You Are Cancelled
Last month the Unspeakables Project dove into the topic of fear. It has been, undoubtedly, a fearful start to the school year for many staff, students and families as we returned to school in the midst of a global pandemic. Some of this fear was “capital F fear” - the kind of fear that leads to physiological flight or fight responses - our survival instinct kicking in. But more often than not, much of fear has been “little f fear” - deeply psychological and perhaps calling into question our competency as educators or what others might think of us as leaders if things don’t go as planned.
We also explored the fears and anxieties prompted by the upcoming election season. A polarized, politicized and divisive road ahead has left many of us in schools feeling uncertain about how to manage conversations both in and out of the classroom about the election - from the candidates, to the issues, to even whom can vote and how we should vote. Every conversation is politicized. We’ve been working with teachers and administrators all month on creating the kinds of classrooms that can support courageous conversations about the election and many of the accompanying issues including race, science, police reform. We’ve been working to create an environment where ideas can be shared, mistakes can be made, and where recovery and repair are possible. Yet over and over again we’ve heard another fear emerge. “What if we can’t repair? What if a student makes a mistake and nothing makes it better? What if I make a mistake and I lose that student’s trust. What if I get . . .cancelled?”
The National Trend
Open discussions and objections to the larger trend of Cancel Culture have been all over both mainstream and social media. If you want to learn more about the origins of Cancel Culture (which is really not new) check out this two part segment about cancel culture from the NYT podcast The Daily earlier in September. In it, host Michael Barbaro featured Obama’s message to young activists against “call out culture.” Another prominent writer and academic, Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind, who keynoted the NAIS Annual Conference this past year, shared in this interview how social media, through its capacity to spread both “likes” and “outrage” has the capacity to ignite and spread conflict about “trivial things and words that someone has used.”
Most notably, Harper’s magazine pre-released into the Twittersphere a controversial letter entitled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” signed by a diverse range of establishment writers, editors, artists, and academics and with a range of political opinions who questioned the state of the free exchange of ideas in the press, on college campuses, and in places of business. The writers and signers of the letters argue, “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought...Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.”
This letter was criticized across social media by skeptics who felt the letter smacked of self-interest and was written in an effort for a small group of elites to maintain their positions of authority and prestige. One prominent response was titled, “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” In this view, the rise of what some call “cancel culture” is actually the inclusion of voices that have traditionally been marginalized, insisting on their rights to participate in open debate and critique the voices empowered by the mainstream. In the view of these authors, most of whom work in academia or journalism but who are generally not household names, “the irony of the [Harper’s] piece is that nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing. [...] In truth, Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ people — particularly Black and trans people — can now critique elites publicly and hold them accountable socially; this seems to be the letter’s greatest concern.”
Cancel Culture in Our Schools
This larger national trend of cancel culture plays out in some variations in our schools. But let’s define cancel culture and some of the nuances and views around canceling. The simplest definition is the publicly sharing the words and actions of someone else with the primary purpose of judging shaming or calling into question these words and actions. This is largely done on social media, but can be done in front of a public audience or in more traditional media. But it is actually not that simple.
In one view, “cancel culture” is about attacking people and destroying their lives for saying anything that deviates from their point of view. This type of “Capital C” cancelling attacks the humanity of others and denies their ability to be educated, have a different point of view, make mistakes, and move beyond that moment.
In another view, what some call “cancel culture” is really just a long-overdue correction to our public discourse. This may really just be critique, and while it may be unfamiliar to the people who are on the receiving end, it’s not necessarily bad. We believe in holding students capable of hearing that others disagree with us -- even that what we said may have been wrong, biased, sexist, or racist. ”Little c” cancelling may simply be the critique of voices who haven’t been centered in the dialogue, and the entry of any new voice or critique -- because others aren’t used to its presence -- may feel disruptive, even if it’s salutary.
What makes it difficult is that people sometimes complain of “cancel culture” when really they’re just being critiqued or held accountable. And other times, students -- who love absolutes -- are unable to accept that others may make mistakes from which they should be able to recover.
So what are we to do in schools? At the core of all dialogue should be the inherent human value of everyone in the school, whether it’s a kid who has said something thoughtless and deserves the opportunity to learn from what happens next, or the value of a kid who has been marginalized and is now asserting their voice. In other words, cancel ideas, not people.
Still it is messy in practice and when you actually zoom into specific examples.
This year, I have read emails from parents who are seeing their kids ostracized by peers for their more conservative political views in predominantly liberal school environments. When it shows up in class as a direct confrontation that may sound like “What you said was racist,” it feels uncomfortable, but worth exploring, unpacking, and possibly even repairing. But when it shows up in social media - by being removed from “group chats” or named or called out explicitly in a post - in these instances, “cancelling” is more about public shame and an intent to harm someone’s personal reputation. This becomes hard to repair because it spreads fast and damage is done.
I’ve also spent significant time pouring over the “Black at. . .” and “#metoo at ….” Instagram posts written by students and alumni of dozens of schools this summer. These posts surface clearly and directly that the experiences they are having in school are painful and can have long-lasting damaging effects. In many of those cases, calling out injustices feels both justifiable, cathartic and perhaps even a moral imperative.
So here lies the tension: Of course kids will say the wrong thing. They’re kids. All students deserve the opportunity to move past the dumbest thing they’ve ever said, while being held capable of hearing critique of their statements. And the canceling of peers could be a classic bully move or it could be an attempt to give voice to a group that has felt unheard, under-represented or marginalized. As the adults in the school, we need to help students sort through this tension and get curious about exactly what is happening and why it might be happening.
The School’s role in Cancel Culture
We might, as schools, ask ourselves about our role in fostering a cancel culture over a learning culture. Perhaps we are wiring our schools for cancel culture without even realizing it by valuing and rewarding “being right” above all else. We need to take a good look at how we reward “rightness” in our classes versus how we reward taking intellectual risks. Do we set up our class discussions, assignments and assessment for the “right answer” or do we teach for nuance and discernment? It’s certainly easier to teach one right answer, but if critical thinking is a goal of your school or your classroom, then we need to make space for ambiguity and for civil discourse. We also need to help students understand that sometimes they can be wrong - and it’s not the end of the world and that if they do or say something wrong, they can recover gracefully.
How do we create cultures in schools that are less about canceling and more about learning and curiosity in others' opinions and perspectives and values? How can we ensure that students (and teachers) still have the space to discuss ideas and to engage in potentially polarizing conversations without fear of being cancelled by a peer?
Antidotes to Cancel Culture
While it is true that no student or member of the faculty or staff should endure dehumanizing experiences, we as educators and educational leaders have a responsibility to develop in young people from all backgrounds the skills and confidence to put ideas out into the universe, be intellectually challenged, allowed to change course, to rebound, to fail and to repair. One antidote to cancel culture is forgiveness. If we can’t cultivate forgiveness in our classrooms, we will raise a generation of young adults who will paralyzed by interpersonal conflict - which is actually part of almost any relationship. Learning how to disagree with someone you care about is an important part of building healthy relationships.
Another antidote to cancel culture is explicitly addressing this trend with your students. In our Design for Election Week materials we created a lesson on cancel culture which we will share with you here . Take a few minutes to watch this video (5 minutes) with your students and then use this short worksheet to help them have a dialogue about cancel culture. You can do this in class, in an advisory group, over lunch, over ZOOM or in the residence halls.
