Cancel Culture is Paved With Good Intentions
So many problems in our society are the consequence of nothing but a clash of well-intentioned people doing what they think is right, and speaking across one another. The old white man who seeks to become an ally and asks an ignorant question that comes across the wrong way. These people are often ostracized, some might even say canceled, over the very ignorance that they are attempting to remedy. The activist who is genuinely worried about protecting children from permanent consequences and protests gender reassignment therapies. These people are often categorized as homophobic and religious fundamentalists.
Controversies are easy to manipulate for a nefarious agenda. Can we really assume the best intentions when we don’t even know these people? Your answer depends on your level of cynicism. But it is that cynicism and defensiveness that stands in our way. It is the very passion with which we want to do the right thing that often works against us when we judge one another. I recently lived through a prime example of this behavior myself. It was a subtle yet undeniable reminder of a society that encourages us to emit absolute judgment and act on it swiftly.
English being my second language, I still encounter words that are new or unfamiliar. I encountered a handful of new words in a poem that caught my attention.
We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.Reclaim now, now renew the vision of
a human world where godliness
is possible and man
is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kikebut man
permitted to be man.
**― Robert Hayden, Collected Poems **
“What do these words mean?” I asked, “ I read them in this poem.” I shared the poem with a friend. He explained that those were racist slurs and bad ones. “This is an incredibly racist poem!”
I doubted myself before admitting that I did not agree with him. I had asked one of the most well-intentioned and well-read individuals I know. My friend is a communications expert and yet we thought the moral of this poem was about exactly opposite things! Better to be sure: I read it again, and again, and even with the understanding of those words, I still stood by my original conclusion.
“Are you sure the poem is racist?” I asked “It kind of sounds like the opposite to me. Who is this Robert Hayden anyway?” “I don’t know and I don’t want to know.” He said.
You might be able to spoil my punchline if you are a fan of American poetry from the 70s, but how could I have known? Surely my friend, an American concerned with social issues and a native English speaker, was in a much better position to understand this than I, an immigrant with less than a decade in this country, will ever be. I googled the author. No sense in continuing to embarrass myself on an issue as delicate as racism.
Robert Hayden was the first African American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and is an icon of Afro-American poetry. Further, this poem is a critique to the labels that we impose on others and to our inability to let people just be people. Why was my friend so wrong about this? For the same reason that many well-intentioned anti-racism Americans would be: The cultural obsession with cancel culture and political correctness.
Suddenly my blindness to political correctness felt like an asset to deal with complexity because it is. The meaning of the poem was obvious to me precisely because the racial and homophobic slurs did not hit me with the same intensity. My friend, unfortunately for Mr. Hayden, did not grow up equally shielded from the meaning of those words. I wonder what he would have thought about the fact that in only a few decades, America’s obsession with virtue signaling would preclude his message from being heard.
Our obsession with cancel culture and zero tolerance is rendering us blind to real meaning and real intentions. If intentions no longer matter, then we all better start thinking more carefully about the consequences on both ends. How many well-intentioned people making important points are we avoiding listening to every day? Think about that next time you take someone for a blatant bigot with no right to be heard.