Cancelled; then what happens?
Thoughts on why the white, Western iteration of cancel culture fails to effect positive change, or foster accountability between people with power and people without.
TW: mention of sexual assault
2016 was a bad year.
I’d go out on a limb and say that, for most of us in the U.S., it was a bad year. I certainly hit a premier rock bottom. On a grand scale, there was Prince's death, David Bowie’s very troubling legacy, the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by police, Trump’s run for president, Trump’s election as president, etc. The list is very long. Speaking more personally about 2016, I saw people close to me get sick, I lost two different jobs, and I was waking up at 4:30am five days a week in order to clock in as a subpar barista. I also reconnected with, and began dating, an old crush (initially a good thing!) only to have him dump me a few months in. He admitted that he’d only sought me out because I seemed like a “nice option” for a rebound following the meltdown of his previous relationship.
Generally, I felt like I had peaked as a 23-year-old, and was destined to spend the remainder of my life in decline. But the starting gun for 2016’s heinousness, at least for me, was well before any of this happened. On a gray Monday afternoon in January, while I was at one of the many jobs I had that year, one of my coworkers said something awful to me. And though cancel culture was only just getting co-opted by the American mainstream and not yet on my radar, what happened that day pushed me to consider the implications of what would eventually be the contemporary, white manifestation of cancellation. Western society uses cancel culture as a unilateral punishment and dismissal of those who have committed a perceivable “wrong,” based on the beliefs of the people who are in power, and the identities of the people being “disciplined.” But cancel culture itself came into being years ago in the Black community, as a means of holding people in power accountable.
One of these iterations of cancellation is easy. The other makes positive change possible. After this 2016 incident with a coworker, I had to choose one or the other as a means of addressing what had happened between us.
The most efficient way to explain how this all started is that I developed a thing for one of the line cooks I worked with at a restaurant in upper Manhattan. Julio was cute as all hell; glasses, big smile, warm and funny and very quick. He was a recent arrival from the Dominican Republic living in the North Bronx. He could strike up conversation with anyone, and make them feel like they were in a spotlight; I couldn’t resist. One week, we barely spoke to each other. The next, we were texting and making plans to go to a nearby dance bar after dinner service the following Saturday. Then, during the third week, we crashed into each other in the back kitchen at work and everything went to hell.
It’s important to note that I was supremely anxious during this period. The restaurant where Julio and I worked was my first place of employ since quitting my very challenging leadership position with a youth program in the fall of 2015. I had a lot of unmanaged baggage from that job floating around. Not to mention, I was not paid well at the restaurant, so anxiety was heightened by financial insecurity. I had to pick up additional work as a teaching artist at a school that turned out be almost as unmanaged and violent as the one I had just quit working at. In sum, I generally felt like I’d been run over by a truck, the raw reality of which showed in how jumpy I was, and how easily I startled. Julio saw this firsthand one afternoon, when he literally ran into me in the back kitchen by mistake. I had let the door shut behind me on my quest for coffee bar supplies, and he had pushed through it and right into me as I stood examining the storage shelves. I jumped a mile and yelped. He, startled by my being startled, jerked away and said, “damn, girl! I shouldn’t scare you! If I had wanted to rape you, I already would’ve!” Then he turned and left, the door swinging shut behind him.
For the remainder of that afternoon and evening shift, I remember next to nothing. But I do know that, after Julio left me in the storage room, I remained frozen there for a bit. And I’m fairly sure that he didn’t say anything further to me, or circle back later in the evening to discuss what he’d said. In light of how common harassment is in the service industry, I think it’s fair to say that the whole interaction was just a workaday blip on Julio’s radar. Women, and men who are anything less than wholly masculine, are subject to a whole range of verbal and sexual abuses while employed at restaurants. The often-misogynistic cultures of professional kitchens have become infamous in the last decade or so, but any disruptions to those patterns have been slow in coming. Mario Batali may have gotten outed for his restaurants’ cultures of abuse in 2017, but even that watershed moment couldn’t make the industry to commit to a wholesale cultural pivot.
