How do you 'cancel' power? - CNN

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This week's culture conversation: 'cancel culture'

Brandon: Have you heard about the Goya Foods controversy?

Leah: A bit. Fill me in.

B: After the company's CEO praised President Donald Trump, many Latinos -- the company focuses on the culinary tastes of Latino cultures -- said that they're going to boycott. Predictably, some people, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, didn't like that, and framed the reaction as another instance of "cancel culture."

What comes to mind when you hear that term?

L: My mind goes to R. Kelly, whom many have tried to cancel for his sexual abuse charges. But his music still gets played, regardless of whether people choose to engage with it. So is it even possible to cancel someone? What does that term even mean?

B: I think of cancel culture as a sort of shell game: Its detractors say that they're about free speech, about protecting the First Amendment, but what they're really about, it appears, is freedom from criticism or accountability. To me, it's a term that's just so imprecise and incendiary that it's almost meaningless.

L: OK, that's true. I agree the term itself has basically lost all meaning. But it's an interesting concept, if only because it forces people to look at things as black or white: This person is bad, so we have to cancel them, and never again engage with them. Which isn't how life works. I mean, R. Kelly is referenced enough that he still has some cultural capital, you know?

B: That gets at another problem I have with the way cancel culture is tossed around. Most of the people who've been canceled haven't actually been canceled. I'm not saying that no one's ever been canceled. (Though I don't think that anyone's making that argument?) But true cancellation is the exception, not the rule. The supposedly canceled tend to remain influential. R. Kelly's music is still available on Spotify. Dave Chappelle is still releasing comedy specials. JK Rowling is still a global icon and multimillionaire.

Like "political correctness," cancel culture tries (often disingenuously, I'd argue) to be a container for social and political realities that can't be boiled down that easily. At their core, these are complicated conversations about power, about people -- including women and people of color -- making their voices heard in spaces where they've historically been ignored.

Think about it: Who are the people usually characterized as cancelers? If we go back to the Goya example, it's Latinos, who are pushing back against a CEO's flattery of a President who's spent his time in office disparaging Latino communities in a racist manner. With Rowling, it's transgender communities and their allies, who are rebuking someone who's trafficking in harmful, essentialist notions of gender.

L: Exactly! This idea of canceling someone is so vague. Like, remember when Shane Gillis, who was almost on "Saturday Night Live," was fired for his racist jokes? So many people were all "cancel culture strikes again," rather than actually grappling with the fact that Gillis was merely being held accountable for his actions. These situations always get labeled as "angry internet mobs go after a celebrity," as if the celebrity did nothing wrong.

B: A friend put it to me like this: "Tell me your views on cancel culture, and I'll tell you who you are."

In short: power

The mass reckoning playing out across the country -- on university campuses, in newsrooms, on streets -- is about one thing: power. That makes sense, given that America was founded on extending control to a few while withholding it from the rest.

Or in short: "everything unsettling that is happening right now, in this moment -- perhaps, in yet another letter you've read -- is about power. who has it, who wants it, how its wielded, and what it means to challenge and upend that," as New York Times Magazine writer Jenna Wortham recently tweeted.

The historical context

Eartha Kitt and the Johnson administration

Cancel culture: What a hazy term!

Its critics often conflate First Amendment-enshrined free speech with immunity from disagreement, including on social media. There's a dizzying amount of irony here: The people with healthy platforms -- columns at magazines, lucrative book deals, the White House -- are the ones who often believe that free speech is under siege. Meanwhile, the supposed cancelers are people who, until recently, had very little opportunity to meaningfully shape national conversations.

History offers us an example of what being canceled actually looks like -- and it's far worse than the sting of Twitter rage. In January 1968, the singer, actor, and activist Eartha Kitt attended a White House luncheon on juvenile crime. (She went reluctantly, according to her autobiography, because she "felt a con coming on.") When it was her turn to speak, she excoriated Lyndon B. Johnson's administration and America's involvement in the Vietnam War.

"You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They will take pot ... and they will get high. They don't want to go to school because they're going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam," Kitt said. "Because there is a war on and I pray that there will be a just and honest peace -- that still doesn't give us a free ticket not to try to work for better things such as against crime in the streets, for better education and better health for our people."

After that event, Kitt's career cratered. According to a 1978 New York Times article, "the Central Intelligence Agency, asked by the Secret Service in 1968 about Eartha Kitt, produced an extensive report containing secondhand gossip about the entertainer but no evidence of any foreign intelligence connections."

Unable to find employment in America, she worked for several years in Europe.

In all that is a lesson about proportion. Cancel culture's detractors may not like suddenly having to engage with historically marginalized groups -- but true, government-sanctioned suppression of free speech and diverging opinions is happening all around them, and has been for a long time.

Recommended for your eyes and ears

Is there anything that wouldn't benefit from Viola Davis' presence?

Vanity Fair's latest edition is yet more proof that the answer is no. The photos are stunning: commanding, incandescent.

But also fascinating is the history behind the photos: This was the first time a Black photographer, Dario Calmese, shot the cover of the magazine.

The photos highlight the importance of telling your own history: Calmese said that his goal was to subvert "the White gaze on Black bodies, and (transmute) that into something of elegance and beauty and power."

His work is a world apart from Annie Leibovitz's photos of Simone Biles for Vogue. This difference illustrates that there's still a long way to go in terms of addressing the racial bias of photography.

"The Old Guard" takes the traditional superhero film and turns it on its head. In a genre steeped in both Whiteness and the male gaze (hello, "Catwoman"), this Netflix blockbuster, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, a Black woman, feels like an action film for everyone else.

She takes the backgrounds of Black and gay characters and elevates them in a way that's sweet and focused but not contrived.

It just goes to show you how much power White people have had for so long, and it illuminates what other stories we can tell when other people are behind the camera.

As many in America begin to have difficult conversations on race, similar questions are being raised in other countries in light of the protests here.

Just look at France, a country that prides itself on its assimilation narrative.

The New York Times explored the cultural shift happening there among first- and second-generation immigrants -- and how this shift could shake up the very essence of French society.

Around the office

Daniel Burke, CNN's religion reporter, wrote about how Black Christians are bracing for "whitelash" -- the moment when White Christians tire of continuing the conversation on race after the death of George Floyd, and once again begin to bristle at such topics.

He writes: "White Christian leaders have prayed at vigils and marched in protests, damned the officers accused of killing Floyd and recited the slogan Black Lives Matter, often while distancing themselves from the organization of the same name. One evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, called for a church-led reparations project. But even as they appreciate the scales falling from some White Christians' eyes, some Black Christians remain wary."

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How do you 'cancel' power? - CNN
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