The Lessons of My Day of Mini-Cancellation
Six years ago, I made the mistake of posting a clickbait parody in a Facebook group. It was a spoof of the obnoxious fad for having a college-age intern or freelancer write about a classic piece of entertainment through the prism of contemporary cultural hypersensitivity.
Satire is tricky because it’s so easy to misunderstand. The target of my satirical piece wasn’t the young people forced to write these cynical exercises in clickbait, possibly at gunpoint, but rather editors and publishers who understand that these articles score major page views because they make people angry. The not-so-secret purpose of these odious articles is to make Gen-Xers apoplectic, so that they’d share them on Facebook and Twitter with scathing commentary or email them to a friend they think will also feel insulted by it.
These pieces do serve one valuable purpose, however. If nothing else, they illustrate that Blazing Saddles could NEVER get made today. All the butthurt snowflakes would be so offended that they’d need to retreat to their safe spaces.
I do a lot of clickbait parodies because clickbait enrages me. Writing spoofs of popular clickbait formats, like “I’m 22 Years Old and Just Watched (Important But Possibly Problematic and Poorly Aged Classic) For the First Time.”
I thought the target and point of my satirical piece were clear. The members of the Facebook group felt strongly otherwise. They thought that I was making fun of a young writer thrown to the wolves for the sake of attention and ad revenue. Since the writer of the article I was spoofing was a person of color, a consensus quickly formed that the article was racist and that I was, by extension, also racist.
The response was so bad that I deleted my post. I did not realize then that deleting something on Facebook is a major modern faux pas, an online transgression. It’s seen as a sign of guilt that the perpetrator has committed such a heinous and incriminating act that they tried to erase evidence of their transgressions from the internet.
I did not know that then. Internet etiquette can be tricky to understand, even if you are not autistic like me.
I will be the first to concede that I probably could have handled the situation better, but I was in a no-win situation. Because some of the people who had commented on the piece were not white or male, I was accused of trying to silence and censor women of color.
It felt awful. Nobody wants to be called racist or sexist unless they’re proud of their bigotry. If I tried to explain my motivation and intentions, it was seen as the defensive mansplaining of a typical heterosexual white dude who freaks out when they’re called out.
The situation grew more hopeless and impossible by the minute. For this Facebook group, this article wasn’t just one of literally thousands, even tens of thousands, that I’d written over the course of my 28 years as a pop culture writer. For these glowering scolds, this piece represented the entirety of my life and career, and exposed me as racist, sexist, ageist, and unwilling to admit to my myriad character flaws. Critics didn’t just see it as a bad piece of comedy writing; they thought I was a bad person for writing and sharing it.
There could be no redemption arc for me. Even if I begged for forgiveness, I’d nevertheless always be the guy who posted a racist article, then deleted it.
I left the group. It was such a difficult day and made such an indelible impression on me that I still remember it fairly vividly to this day, even though it was ultimately nothing more than a few hours of internet melodrama.
It was useful, however, in that it gave me insights into the excesses of woke. Here’s the thing: an excellent argument can be made against the excesses of woke, but it is not the one conservatives are making. It’s not the one leftists are making either, but I’ll have a go at it here.
At the risk of stating the obvious, people do not want to be held to impossible standards of cultural sensitivity, then punished harshly when they inevitably fail to meet them. People don’t want to feel like a single online blunder can destroy their reputation.
People are put off by the rigidity, harshness, and moralism of the excesses of woke, at the idea that there are self-appointed gatekeepers of language and culture making unwritten rules they must follow or be punished disproportionately. They’re repelled by the self-righteousness of people who are quick to judge but slow to forgive.
The rigidity of woke excess does not acknowledge that sometimes people make mistakes and say the wrong thing not because they’re racist or sexist or transphobic, but rather because they’re human beings, and human beings make mistakes. That’s why forgiveness is so important.
It’s essential to hold people accountable, particularly those in power. It’s quite another to nail relatively powerless people to the wall over perceived transgressions.
To cite another example of woke excess, in an entirely different Facebook group, one member would respond to any positive references to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris by saying that they had blood on their hands, are pro-genocide, and might as well be in the Gaza Strip with machine guns hunting children.
I’m pro-Palestinian. I think that what Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip is deplorable and genocidal, but I also think that accusing leftists of being pro-genocide if they express sadness that Kamala Harris lost on the day Trump was inaugurated is only going to push them away.
The Democrats reportedly spent 20 million dollars on focus groups in an attempt to reach working-class men.
What the left needs to do is be less self-righteous and judgmental and more flexible and forgiving. It needs to encourage people to be more culturally sensitive rather than eviscerating people for cultural insensitivity. Every powerful movement engenders backlash. The response to woke has been fierce, out of control, and nonsensical. The right’s antidote to the extremely online left’s cultural hyper-sensitivity has been to actively encourage purposeful cultural insensitivity, to bring back all of the verboten words and stereotypes that we were allowed to say as kids but are now forbidden because they are cruel and hurtful. In a deliberately cruel and hurtful society, that no longer qualifies as perjorative.
The right isn’t making incisive criticism of the excesses of woke. Instead, they’ve adopted it, along with DEI, as all-purpose cultural boogeymen to be scapegoated for everything that goes wrong in society. Plane crash? Woke, incompetent pilots hired through DEI. The salmon you ordered for dinner was a little bland? Woke chefs are to blame.
The definition of "woke" has become so broad and vague as to be meaningless. If a word applies to just about everything, then it ultimately means nothing.
Rather than criticize the reality of woke, the right has constructed a garish cartoon caricature, complete with pink hair, unflattering clothing choices, regrettable piercings, and deafening volume.
Instead of mounting a convincing argument against woke, the right screeches and points an angry finger of judgment at those tempted to judge them.
Trump likes to say that woke is dead. In its original, purest form, woke was largely a matter of cultural sensitivity. Cultural sensitivity in Trump’s America may not be dead but the poor fucker is, at the very least, on life support.
You can pre-order my upcoming book, The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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