In 2021, chefs and restaurant owners are still getting exposed as enablers and enactors of abuse. In fact, some of these chefs and restaurant owners (David Chang, for example) are currently fighting to keep or return to their positions in the industry, instead of accepting unilateral dismissal on the grounds of their conduct and leadership. This pushback is fueled by the argument that perpetrators should be allowed a chance to demonstrate growth, change, and behavioral reformation. Leaders in the service industry who have been publicly denounced are, in other words, denouncing their denouncements and subsequent falls from grace. But to what end? There are no codified methods for post-cancellation education or recovery, or standards by which an individual might be measured in their efforts to demonstrate real, positive growth. Who gets second chances? What are those second chances? And what comes after that? With the absence of structure, those who have been cancelled generally wind up in two categories: permanently off the proverbial table, or sliding back into society and finagling new acceptance. Who ends up in which category depends heavily on power structures, race, class, and gender.
Cancellation’s roots are in the Black American community, and go back several decades. But in the last ~6 years, the Western zeitgeist has taken up the concept and disfigured it. Where cancellation began as a means of holding people in power, particularly white people, accountable, it has been increasingly deployed as a tool of power over minoritied groups insteaed. This current, white iteration leans heavily on the binary of “right” versus “wrong. Accountability, ongoing growth, and learning are not upheld as core tenets of cancellation by the mainstream. Cancel culture is no longer a means of holding the majority accountable for its oppressive actions. It has been changed into a tool of obliteration, wielded by the largest, most powerful hands in a room. In their piece “The second wave of “cancel culture”” (and the preceding piece “Why we can’t stop fighting about cancel culture”) Vox staff writer Aja Romano does an excellent job of detailing not only the origins of cancellation in Black American culture, but the timeline of its ascension into the larger American zeitgeist, and how the white, Western mainstream has recast it:
The idea of canceling began as a tool for marginalized communities to assert their values against public figures who retained power and authority even after committing wrongdoing…The core concern of cancel culture — accountability — remains as crucial a topic as ever. But increasingly, the cancel culture debate has become about how we communicate within a binary, right versus wrong framework. And a central question is not whether we can hold one another accountable, but how we can ever forgive. (Romano, 5/5/21)
Romano also goes on to point out that,
Within the realm of good faith, the larger conversation around these questions can then expand to contain nuanced considerations of what the consequences of public misbehavior should be, how and when to rehabilitate the reputation of someone who’s been “canceled,” and who gets to decide those things.
Taken in bad faith, however, “cancel culture” becomes an omniscient and dangerous specter: a woke, online social justice mob that’s ready to rise up and attack anyone, even other progressives, at the merest sign of dissent. (Romano, 5/5/21)
At a most basic level, restaurants have never been safe workplaces for certain populations. The surge in assault accusations lodged against chefs and industry leaders in the last five years has hammered this reality home. But these waves of cancellations have also forced white society to examine the infrastructure of its version of cancel culture. What are the actual implications of such an imperative action as cancellation? Do the accused enroll in classes, or attend mandated therapy sessions? Rehab? If cancelling an entire person is an act of accountability, ostensibly there are steps to be taken following the initial cancellation that aid the canceled in their pursuit(s) of responsibility-taking. Is there an endpoint, or benchmarks that individuals reach along their journeys, that indicate their learning and growth? When do people get “uncanceled,” and who is in charge of overseeing all of this?
The Western appetite for binaries and their stark delineations of what is correct, what comes next in a sequence, and so much else fuels the mainstream iteration of cancel culture, but what has become increasingly clear over the last several years is that the only recovery from cancellation is one that exists outside of binary thought. And we cannot handle that.
At the time of my upsetting interaction with Julio, I was several years deep into an on-again, off-again career in restaurant work. So I knew, even as I reeled from his words, that,
he likely didn't realize what he had done, and,
there likely wouldn’t be anything I could do about it, besides “move on” from the whole thing.
It would likely do me a greater disservice than service to say something to someone at the restaurant. It simply wasn’t “done.” But how could I, alternatively, “let it go”?
