When is cancel culture going to be canceled?
America has been more emotional than it ever has been. And it’s dangerous.
From politics to entertainers to products, everything seems to be getting “canceled.”
George Washington, Jeff Bezos, Jeanna Marbles are being canceled. In fact, July 4th, skin-whitening lotions, Mount Rushmore are being criticized as well. Heck, we might as well cancel America at this point.
Cancel culture is a form of boycott of an entity that has acted in a controversial way in the present or even the past. For example, since Kanye West suggested that slavery was a choice, canceling him would mean to not listen to his music or to bombard his twitter feed with “CANCELED,” or “never listening to you ever again!”
However, cancel culture is more than just harmless criticism. It might very well be the cause of society’s downfall.
The influence of social media has made cancel culture more powerful than ever. After digging up some dirt of a celebrity and exposing them online, the wildfire begins. Twitter threads, TikTok videos, YouTube videos all going after someone for an incidence of the past.
Not only is it silly to cancel someone of their past mistakes, but it sets up this foundation of a sensitive culture. Can you imagine someone canceling a product because it’s tailored to a different race?
Last month, Johnson & Johnson released that they will stop selling skin-whitening lotions. This was because they were receiving backlash for promoting “whiter skin” over their natural skin color.
The problem is that different cultures have completely different perceptions of beauty. People don’t use these skin-whitening products because they think that the color white is superior to other colors, they use it because they view it as more beautiful.
Of course, this isn’t to deny the beauty of other colors, but we should respect what is considered beauty in other countries.
The media and Gen-Z wanted to cancel the 4th of July as well.
Why?
Because it doesn’t represent freedom for slaves.
The 4th of July is celebrated to commemorate the Declaration of Independence. This means that we are celebrating freedom from Britain, nothing else. The 4th of July was never about freedom for every single human in America. Trying to twist the narrative of what the 4th represents discredits all the hard work of our Founding Fathers.
It discredits all the rights that you are able to have, such as this cancel culture phenomenon.
While protests and riots continue in our country, the call to take down statues of our “racist” Founding Fathers start. Who would’ve thought that we would be canceling the men that built our country?
The argument is that our founding fathers owned slaves; thus, their racist statues must be removed.
However, the truth is the majority of people in the 18th century owned slaves. Owning slaves, back then, wasn’t seen as a bad thing nor was it illegal to do so. We can all agree that owning slaves is terrible; however, using modern standards to evaluate someone of the past is disingenuous.
Moreover, to discredit all the things they’ve done for our country just because they owned slaves is immature and shows the lack of an objective view.
So why does all of this matter? Isn’t cancel culture just criticism?
Cancel culture is criticism, but there’s a broader issue surrounding this culture that has become prevalent. Canceling everything (literally everything) creates an extremely sensitive society.
A sensitive society is an emotional society where feelings are always involved. We see this with Washington; they let their feelings take over, and consequently, are unable to look at it from a birds-eye view.
However, it also stops any civil conversation from happening because their emotions will take over. They’ll simply walk off or furiously cancel someone if they disagree with their view.
A society that relies on emotion tends to be easily manipulated by the media and the government. If we continue to be gullible and naive, the government will infiltrate our minds in a matter of weeks.
They can use any mediums of emotion to evoke a response, even dangerous ones such as revolutionary calls or pitting a race against another.
The broader issue that resides with us is not letting our emotions overtake our senses. We can start to do this by canceling cancel culture.
This paper is written and submitted anonymously.
