As we all know cancelling someone is nothing new. In fact, the boycott is a long and beloved tactic on all spectrums of the political range. The Right was happy to cancel Colin Kaepernick for standing up, or kneeling to be accurate, for Black lives and against police brutality. While the Left has cancelled Gina Carano, an actress that is a prime example of why I don’t like to learn about the people behind the work I love, for, among other things, a tweet equating her struggles as a privileged, white presenting, Conservative to those of the Jews during the reign of the Nazis. Of course, politicians got involved with cancelling Kaepernick making it a true freedom of speech discussion. The cancelling of Carano was a private decision by the company that employed her. But I digress.
“Cancel Culture” is further complicated by victim culture. Conservative Christian Nationalists honestly believe that they are more discriminated against, in the US, than Black people, Muslims, brown people, Indigenous people, or Jewish folks. In America. Like, within the country of the United State of America.
Since at least the 80s, under the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan then and the Tucker Carlsons of the world today, Conservatives Christians have been told that they are being oppressed by liberal, mainstream culture. That liberals hate Christians and Christianity and Christian values, despite the fact that most liberals, like most Americans, are Christians. (Thanks to the conflation of religion and politics this is changing. No one wants to be associated with the sort of hate too many self-described Christians spew.) Many Conservative Christians truly seem to believe that, despite being the people in power, people in power want to silence them.
Still, folks all over the damn place seem to be getting called out for past words and actions. In a lot of cases people being called out and ‘cancelled’ are overdue a bit of justice. Sometimes, perhaps even often, the calling out can be excessive or even unfair. Americans are known more for our enthusiasm than for our equilibrium. Which is okay as long as these actions are not held in isolation.
Back in the 80s Ralph Northam, now governor of Virginia, darkened his face for a Michael Jackson Halloween costume. This was brought to light because of a scandal in which Northam posed in a photo, in blackface, next to a student dressed like a Klan member, in his 1984 medical student yearbook. During Northam’s 2017 campaign the fact that his family had owned slaves and that the Virginia Military Institute, where he went to grade school, still displays Confederate imagery also came to light.
Trading Places, the classic Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy collaboration in which Aykroyd donned blackface came out in 1983. Andrew “Dice” Clay’s the Dice Man was rising to prominence at this time as were shock jocks Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. I’m not saying blackface is ever okay. Just because doing and saying racist things was more acceptable back then doesn’t mean it wasn’t wrong. It is, however, quite a lot for a twenty-something medical student to parse. Especially one wrapped in the privileges of being wealthy, white, and male.
The other stuff isn’t relevant because it is not something he has control over. I mean, I went to a school that was roughly half Black yet named after Confederate general Robert E Lee. Our mascot was a little general and the Confederate flag was everywhere. I would love to go back in time and call out the situation but, at the time, racism was so embedded into our normality no one even questioned whether or not it was acceptable. Other than a few pop culture highlights the 80s was a shitty, shitty decade.
On top of this, it all happened almost forty years ago. What has the man done since then? Or, as Janet would have said at the time, “What has he done for us lately?”
The governor is protective of women’s reproductive rights having led the fight against a transvaginal ultrasound requirement and funding doula services for those who are pregnant. He backed marriage rights for same sex couples and voted against allowing workplace discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. He believes in and is working to alleviate climate change. He advocates for commonsense gun laws including universal background checks. Northam wants to expand Medicare and Medicaid. He voted to raise Virginia’s minimum wage from the federal minimum of $7.25 to $9.25. Ralph Northam helped to end the use of the death penalty by one of the states most deadly to justice. Virginia has a higher death count than Texas. Texas!
Then there is Alexi McCammond. Young and inexperienced it’s questionable whether or not she should have been offered the job as editor of Teen Vogue in the first place. But she had two things the publishing giant that runs the magazine looks for: beauty and buzz. And, apparently, ambition as she probably should have turned the job down. Instead, McCammond was turned out over the furor over blatantly racist tweets she posted almost a decade earlier.
