*Originally published on my Patreon, but entirely too important to be in one place.
Now, I don't purport to know it all. I just know what I've seen, what I've experienced, and what people have shared with me. I've written more than one twitter thread about the myth of cancel culture. Before I go any further with this essay, I'd like to establish a few things:
- the root of "cancel culture" is the phrase "call out culture," which is a pathologized response to Black women, non-Black women of color, trans/ GNC folks of all races, and disabled people of all races and genders pushing back against mistreatment in digital and real time situations. Call outs morphed as social media exploded; a lot of bad actors entered the mix.
- the affixing of the phrase "culture" by (mostly) white, monied, cis hetero, and other people who hold an abundance of social currency is a tit-for-tat, both sides reaction to marginalized folks identifying our existence outside the dominant culture. In other words, they're pathologizing us for how we respond/ react to, divest from, and/ or challenge the status quo.
- there is a carceral logic that undergirds the reactions to being called out/ held responsible or accountable. These reactions occur regardless of social standing; larger society does not teach genuine responsibility or accountability for harm doing or mistakes. Because American society teaches all people to identify with people in power, it's more than common to encounter people with little to no social currency who are "against" powerful people being taken to task.
Now, with that out of the way ...
I've been on the internet since 1997, the year I turned 17. We had AOL at home, and my school had broadband in the computer lab. Socializing online, and later meeting people from the web, was considered niche. It was weird, unusual, maybe an indicator that you have no "real" friends. In reality, the situation was more complex for a lot of us. Personally, I was isolated in my school and home environments, and wanted to talk to people who didn't remind me of my life in real time. I was in the "Ebony" chat rooms, meeting Black folks who lived in places I didn't know we fucked with! I was off in my corner of the web, making friends on WBS dot net, Resort dot org (on telnet!), and Black Planet. Where there were gatherings of people --Black women especially -- there are predators, creeps, harm doers, and messy bitches who live for drama. As early as 1999, there were Black Planet pages dedicated to outing white catfish, cheating boyfriends, and scammers. In my AOL network, we made secondary handles to name nerdowells and generally trifling individuals. Some folks may call it bullying today. If I'm being honest, we were (mostly) Generation Xers and Xennials regulating our online communities, as the Terms of Service for these platforms had nothing to offer users in the way of managing interpersonal harm.
In the early aughts, message boards and java chat rooms reigned supreme: OHHLA, SOHH, OKP, Nappturality, and others were our gathering places. Did you dislike that VIBE profile on your favorite rapper? Sound off. Did you have a meetup with other folks from the site? Post your pics, should people out. As it became more common to connect with one another online as well as off, though, people had to navigate "real" interpersonal conflict with "not real" internet-based relationships. I distinctly recall a certain gigolo type dude from Okayplayer being aired out by an anonymous account. Later, another popular user (who was also a well known collaborator of The Roots) being blasted by a little-known account for transmitting an STI to the account owner. It wasn't unusual for groups of women to email, private message, or call each other to talk about the creeps among us. At large offline gatherings, there were dudes from whom you never accepted a drink, cats you didn't allow to drive you home. We knew. We talked. And it was dismissed as gossip, or "bitches talking shit," while that wasn't the case at all. We did what we could with what was available to us.
During the expansion of the blogosphere circa 2008, it became very common to learn of someone's harm doing through a post. There were racist mommy bloggers, proud abusers, thieves, and god knows what else. And that's before we get to the explosion of conservatives who loudly proclaimed they followed us on socials to learn how to harm us. Somehow -- I'm not clear on it, maybe someone else is -- the term "call out" stuck.
The anatomy of a call out, more or less, looks like this: person A harms person B, often more than once, with word/ deed. Person B experiences this harm largely in isolation. They may or may not, depending on ability, stop interacting with Person A. Person A moves on to harm Persons C, D, and E, who have varying experiences with the aftermath. Because persons A through E are part of the same online circle, it eventually becomes clear to persons B through E that they've all been harmed by Person A. In the case of a call out, all harmed parties choose to speak to what's been done to them by Person A. In the early blogosphere/ earlier days of Twitter and Tumblr, a call out was a lot of folks' only way to draw a boundary publicly. "Person A abused me, here's what happened," or "We, Persons B through E, have written this to explain why we don't fuck with Person A anymore." There may not have been a long, drawn out description. There may have been an invitation for others to speak up, or to stay away from Person A because they were harmful. Depending on the situation, Person A lost their entire online community. Often, though, they would end up in another online space where folks maybe didn't know the deal. Sometimes Person A would just disappear for a minute and come back. Some folks would recall, others wouldn't, and maybe the harmful behavior stopped. Not that Persons B through E were required to monitor, of course. It was very rare for people to be doxxed or harassed for being named in a call out; it was much more common for those who spoke up to receive harassment.