I went home that night in a daze. The next morning, blearily awake a few hours before my midday shift began, I stared at my phone over breakfast. What could I do? Quite soon, I would be expected to work with Julio again. If I were friends with me, what would I say, and to whom would I say it? If past me, trapped in her previous, traumatic situations, was here, what would she tell me to do? I cycled through one option after another— confronting Julio, telling the coffee bar manager, telling the restaurant manager, texting one of the other baristas for help, etc. etc. etc.— for what felt like an eternity. Then, it clicked: my previous self was “here.” In fact, all my past iterations were stashed in my subconscious, and what former Abby would’ve wanted me to do was exactly what present Abby knew she should do. I took a deep breath in, then let it out. I knew I was going to be speaking to the coffee bar manager at the restaurant when I clocked in later.
Melissa had only recently become my supervisor. She had been a barista at the restaurant for years, but the coffee bar’s manager had recently been fired, so she had been summarily promoted in his stead. Melissa was already there when I arrived, my shift meant to bridge the midday service from late morning to dinnertime. I clocked in, and spoke with the barista who had opened: were we okay for milk, did any syrup need to get made, how were we for take-out cups and lids? Did we have sufficient stocks of espresso and brew beans at the counter, or were additional bags needed to be pulled from storage? I made note of the restock necessities, then went to our boss’s closet-turned-office to count my drawer in for the afternoon. It was as I returned to the coffee bar that I flagged Melissa. “Hey, um,” I began. “I, uh— sorry to bother you, but could I talk with you about something quick when you have a moment?”
Melissa looked concerned. “Sure. Are you ok?”
“I’m fine. But I’m… Worried about something. So whenever you’re free?”
“Absolutely. One sec.” She disappeared into the warren of storage rooms behind the main dining room momentarily, then returned. “Okay. Tell me.”
I detailed her, as briefly as possible, what Julio had said. Melissa listened attentively, brow growing more and more furrowed as I outlined the encounter. When she finally spoke, she sounded equal parts angry and miserable. “I’m really sorry, Abby,” she told me, “but I’m going to have to tell Jason and Matt about this.”
I had figured as much. I told Melissa that she should do whatever she felt was right as my manager, privately feeling that, either way, it’d be ideal if nothing came of this. Maybe the restaurant leadership would take me seriously, via Melissa’s reporting, but then insist on speaking to me directly about what had happened. Or, the restaurant leadership would brush the whole thing off as hearsay, and expect me to continue working with Julio as though nothing had happened. Or, I would get punished passive aggressively for making such a report, while Julio would face no repercussions. I had, in past, tried to inform men who had harmed me, or someone in power above the man in question, that I had experienced harm. None of these attempts at voicing my concerns had ever gone well, so my expectations for such a situation in a restaurant were nil. When Melissa reappeared after speaking with the restaurant manager and owner in the back, saying that they wanted to see me, I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t optimistic, either. I walked out from behind my station, past the bar at the center of the dining room, and up the three rotten steps that connected the kitchen and bar with the office/closet where the restaurant’s owner and manager were waiting for me. I had barely finished greeting them when Jason, my boss, began speaking.
“So, what do you want us to do?”
—
As of 2021, cancel culture (under the purview of mainstream American culture) is often weaponized. In cancelling a person or thing, private citizens are able to collaboratively mete out punishment on a public scale, sometimes to devastating effect: altering individuals’ careers and livelihoods, compromising businesses’ or organizations’ existences, devaluing specific products. But the success, and efficacy, of cancellation hinges not on the decision of a designated court, but the standards of a society at a given time. “The concept of a ‘cancel culture,’” writes scholar Pippa Norris, "can be defined broadly as attempts to ostracize someone for violating social norms. The notion has also been understood more narrowly as “the practice of withdrawing support for (or canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive…” (Norris, 2020) But, as LSE professor Shakuntala Banaji points out, “social norms… are far from fixed, and they often include the most inhumane and vicious of behaviours.” (Banaji, 2021) Thus, it is hard to determine not only what “should” be canceled, but whether or not a cancellation is ethical. Western society is a hegemonic machine that runs on power: who has it, who doesn’t, who wants it. Social norms defer to those at the top of this pyramid. As Banaji writes:
Many of the people accused of bullying and ‘cancelling’ others hail from historically marginalised and oppressed groups and often from an intersection of these groups. This does not make them infallible, but it does suggest the legitimacy of underlying grievances.