Note: Black people can be racist. We can be racist against other Black people, a la Ben Carson and Candace Owens. We can be racist against other minorities as is the case with these tweets. We can also be bigoted against whites, LGBTQ+ people, people of other religions, etc. People are assholes and Black folks are people. What we cannot do is participate in systemic racism against white people in the US because systemic racism against white people in the US does not exist. Systemic racism is there to protect white power and white supremacy, and to suppress and oppress anyone who tries to confront it.
Condé Nast, which owns Teen Vogue, is a predominantly white company. Though most of its focus is on the lives of those that are rich, beautiful, famous, or some combination thereof, Teen Vogue has been producing some hard-core commentary on current events. Its almost leftist activist tone meant that when McCammond was tapped there was immediate pushback from the Teen Vogue staff, almost certainly the most diverse staff in the company, as McCammond’s tweets once again became fodder for the news. The timing was especially bad as the company was still weathering a scandal involving race-based favoritism resulting in the marginalizing of people of color over at Bon Appetit.
As you may have noticed from my repeated use of “again”, the tweets were nothing new. They surfaced originally over two years ago after an incident between McCammond and Charles Barkley which initiated some of the original buzz that made McCammond so appealing to Conde Nast in the first place. They were something she had published as a teenager almost a decade earlier, before we had as full an understanding of the power of social media. At this point McCammond had already deleted and publicly apologized for them.
This was not nearly enough. Part of it is this is a bad year for Asian Americans. The Rightist use of the terms “Kung Flu” and “China Virus” only underscored an issue that has always plagued being Asian in America- othering. Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart–Celler Act, became effective in 1968 almost half of the nearly 20 million immigrants admitted to the U.S. were born in Asia. The population of Asian Americans has gone from less than one percent in 1965 to more than five and a half percent as of 2019. Which means that the vast majority of Asian Americans have been raised under the umbrella of the Model Minority myth which has been manipulated by, mostly white, conservatives against other people of color in the US. Particularly, against Black American Non-Immigrants.
The Model Minority Myth is a lie. It protects Asian Americans about as much as Trickle Down Economics (Aka, Golden Shower Economics) improves the lives of the middle and lower classes. The past year has poked holes in the umbrella with a series of incidents, many violent, against Asian Americans. The most horrific of which was the murder of six Asian women in a mass shooting that killed eight people. This was a hate crime. It was racist. It was misogynistic. Either of which would make it a hate crime. That people don’t seem to want to understand this is too normal here in the US.
But, also, while McCammond seems to have apologized she does not seem to have attempted to make amends. We’ve all done stuff when we were young and dumb. But McCammond should have known that, as a Black woman, she doesn’t get to write that kind of thing off the way white guys do. Well, she knows it now.
In the end, however, the thing about so called Cancel Culture is that the vast majority of people with power, including Ralph Northam and even Alexi McCammond, will be just fine.
Sources
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/teen-vogue-conde-nast-wintour-mccammond/2021/04/03/dafd2804-9104-11eb-a74e-1f4cf89fd948_story.html
http://mammiddleagedmama.com/asian-american-mythology/
https://fashionista.com/2021/03/teen-vogue-alexi-mccammond-staff-protest-letter-controversy
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/media/teen-vogue-editor-alexi-mccammond.html
https://www.eater.com/2020/6/10/21286688/bon-appetit-toxic-work-culture-of-racism
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/03/alexi-mccammond-teen-vogue-conde-nast-controversy.html
https://www.ontheissues.org/Ralph_Northam.htm
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/01/politics/northam-blackface-photo
https://www.virginiamercury.com/2019/11/06/five-things-northam-says-he-will-and-maybe-wont-do-with-a-democratic-majority/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/why-most-black-virginians-dont-want-ralph-northam-resign
https://www.nbc29.com/2021/03/16/gov-northam-restores-civil-rights-over-k-virginians/
https://www.ontheissues.org/governor/Ralph_Northam_Civil_Rights.htm