Which brings me to the idea of "cancel culture." The term "that's canceled," or "ABC person is canceled," started as AAVE; I first saw it on Twitter from gay Black men and Black trans women. As in, a joking declaration that someone's wig was tired and therefore worthy of getting them canceled. Like a television show that didn't do so well. Knowing that Black cultural production, from language to clothing, is always absorbed into the mainstream culture, I expected "canceling" to take off. What I did not expect: cis hetero Black people using it and all kinds of non-Black people taking it too far. You see, the context of Blackness *and* queer/ transness means certain practices and language are filtered through the lenses of people who do not actually see or understand us. Antiblackness strikes again. You know the deal. Someone took the term out of context and made it serious. It caught on. It took off. This is another, unfortunate, essentially unavoidable result of in-house conversations being had on the internet. Kinda like 2 or more Black folks gathering in a mostly white space being viewed as a "meeting," or the beginning of some kind of revolt.
There's no novelty in the consistently-horrified-and-simultaneously-amused-reaction to any and everything Black people do. When it comes to the internet, we're a social experiment to some. So, the way we react -- Black Americans especially -- to antiblack civilian violence, police violence, and other forms of oppression will always be perceived differently. After all, we have no selves to defend in this world. The second we stand up for ourselves or each other, there's something wrong. We are "just" angry, bitter, making excuses, responding poorly, etc. Never are we considered righteously upset, angry, tired, frustrated. It's never good enough that we say no. We die socially and/ or literally when we say no. Add to that the dominant culture's unending need to pathologize Black folks, and we have scared white ppl of all stripes (and the POC who back them up), billionaires, and all who aspire to their heights clutching their pearls. We're mean internet trolls or whatever.
Maybe you remember Justine Sacco, or the Racists Getting Fired blog. Maybe you saw what happened when people harassed Kehlani into suicide ideation. There are numerous examples of online reactions moving into a space of harassment, death threats, and doxxing. There's swatting, too! So many terms for doing awful shit to damn-near-strangers, or people you wouldn't know existed if someone hadn't put them on your radar. Someone you don't know enough about to dislike, but your friends from 4chan, reddit, and the dark web are encouraging you to go off. Please be clear: posting the government name of someone who's harmed you is not doxxing; it is often a response to escalating harm. Nor is directing people to their alt accounts, especially when they use said alt accounts to surveil or harass.
I think the disconnect, as cited above, is folks identifying with the person(s) wielding power to harm/ deceive folks (examples include Hugo Schwyzer, @emoblackthot, Shaun King, and that girl from Sprinkle of Jesus, alongside BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors). I do not think the majority of people really sit and think about what it means to have a way to publicly address harmdoing. It seems they react the same way our body-shaming elders did us, telling us that some things should not be discussed publicly, if at all. Wanting to tell the entire world what's been done to you is largely considered taboo, even in the age of influencers and reality show stars launching OnlyFans accounts. Because it's not a fucking commodity or a come-up. There are constant declarations that "victims want money," or notoriety, or whatever currency. Nobody gets paid for being a victim unless they're being paid off; that does not at all compare to being paid to share their experiences in certain contexts. In the same vein, who's actually been canceled out here? Who has lost everything because of "internet backlash?"
Justine Sacco is okay. Aziz Ansari is fine. R Kelly still has legions of fans, many of whom have gone into overdrive because of the docuseries about him. And so on. Chrisette Michele may never bounce back. But Mario Batali has returned. Did y'all know about Trey Songz? And I think Chris Brown is doing a Vegas residency. Sure, Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted, but we gotta ask how long she'll be permitted to stay alive. Whose secrets cost more than her life, or the lives of her victims?
I wonder how it is that, of the people I've named here, the only one who seems to be fighting to get back in folks' good graces is a Black woman. That can't possibly be a fluke. After all, #MisogynoirIsAnIndustry. It can be argued that "canceling people is wrong," sure. But we have to actually look at who's been shut out, who's lost everything. Telling the world about your abuser isn't carceral in and of itself. Naming a prolific grifter is not the same thing as the often-invoked lynch mobs, which actually murdered Black people.
There's a level of dishonesty and cruelty at play in the "response to cancel culture," especially when people with so much to say about "not canceling each other" have benefited from the call outs/ public statements/ open letters of victims! There are folks whose writing and other media would be drowned out, or outright stolen by media outlets and institutions without people like me (yes, me!) naming harm when we see it.
I have to ask, when folks talk about the "wrongness" of canceling, what are they really saying? Cuz it don't make a lick of sense to me. Maybe they're digesting the twisted rewriting of the histories of Black women online, and don't even realize it.