By contrast, many of the people whose claims to being ‘cancelled’ are amplified by the media – for instance Chris Pratt, Jeremy Clarkson and Lawrence Fox – have previously been asked by concerned colleagues to tone down their prejudice. When asked privately to account for the ongoing harm that their words and actions cause, few of these people have been willing to do so…’ [Cancel culture has become] paradoxical in that its opponents manage to claim it’s both harmfully punitive and performative virtue signalling.’ Powerful groups telling less powerful ones to mind their language and tone is not new. (Banaji, 2021)
When cancellation occurs, it does not happen in a vacuum; the power structures that surround both those wielding the cancellation and those who are being cancelled directly influence the severity and duration of punishment. Race, class, and gender inform every act of cancellation, as well as the aftermath. The absence of a rulebook improves the odds of a light sentencing for people with power (be it racial, financial, and/or gendered), and a full stoning for those who lack it. The juxtaposition of Louis C.K.’s cancellation with Azealia Banks’s is a primer on the topic: in 2017, comedian C.K. was banned from the celebrity circuit following allegations of sexual harassment and abuse from many individuals in his industry. A year later, he silently returned to comedy, keeping himself unlisted in performance lineups and finagling performance slots with audiences who had not consented to listen to him, or pay him for, doing so.
Musician Azealia Banks, meanwhile, has been in and out of the public eye since 2015, making many public racist and homophobic statements while also attracting attention for attacking other celebrities online and releasing strange videos. Banks has been banned from Twitter multiple times. C.K. still maintains his account. C.K. released a comedy special in 2020, and launched a national tour in 2021. Banks continues to live in the limbo that cancellation leaves many in, with an individual’s career being significantly overshadowed by their worst actions. To be fair, Banks has continued to release inflammatory content, online and in person since her initial cancellation, while no further assault allegations seem to have been brought against C.K. But the fact remains that a white man who legally admitted to sexually harming multiple people began to recover from cancellation within 12 months, while a Black woman whose harmful use of language and internet platforms has been pushed back towards the margins of her industry for more than 6 years (see also: Michael Cuby’s piece on RuPaul and Kanyé’s continued successes, compared with the repeated cancellations Banks has experienced). If you’re going to be cancelled, it pays to be male. It pays to be white. And it pays to be wildly successful in your field.
Of course, the flip side of the C.K.-Banks coin, and this “after” phase of cancellation, is the fact that there really is no rulebook. As I asked earlier in this essay, are there classes or facilities or programs that the cancelled must enroll in? The short answer is “no.” The longer answer is “no, which means that when people are pushed to society’s margins, they are solely responsible for any growth or healing that might make their eventual cultural re-entry possible, which can result in no actual growth or healing actually occurring.” There has been no standardization of post-cancellation, and thus, it depends entirely on the individual and their place in society, and there is no guarantee of actual healthy change in the individual. Or the chance to pursue healthy change.
Back in the office/closet, the restaurant owner, manager, and I were jammed together in order to conduct our conversation semi-privately. Matt the manager was pressed into a quasi perch on the office/closet’s tiny desk, while Jason swiveled back and forth on a tottery office chair. I was standing in the doorway, braced against the frame with both hands so as not to topple back down the steps behind me. Jason leaned towards me. “This is very serious, what Julio did.”
“I… agree?” I replied, more confused than confident; I had not been prepared for a decidedly not-victim-blamey conversation. In fact, I had spent the preceding 20-something hours preparing for, in the best case scenario, being told to get over myself. Being handed responsibility for what disciplinary action might be taken against Julio had been so far down on the possibility list, I hadn’t even included it in my troubleshooting. “What Julio did,” I eventually managed to say, “was very inappropriate. And I don’t want him to do it again.”
“Right,” Jason agreed. I could see Matt nodding emphatically from his seat on the office/closet desk. “So, we can fire him.”
“Wait, what?! Wait, no!” I said in alarm.
“Why not?”
“You can’t just fire him because he said something awful to me!”
