Cancel Culture Anxiety

By Ash Acuña

When I first joined the team at the Women’s Center, one of the very first things we covered were Brave Space guidelines. The three core tenets of Brave Spaces—challenge yourself, respect others, cultivate community—invite curiosity, learning, and safety to improve. Brave Spaces, at times, feel like a replacement for what educational spaces are supposed to represent. Growing up in a time of social media, it feels like everything is at risk of being recorded and put on the internet for others to dissect. Having Brave Spaces reminds me that real life is often not like that—and yet, the anxiety carries over.

I find it odd that my peers will often soften their opinions in class. Classrooms should be a place for learning, but I have heard classmates say, “I don’t want to get canceled for this,” far too many times (and on relatively cold takes, too). They share their thoughts with hesitancy, putting literal disclaimers out ahead of their speech, afraid they will be ostracized for participating in a discussion that is intended for all of us to learn from. Rather than be wrong and grow from it, we live in an age where being wrong in the wrong place can send a hurricane of hate your way.

I feel the same anxiety my classmates do. I see the same people they do get canceled on Twitter and fear my words could also be virally twisted to the point that nobody will listen when I try to defend myself. My own fears stem from the physical world; in 2020, stuck in quarantine with my family, I was verbally attacked by loved ones for what was perceived to be performative activism (rather than burnout and the personal trauma I was sorting out). Unable to defend myself, isolated from a support system, it felt like one wrong move would send me straight to hell. If I didn’t act the exact right way, or didn’t say the exact right thing, then I was a performer, a bad person, a liar who cared more for themself than for the people who they claimed to want to help.

I know I was not the only one who experienced this kind of anxiety; many of my friends stayed silent for fear of saying the wrong thing and getting blasted on Facebook or Instagram stories. I watched as people who seemed to be making honest efforts to improve got dragged for posting about their learning. I have found myself to be in the position of a crusader, having shamed a past partner for not voting when they were able (shaming someone is different than sharing different values; voting was, and is, important to me, but it was not to my partner. Rather than understand that, I tried to coerce—shame—them into believing what I wanted them to). Even though situations are often more nuanced than they appear to be, nuance is not, it seems, easily translated or understood in mob thinking. The social pressure to think like everyone else, at risk of ending up on the side of the attacked, is great enough to cause an emotional spiral.

What I know now is that shame does not work to create change. It is a spiteful, coercive tactic to manipulate people into doing or believing what you want them to. It also does not leave room for learning. Rather than understand why what we did or said was wrong, when we are shamed, we fixate on how to avoid being rejected by our community. Cancel culture necessitates that we publicly shame others into believing they were wrong, but it does not actually teach the wrong-doer how to change their behavior. Cancel culture is operating under the name of “accountability” when it is in reality just a substitute for public shaming. Shame, as Brené Brown puts it, is the feeling that something is wrong with ourselves. Remorse, on the other hand, is understanding the harm our actions have caused.

Cancel culture is often justified by suggesting that the person being canceled should know, or is old enough to know, better. But how do we judge that, without knowing all that a person has experienced? Knowledge is not inherent; we all learn it from someone or something. With my personal experience of having grown up in a highly conservative area, I have seen how the echo chamber of the community you live in is one that could very easily never challenge your beliefs. Let us not forget that higher education is a privilege; even publicly available literature is often inaccessible to those not familiar with academic jargon.

We cannot cultivate community when we are looking for reasons to oust people from it. We are not respecting others when we don’t give them the benefit of the doubt. We cannot challenge ourselves when we don’t feel safe enough to do so.

People are wrong. Frequently. What matters isn’t that we are wrong, it is how we handle it. It is impossible to know everything, especially when the world changes so quickly. A community that will guide us and continue to treat us as humans when we are led astray is the best way to combat ignorance. It helps no one to launch into an immediate attack, throwing inflammatory labels onto someone who, for all we know, may have been truly misguided. And if we are so easily ready to throw stones at those who are wrong, it may be worth looking inwards and treating others with the same grace we should be affording ourselves.

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