Cancel Culture Gone Awry

Hesitant to ask, lest be cancelled.

I was born in 1973. My early educational years from preschool at Ms. Anna’s Day School through primary school at Newport Elementary were the years I most cherish from my childhood.

During those years, I spent a lot of time with my great grandmother Ruth who had a bigger than life personality. She was a strong, independent, force to be reckoned with, having a formidable sense of self, despite being a woman born in 1898, who also had a penchant for statement jewelry adorned with large precious gemstones. She commanded presence and attention, just by being in the room. Her imprint on me has been greater than anyone else in my family who came before me other than my mother. I truly loved and adored her and am so grateful for all the years I got to spend with her before she passed.

I also spent a lot of time with my great aunt Louise. On weekends I would sleep over at her home where I would go swimming on Saturdays and to church with her on Sundays at the Church of Christ, Scientist. She taught me The Lords Prayer when I was itty bitty and we would recite it together each night when she tucked me into bed.

I was a Brownie and a Girl Scout, each year outselling everyone in my troop when it came time to canvass my neighborhood, street by street, door by door, introducing myself, retailing cookies and calendars.

As a little girl I loved school and was considered, what back then was called a “teacher’s pet”. Mrs. Steckbauer was that one teacher who left an impression on me long after I left her classroom. She had a poster of Tom Selleck on the rear side of her office door, which adjoined to our classroom. Magnum P.I. was a huge hit at the time. Mrs. Steckbauer was forthright and “to the point”, always letting me know when my Chatty Kathy-ness was disruptive in class and needed to be curbed. Honest, direct, yet neutral, without judgement. Kind. Just wanting the best from me. She saw me, believed in me and helped me believe in myself.

Instilled in me over those formative years was the idea that “there is no such thing as a stupid question.” This refrain was repeated often to my peers and me in school and out. As learners, as young people, as the newest generation of the future, we were encouraged to ask questions, hypothesize, seek truth, run for Student Council, write for the newspaper and join the debate team.

In hindsight, the fertile seeds planted by these influential women when I was a young girl, took hold and flourished into many of the beliefs and characteristics that represent much of who I am today and what I value most.

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Like my great grandmother Ruth, I am a strong, capable woman and an independent thinker who subsequently often finds myself marching to the beat of a less followed drum. Home birthing both of my children, practicing homeopathy and natural medicine almost exclusively, believing in our body’s ability to heal via more natural and Eastern methods, and attending church most Sundays with my children, trickled down, I believe, from spending weekends with my Christian Science practicing aunt. Being comfortable standing in my truth and choices that are less familiar to many, therefore definitely not popular or “on trend”, and even at times disagreed with and challenged, are characteristics I witnessed both of these women model.

I am also an entrepreneur today just as I was exemplifying the entrepreneurial spirit as a Girl Scout. Confident in my ability to figure things out, gumption to try, hard working, gritty and resilient leanings, understanding “failure” or falling short as just a data point, and risk tolerant are core attributes of who I am, due in part to engaging in activities that required these skills long before I was old enough to be afraid and doubtful to enter the arena. Selling cookies and calendars, one door knock after the other, and earning Brownie and Girl Scout badges out in the world of my neighborhood, anchored these proclivities within me.

Additionally, I am an avid reader and researcher who believes deeply in the importance of inquiry, dialogue and discussion as a vital means to learn, discover truth, and progress. Being curious, with a strong desire to learn, grow and share what I have found to be true are hallmarks of my personality hailed from the classrooms, student government campaigns, debate competitions, and newsroom of my school.

In countless ways, we all are a reflection of what we were steeped in as children. Cups of tea, flavored by the tea bags of life’s happenstance. The people and experiences that infuse us ever so slightly yet profoundly, usually unnoticeably in the moment.

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Today I find myself afraid to ask many questions. Lest out of ignorance — the exact ignorance I want to transmute to knowledge, understanding and insight — I “misspeak” and end up in the crosshairs of an unforgivable aggression, micro or otherwise. I am hesitant to explore a topic or idea, in dialogue or in my writing, weary of the castration if I don’t “hook line and sinker” tow the mob narrative.

Our Constitutional rights upon which our Democracy was built, include checks and balances such as freedom of speech, the press, to assemble and petition as critical means to fight against injustice and power. As too, the origins of cancel culture which evolved from a means to shift power through boycotting during the Civil Rights Movement.

Years later, cancelling entered Black pop culture first in Nile Rogers’ 1981 song Your Love Is Cancelled, then the Wesley Snipes movie New Jack City in 1991, followed by the reality show Love and Hip Hop: New York in 2014, finally solidifying not long after into the popular American lexicon via Black Twitter. Today cancelling has circled back to a tool to combat power and to wield it.

However, the use of cancelling to fight injustice has devolved at times to an erroneous rush to judgement, manipulation and even relentless bullying, which has resulted in catastrophically unjust outcomes including the loss of careers, livelihoods, relationships, reputations, opportunities and the ultimate loss — the loss of life.

How can we learn if we can not ask those who know more than us, who have intimate understanding through personal experience, who have learned things we have yet to find in our own research or life experiences if we are too afraid to broach the subject?

I was taught in my classrooms, all the way through graduate school, to think for myself in search of the nuance, truth, and possibilities, not just the unequivocal binary. To uncover and contemplate what everyone else is ignoring and why. And my peers and I did this through discourse. Raising our hands and pondering out loud, oftentimes vulnerably because we were unsure. Thinking, discussing, even debating is how we processed, learned and progressed.

I remember hearing a dear friend in business school say the simple yet powerful statement, “Good point. I had not considered that before.” The need to be staunch in a viewpoint just melts away with that statement. It instantly creates time to pause, to consider. The space to change our mind. To evolve our thinking.

Isn’t that the point?

I wonder to myself often, if I grew up in the current cultural climate, as my own children are, who would I be today? Would I be the person who Ruth, Louise and Mrs. Steckbauer instilled the confidence, conviction and curiosity to seek?

Knowing how high the stakes are, would I have embraced the same vulnerability and bravery I did when I was young, to explore the world around me, asking questions and pushing for greater understanding?

I would like to think so, but I am not so sure.

WRW