“This is serious, Abby,” Jason said sternly. “Rape is serious. My mother was raped. This is not a joke to me.”
“N-not to me, either!” I stammered, now entirely off whatever mental tracks I had entered this situation on. As a staff, we all knew a little about Jason’s personal history, particularly the very traumatic series of childhood events that he was now referencing. But his frank statement— “Rape is serious. My mother was raped.”— short-circuited something in my brain. It was a struggle to piece together a coherent thought. What could I say that might actually explain why I thought firing Julio was one of the worst possible outcomes on the table? How could I show Jason that I actually meant it? “Please… Please, Jason,” I eventually stuttered. “Don’t… Don’t fire Julio.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” Jason said, almost biting off the end of each word.
“No, he…” I cast around for the words I wanted. “I… He has to work with me. After doing this.”
Jason and Matt looked at me like I’d grown a third head. “What?!”
“No, he does,” I insisted. “He said this thing to me that was awful. But he doesn’t get to just disappear from it… He has to come back and work with me, see me, and understand that he screwed up and has to work through it.” I paused. “He won’t stop joking about raping the women he works with if there isn’t some kind of full-circle thing, where he feels accountable for hurting someone and understands why he’s being asked to never do it again.”
Jason and Matt were still skeptical; their foreheads were creased, and the office/closet felt (somehow) even more cramped now than it had at the start of the conversation.
“Please,” I said again. “Just please don’t fire Julio. That doesn’t fix anything.”
Jason eyed me. “You mean,” he said slowly, “that you’d be ok with him coming back here?”
“Yes,” I affirmed, even though my stomach twisted at the thought of having to see him. Speaking honestly? I absolutely never wanted to be in the same country as Julio again. But, I told myself firmly, that’s not the point, here.You’re safe. He deserves a second chance. He’s a smart guy, he won’t come after you. He shouldn’t lose this job.
“Okay…” Jason’s reluctance was evident. “I’m going to take a few days off his schedule, though. He doesn’t get to just come back to work like nothing happened.” Matt inclined his head, agreeing with our boss as noncommittally as possible
“That’s fine,” I said quickly. “Whatever you guys think.” I wanted the conversation to be over. I wouldn’t have to face Julio until later in the week? Great. I could worry about his return, and how he might act, later. For now, I wanted a drink and a nap. Or, maybe just the freedom to fall unconscious for a week. The important part of this whole thing had originally been “Abby, tell the restaurant about what happened.” To have it morph into the defense of my harasser’s employment was entirely unexpected. Plus, I had gone in prepared to be brushed off, only to be given a say in what disciplinary action would be used against my harasser. The male superiors to whom the incident had been reported had listened to me. I had never before been shown such a level of consideration by higher-ups or by perpetrators before. The way everything had unfolded was entirely unprecedented, and I didn’t quite know what to do with myself.
At the time of the incident with Julio, and my subsequent discussion with Jason and Matt about it, I didn’t know what cancel culture was. But I did know that the odds of further harm done would be significantly greater if Julio was cast out instead of being asked to learn from his mistake. I had more power than he did: I was a white, American-born woman with a college degree, and he was a Dominican immigrant who was still learning English and had no degree. He had said something heinous to me, but would not reckon with why it was heinous or how he might speak differently in future if our boss just kicked him out point blank; if anything, Julio could go on to repeat or intensify the incident at another job, fueled by resentment.
Our society clings desperately to its binaries of “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” but in reality, we all live in the gray area in-between.What Julio had done was “bad.” But failing to address his actions and simply punishing him would’ve been “bad,” too. There would never be any “good” if the “bad” weren’t addressed, and learning wasn’t facilitated. Which meant I had to stay there; in the gray area. Angry at my cute, hilarious coworker and afraid of his possible anger at me over this incident, but unwilling to let him be written off entirely because of it. It was uncomfortable. I hated it. It was the closest I was going to be able get to doing something “good.” Similarly, I hate the idea of Louis C.K. being back onstage as a comedian, of disgraced chefs helming new kitchens, and of the people who have colluded with these perpetrators being able to work ever again. But there will be no actual alterations, no “good,” if there is no commitment made to inhabiting that uncomfortable in-between space and establishing ways for the canceled to be held accountable after the cancellation, laying the groundwork for permanent, positive change over time.
