BYE BYE CANCEL CULTURE!

Let me paint a picture for you. It's 2012 and after a long day of class you hop straight on Twitter. You're scrolling everyone's making a tweet for the hashtag of the day, you may see a vine or two, and shouting out whoever earned your 500th tweet dedication. Remember the vibes yet? Before there were memes and gifs, we had hashtags of the day and twitter jails that we were subject to after flaming the life out of our homies. It was a place filled of crude jokes and no hard feelings. You could state your opinion without fear of being shamed for it. If "agree to disagree" was a place, it was certainly Twitter.

It's no secret that the advancement of technology and social media over the years has been profound. With the spike of the digital age and its usage almost everyone is online, our lives are fully scoped and there are less intimate moments. That means more personality, more people from different walks of life, more reach, and more differences of opinion. Over an eight year span a lot of things that were uncommon in 2012 are now acceptable. Media is now becoming more censored in respects to feelings or making everyone feel "inclusive". I'll be honest... 2012 me would've been packed up and canceled. Let's get to the real point. What is cancel culture? It is a form of boycott that focuses on an individual, normally a celebrity, whose opinion is questionable or controversial to the general public. It's literally public shaming. Its whole ideology is obtuse as hell to me. For starters, something that originated as a joke is now a full blown movement. Furthermore, I find myself questioning whether or not cancel culture has gone too far? What are the grounds of being canceled? And why do we care so much about OPINIONS? Cancel culture is trash. Its basis is publicly humiliating someone whose opinion just so happens to not align with yours in a digital world. Now I'm not suggesting that the R. Kelly's or anyone behind a #MeToo movement needs to be rescued, because we still want smoke behind that as we should. More so, why are we canceling someone behind their preference of not dating a 9-5 worker opposed to an entrepreneur? Why cancel the person who commented on social injustice from their prospective? Or even why cancel the person who said nothing all on social media yet made an actual impact in real time?

Unfortunately, cancel culture is not something that I foresee meeting a near end however I do believe that there is a way for it to coexist while functioning in a healthy digital space. Starting with canceling things or individuals that go against morale such as abusers or companies that verbally express that they have no desire to push or contribute to the black agenda. When we cancel our black distinguished figures, we not only run the risk of being inimical to creating a change within the black community but we risk canceling our own voices to some degree. We can expel people from our lives in healthier ways such as limiting engagement and redirecting our focus. I leave you with this sentiment, don't take things so personal and agree to disagree.