You can’t Love your Neighbour if you Cancel Them

In the last few years there has been a growing trend across social media called cancel culture. Cancel culture is a form of online shaming individuals or companies for comments they have made across social media. It can mean accusations of spreading violence, hate speech or being politically incorrect. There will be those that push for the person to be silenced, and the possibility of losing their jobs in the process or being de-platformed from mainstream platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. This modern wave cancel culture seems to be rooted in identity politics and has been on the increase since Donald Trump won the election in 2016. In 2018 the most notable case was when Alex Jones and Info Wars lost their social media channels on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube for apparently violating their terms of service. At that time, Infowars had around a million followers or more on those platforms. Despite the bans Infowars has continued to grow with around 10 million visiting the site as of 2020. (Infowars.com Traffic Statistics, 2020)

Cancel culture has slowly been increasing over the most recent years but has really gone into overdrive in 2020. During the Covid 19 crisis and subsequent lockdowns that made people spend more time online as people were working from home, as well schools and universities being shut. On the 25th of May 2020, the death of George Floyd gained international attention and sparked a series of protests, riots across the USA but also in different parts of the world. This led to an online surge in ‘racial awareness’ with ‘Blackout Tuesday’ where people around the world, including celebrities posted a black square on Instagram. It did not stop there as it led to protests in various cities, as well as the removal and desecration of statues, and the removal of bands. The most known brand that had pressure put on it was Aunt Jemima that featured a black woman as a part of the product logo design and it led to the company deciding to retire the image in favour of ‘progressing towards racial equality’. (NBC News, 2020) Voice actors also took to twitter apologising for the roles they had portrayed in animated shows, such as Bojack Horseman actress Alison Brie apologised for her role as Diane, who in the show was a Vietnamese-American. (News, 2020) It begs the question where one draws the line since acting is simply playing the role of someone you are not in a fictional setting. Of course, in biographical dramas it is important to get someone that looks like the person the story is about, but that is certainly applicable to cartoon shows. Does it require every character on the show to be played by someone that looks like them in real life? In Family Guy, the character Joe is a disabled police officer, does that mean the actor who plays the voice needs to be disabled? Or even more precise than that a disabled police officer who can’t act? No one seems to have an answer for it and there does not yet seem to be a line either. It went from people pushing pressure on celebrities to act in a certain way or face being cancelled, to celebrities as in the case of Alison to pre-emptively cancel herself, that most likely is only to avoid her own backlash. Cancel culture in 2020 has not just been about race however, as J.K Rowling posted some tweets about women and gender that drew attention from all around the world with numerous articles about it. It went further than just targeting J.K Rowling, even an author that liked one of the tweets then had her deal with a publisher terminated simply on the basis of liking one of these tweets. An objection of course to cancel culture can often be seen to express words or sentiments that could be identified as “right wing” or the type of thing Trump would say. However, Trump himself has done the same thing, indulging in cancel culture such as withdrawing America’s WHO membership. It is seemingly can be used by either side of the political spectrum if it is used for different reasons and can be done on a moment’s notice, pushing so far that any bridge between them is burnt. The question is though, is it right? Do you keep pushing till the bridge is burnt, without mercy? That unless you have the exact same opinion or view, that you need to be censored? Christianity by its nature has an objection to cancel culture. Christians follow the teachings of Christ and the applications. One of Jesus’s commandments was to love your neighbour as yourself. Christianity is rooted in the idea of mercy, grace and forgiveness, because human nature is inherently broken and sinful. It means that once you become a Christian you are forgiven of all past sins---those times you have gossiped about people, or making the most stupid mistakes, or the times you lied and disobeyed your parents. Which means that when we come to loving our neighbours it means that we are reminded when people hurt us, that we should do our best to forgive them, show them mercy and forgiveness as is the same mercy Christ has given us. Otherwise it would be hypocritical to no forgive others when we too have been forgiven. Loving your neighbour as yourself means that if you love them as Christ loves us, that we wouldn’t want to attack them, assault them in public and seek to destroy their reputations in character assassinations, we would want to build or repair the bridge between them. It is far better to have and more fruitful to discuss why it might be a problem for a product to have an ethnic minority on their logo. But it is also important to hear both sides to the discussion, rather than simply tearing the others apart. In the end if we keep pushing against everybody that disagrees with us we will end up in a segregated society—between two sub-cultures. Or do we strive towards what Jesus said, loving our neighbour and forgiving them even when they harm us?

References

News, T., 2020. ‘Bojack Horseman’ Actor Alison Brie Apologizes For Playing A Vietnamese-American Character. [online] TVweb. Available at: <https://tvweb.com/bojack-horseman-alison-brie-apology/> [Accessed 15 August 2020].

NBC News. 2020. Aunt Jemima To Change Name, Remove Image From Packaging. [online] Available at: <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/aunt-jemima-brand-will-change-name-remove-image-quaker-says-n1231260> [Accessed 15 August 2020].

SimilarWeb. 2020. Infowars.Com Traffic Statistics. [online] Available at: <https://www.similarweb.com/website/infowars.com/#overview> [Accessed 15 August 2020].