No one can seem agree upon the origin of the label “cancel culture.” In a December 2020 article in the New York Times entitled, “The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture, Ligaya Mishan cited that the term’s evolution began in the early 21st century from a Chinese phrase, renrou sousuo, which translates precisely as “human flesh search.” What initially started a rallying of common causes morphed into identifying and disparaging of societal transgressors. According to Ms. Mishan, “Media coverage in the West framed renrou sousuo as an exotic phenomenon, almost unheard-of outside China. It couldn’t happen here.”
However, contrary to Ms. Mishan’s theory, in reality the usage of cancel in the way it’s thought of today can be traced back to the 1983 album Take It Off by the Pop/RB group, Chic. One of the tracks was “Your Love Is Canceled” which compared a break-up to the cancellation of a TV show. The term spread within the African-American community and reached popularity on Black Twitter five or six years ago. Artists and platform users regularly called each other out, sometimes in a lighthearted manner and other times in a more unrelenting way to redirect thought on serious issues or for cultural lapses.
However, the majority of African-Americans who have navigated a historically racist nation for decades understand that cancel culture began with slavery and continued through Reconstruction, The Lost Cause, Jim Crow and the present-day interconnected structures of systemic racism. Chandra Bozelko wrote in the St. Augustine Record in September 2020, “The thing about cancel culture is that it is our history. No matter how one beholds this social phenomenon, it’s prudent to remember that it’s a vestige of slavery, or at least the organized efforts to maintain it.”
Regardless of its beginnings, cancel culture has become another in a long line of African-American ethnological foundations that have now been confiscated by a segment of White society. One only has to watch commercial television to see the extent of these expropriations of dance, song and gestures. As James Baldwin opined in September 2010 in the New York Times, “I DO not know what White Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound.” Yet we remain among the most disfavored racial groups, not only in this country, but globally. Now cancel culture has taken on a life of its own and it’s another gift that we’ve offered up with little in return.
In present day America, the characterization has been commandeered and weaponized by reactionary political and media influencers promoting the false narratives of victimology and grievance in effort to cloak odious personal behavior and professional malfeasance as a means of evading warrantable consequences. In the minds of these new perpetrators, they are experiencing a perceived defenselessness that we as African-Americans have known from the time our ancestors landed on this nation’s shores. When privileged hucksters like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and others fulminate about being held accountable by external forces beyond their control, it only authenticates the weaknesses in their arguments and the inability to explain their actions.
Shanita Hubbard, Freelance Task Force Chair for the National Association of Black Journalists commented in the Insider, “the term ‘cancel culture’ is being used as a shield as people try to evade responsibility for their actions and decry any kind of public accountability.” If reasonable people can agree on her premise, we will benefit greatly as a society because an understanding will have been reached that indeed, there are consequences to our actions. As far as the right-wing voices are concerned who complain about being canceled? Welcome to the club.