I just spent a long weekend with some girlfriends where, over the course of our long chats, the topic of Cancel Culture came up. And while it’s become common enough that we have this casual nomenclature for it, our conversation exposed an underbelly to it that I hadn’t considered previously.
Initially, when I heard about things happening that would later be referred to as Cancel Culture or “being canceled,” I occasionally thought – good. Let’s take action when we see bad behavior that we want to discourage. It’s time for accountability for our words and actions and I appreciated the idea that businesses and workplaces were taking a stand against language and behaviors that were intentionally hurtful to others.
But in hearing about a recent story of a woman who resigned (or maybe was asked to resign) before she’d even started her job, because of a tweet from a decade earlier when she was a pre-teen, I felt a twinge of warning ping in my belly. Have we taken Cancel Culture too far?
This exposed a shadow side to our rush to punish that makes me worry about unintended consequences. Consider this: if we are holding people accountable for their words and actions in the past (which I believe we should do), but to the degree that they’re getting fired or cast aside somehow, aren’t we taking away the possibility for them to learn, grow, and make amends for their behavior? If we say – hey, she tweeted these hurtful words 10 years ago, we can’t hire her / need to fire her – aren’t we taking away motivation to make things right? If we’re forever going to be cast in the light from a past action that we cannot change, it renders any effort inherently fruitless, so why even try?
It made me think that we need a better framework for how to understand, account for, and move forward from our words or actions that may have caused harm. What if, instead of Cancel Culture, we had an Accountability Culture? One in which we take stock of our impact by hearing from those we’ve hurt, seek to make amends to those impacted, and move forward with a public commitment to change our vocabulary or shift our behaviors.
What have you tried when it comes to holding accountability for something that occurred in the past, whether for you or for someone else?
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