wishes to debate in the ‘free marketplace of ideas’ with bad faith, they may be signalling to white supremacists, queerphobes, or some other group that wishes to remove the rights of others, or they may be explicitly calling for violence.
Deplatforming is founded on the principle that by taking away the megaphone, the spread of these destructive, insidious views will be diminished, showing the speaker that their ideas are not welcome. To paraphrase Karl Popper in An Open Society and its Enemies, tolerance is paradoxical. If a society is too tolerant of intolerant viewpoints, the intolerant ideas will eventually become acceptable at the highest levels of society, leading to a less open and free society overall.
Cancel culture, then, is a lowering of the threshold of what a dangerous ideology is, resulting in less tolerance of mistakes in otherwise well-meaning people. It is the deplatforming of people without knowing their intentions or ideology; only that their views are not exactly the same as yours.
Cancel Culture in the Field
The cancellation of a recent trans vigil in Brighton, planned for Saturday the 4th of July 2020, is a blatant example of this issue. What started as a small trans vigil ballooned into a much larger event. Two weeks before the planned event date, the organiser put out a call for speakers. This included directly contacting queer and trans people of colour (QTPoC) activist organisations, from which they received no responses.
A week before the event, they released the itinerary, including the lineup of speakers. The overall feedback appeared generally positive. However, the day before the event was scheduled, Concerns were raised about a lack of PoC in the speaking lineup. This snowballed into public accusations of racism and direct messages to the organiser demanding an explanation. In the end the organiser (a disabled non-binary person) was criticised for going to bed instead of staying up late into the night instead of answering Facebook messages.
Eventually the felt they had no choice but to cancel the event. They became too overwhelmed. So there was no trans vigil. No place for that conversation to continue. With increased awareness, this event could reach a wider audience. It could attract more speakers; more diverse speakers, and improve year-on-year. Only now, it can’t.
The Weaponisation of Knowledge
Cancel culture is often seen to stem from a need to feel morally superior to another by flaunting your knowledge. It follows a dangerous paradigm — that anybody who says or does anything else that disagrees with your morals is ill-intentioned, and thus must be deplatformed. There is no room for mistakes.
The reality of this is that we are all human, and nobody is perfect. We all have blindspots. We may have tried as much as we are able to improve our actions, but are hindered by circumstance. The least we can do is treat each other with compassion and aim to compassionately and constructively educate each other.
By attacking people fighting for the same goal as us, we divide ourselves. We silence important voices. Trans and non-binary people don’t need that. We’re already often dismissed by cis gays, who seem to gain mainstream acceptance in part by distancing themselves from the rest of the LGBTQ+ community. There are many who deny our existence, blocking the conversation from progressing towards rights, medical treatment, and wider conversation and visibility.
In this way, cancel culture plays perfectly into the hands of people who benefit from our silence. People don’t speak up out of fear that they’ll be attacked by not only bad-faith actors, but members of their own community.
This also bites back when cancelling people outside the LGBTQ+ community. Well-meaning allies who misspeak end up being dogpiled. Again, this could prevent them from speaking up in the future, or alternatively may lead to them doubling down on their mistake and pushing them away. This is also seen in the dredging up of years-old tweets a la James Gunn, which can be leveraged by the far right to destroy careers.
“The enemy of progress is perfectionism”, and as much as I hate to quote Churchill, that statement is not wrong. If we fear being wrong, we fear the opportunity to grow. If we attack others for missteps, it becomes a projection of our own fear of being wrong. This perfectionist anxiety can be so paralysing that many people end up doing nothing because if we don’t act, we can’t make an imperfect action.
Community over competition
Cancelling shows a complete lack of any nuanced understanding of other people. Either they exactly agree with you, or they’re against you. By not allowing room for growth or discussion, you make sure they are less likely to agree with you in the future.
The target must be community, not competition. Progressivism is difficult, that’s indisputable. Everyone has their own ideas of how to move society forward for the better. It requires overcoming ingrained prejudices and questioning the unjust structures that permeate our societies. We’re using abstract, often nebulous ideas of progress that are alien to some members of the public. However by not discussing and negotiating, instead opening with attack, there is no chance of a cohesive and coordinated response to the very real existential crises we currently face. We’ve had the rounding up and murder of LGBTQ+ people in Chechnya. We have continually high suicide, murder, and homelessness rates for LGBTQ+ people. As we speak, the US, UK, and Brazilian governments wish to roll back career, anti-discrimination, and healthcare policies for LGBTQ+ people.
The current political right do it so well because they know what they want. Theyre geared towards maintaining the status quo of a cisheterosexual white-supremecist patriarchy. The various factions are happy to cohere around their mutual dislike and subsequent exclusion of groups they dislike. Don’t do their job for them.