Of course, Julio was not kept from working for the full “few days” Jason had prescribed. My conversation with management was on Tuesday morning of that week, and Julio walked back in to the restaurant Thursday afternoon to sub in for the dinner service. It was the classic industry conundrum: sure, Julio was supposed to be denied a couple of shifts’ worth of income to hammer home a disciplinary point, but both the sous chef and another cook called out on the same day, so someone was going to call the guy who was in the doghouse and ask him to come in on short notice. The show must go on. I looked up when the front door banged, expecting a late-afternoon coffee patron, and found myself eyeball to eyeball with the man I didn’t expect to see for at least another 24 hours. My heart fell out of my body. He stood stock still. We remained frozen, staring at one another, for a good five seconds. Then he put his head down, hurried past the coffee bar, and disappeared into the back.
Later, we almost ran into each other once more, face to face in the awkward hallway between the now-infamous back kitchen and the front of the house. The walk-in was stowed there; I was carrying paper products, he was stumbling out of the enormous fridge carrying perishables. We started at each other.
“I, uh…” I faltered. He looked at me, waiting. After a long moment, I realized he wasn’t going to speak unless I did. “I…” I tried again. “I… Are you mad at me?”
“Wha—?!” He literally jerked his head back a little. “Ma, what?! No.”
“Do you have anything you need to say?”
“No, Mami. No.” He shook his head vehemently. “I’m not… Ma, I’m just sorry. I’m not mad at you. What did you do?!”
Julio’s response, though he couldn’t have known it, was revolutionary. So much so, it was almost impossible to listen to. Having personally experienced a whole spectrum of denials— from dismissive to terrifying— from men who had compromised me in platonic, romantic, and professional situations, I was in no way prepared for Julio’s response. I had no experience with the quiet, unhappy utterance, “I’m just sorry,” followed by the stunned “what did you do?!” I had no playbook for actual resolution in such a situation.
“I— oh. Okay,” I managed. “Okay.” He and I stood there mutely for a few moments, then made our respective ways out of the tiny hallway and back to work. Our flirtation, our “maybe let’s go dancing or get drinks or see each other casually,” our “whatever,” it was over; we both knew that. But any sort of wounding was also, for the most part, over, too. Julio still had his job, and had a new awareness of how a rape joke in the kitchen could be something upsetting, instead of something casually tossed off. I still saw him every time I worked, which meant that I was spending regular time with a man who had hurt me, apologized for hurting me, and gone on to maintain a professional relationship with me that was not rancorous.
I don’t know what the answer is to cancel culture, because there isn’t one; there are many, and they aren’t answers so much as possibilities. All I know is that the incident with Julio gave me a chance to practice what a more inclusive, intersectional version might look like. Men like Louis C.K., Mario Batali, and their brethren are dangerous, and finding a means of holding them accountable, such that future generations of men (and everyone else) in power do not conduct themselves in the same way, is going take years. But for what it’s worth, Julio showed me that there might be change eventually. Today, I can distinctly remember when, at age 21, I final got away from a man who had hurt me for a long time, but feared the whole while that he would go on to hurt other women because I had not somehow managed to stop him.
I like to think that, in the end, I paid 21-year-old me back a little.
Sources
Service Industry Harassment/Assault:
https://rocunited.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2020/02/TakeUsOffTheMenuReport.pdf
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sexual-harassment-restaurant-industry-70-percent/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/05/dining/restaurant-workers-ndas-david-chang.html
Cancel Culture Specifics
https://www.vox.com/22384308/cancel-culture-free-speech-accountability-debate
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2021/07/20/cancel-culture-and-historical-silencing/
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3671026
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/12/30/20879720/what-is-cancel-culture-explained-history-debate
Azealia Banks versus Louis C.K.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jan/24/azealia-banks-misunderstood-talent-or-tedious-troll
https://www.them.us/story/azealia-banks-rupaul
https://louisck.com
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/11/9/16629400/louis-ck-allegations-masturbation
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/arts/television/louis-ck-performs-comedy.html?module=inline