“Some Culture Needs to be Canceled” May 9, 2021 Dr. Roger Ray
Allison Gaines - While some have complained that cancel culture is negative, I think it acts as an important social filter. If someone’s words or actions are offensive for many people, one should consider the intent of the speaker. If the intent was to alienate or mock marginalized groups of people, then the public has a right to recognize this and withdraw their support. In the digital age, consumers have a variety of materials they can read or view. Thus, they should have the freedoms that come along with that choice. Social media has provided a network of communication amongst consumers from all walks of life. It’s only logical that some people are offended by some content. They have the right to ignore or boycott brands, actors, and companies who use vulgar obscenities. In response to public outcry, corporate executives and policymakers have to weigh the risks of ignoring the voices of the general public.
Earlier this year, Anna Malaika Tubbs, currently a Ph.D. student at Cambridge, released a book that really needed to be written. It is entitled Three Mothers, and it pieces together what can be known of the women who raised the three black men who helped to reshape the world in the 20thcentury: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Three women who have been largely overlooked by history but whose hearts and minds shaped the civil rights leaders to whom they gave birth, and more importantly, gave inspiration.
I am painfully aware that Mother’s Day is not a universally happy holiday for everyone. Sometimes a mother gives a child a head start in life and sometimes they give their children something to be overcome through years of therapy. Sometimes they do both. But as Malcolm X said, “The mother is the first teacher of the child. The message she gives that child, that child gives to the world.” Malcolm’s mother, Louis Little, was an immigrant from Grenada, who spoke several languages, and she taught her children by putting newspaper clippings on the kitchen table with a dictionary. The children were daily assigned the task of comparing current events with what their white teachers were teaching them in school. Each of these three leaders had mothers who instilled a love of art, poetry, music, literature, and culture in them as a way of defying the narrow path that the predominant white culture wanted to put them into.
Berdis Baldwin taught her son James, Alberta King taught her son Martin, and Louise Little taught her son Malcolm, they taught their black sons to be aware of the culture that would seek to hold them down and they taught them to dream big dreams.
We often remember little Ruby Bridges this way, being escorted into a New Orleans segregated school by white, male, federal agents, as depicted by Normal Rockwell. But the historical fact is better portrayed by the movie, because she was walked to school every day holding the hand of her mother, Lucille. Ruby walked into an angry crowd of racists day after day, holding Lucille’s hand. And she said that she was only afraid once; there was an angry white woman holding a child’s coffin with a black doll in it, yelling at Ruby that she was going to lynch her. But, Ruby said, her mom looked at her and said, “That woman is not going to hurt you, I’ll see to that.” And Ruby believed her and was never afraid of the crowds again.
Martin Luther King’s older sister, Christine, remarked, “I have to chuckle as I realize there are people who actually believe M.L. just appeared.” Every great hero of history had mentors, teachers, and for many of them, their mother may have been more than their first teacher, she may have been their greatest teacher.
We have a Latin saying in philosophy, Ex nihilo nihil fit, “out of nothing, nothing comes.” We are born into a culture and even though cultures are always changing, we tend to accept the culture into which we are born, the status quo, as being the way things have always been. We can turn to both history and anthropology to understand male dominance, white privilege, homophobia, nationalism, and the assumption that whatever religion you were born into is the only true religion.
The Irish playwright and political activist, George Bernard Shaw, said: ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ If we simply accept the status quo, if we only preserve the culture we inherited, then nothing will ever come of us, we will never produce any progress. No one becomes a prophet by trying to preserve the way that things are.
I don’t want to bore you by just stating the obvious and I don’t want to indict mothers or fathers who just want their children to be safe, but, folks, if you teach your kids to adapt themselves comfortably into a sick society, are you doing them a favor? My parents never wanted me to rock the boat. They wanted me to be successful within the confines of a capitalist system where I was born on third base by being white, male, and straight, and it took me a long time to realize how the game was rigged, but once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Would you rather raise another Jeff Bezos or another Colin Kaepernick?
In my relationship with my Brazilian girlfriend, I am inheriting these two delightful, dark skinned nieces. I have offered to tutor them in their English classes, and I think I am going to start with Martin Luther King, Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Sure, they’re young for that, but my mom took me to Bible class when I was younger than them and I didn’t understand a word of it at first. I think that if this doesn’t make sense today, it will, and it will too soon. I wish that I had read it to my white nieces and nephews before they grew into adults in Kentucky and Alabama…. And that is all that I am going to say about that.
It takes critical thinking and courage to find the ways in which culture really needs to be changed, improved, advanced. The media tends to train us to think with our visceral emotions.
This meme points to the hypocrisy of how the political right tries to use social agenda triggers to control those whose only way of thinking is angry and fearful reactions. I would remind that that early last month, we were having news reports of mass shootings almost daily, and it was in the midst of that, that Republicans started talking about trans women competing in women’s sports. They will not consider anything to lower gun deaths, but they will try to stoke fear of transgender folk. Women’s athletics is just the current version of the debate about who uses which restroom.
And just for the record, there are no known instances of a trans person molesting anyone in any restroom. In fact, it is safe to say that the most anxious person in any public restroom is a trans person who is only hoping that they can pee without getting murdered. More than 20 trans folk have already been killed this year for being trans, one was right here in Springfield. How many people, for comparisons sake, have been killed this year for being straight?
Especially when you consider that less than 1% of the population is trans, and more than 97% report being straight, let’s be realistic and call that 90%, shall we?
If trans people were so dangerous, you would think that you would hear about some trans folk killing straight people but that’s a story that doesn’t seem to show up in the statistics! That doesn’t exist but there actually is a legal defense called the “trans panic” defense to excuse the murder of trans people, usually women, by men who are very insecure about just how straight they really are.
It is nice having a live audience again after all of these months, so let me ask you ladies: You are about to get on an elevator and one of these two people are getting in with you. Which one seems the most creepy to you, Tucker Carlson or this lovely trans woman? Being nervous about being alone with Tucker Carlson may be entirely rational, but transphobia is not.
I am especially disturbed by the same brand of lawmakers who wanted to subject
women, who were seeking an abortion, to a transvaginal ultrasound, violating women vaginally who may well be seeking an abortion because they have already been sexually violated . . . and now these same really creepy politicians are wanting to subject female athletes to a visual inspection of their genitals…. Is it too much to ask to get Republicans to just leave our private parts alone? Just don’t, don’t look, don’t touch, don’t insert, . . . just don’t!
What does your mother want for Mother’s Day, I’m guessing that I know the top two things on mom’s list: Equal pay for equal work, and for Republicans to stop thinking about her vagina all of the time. Now that would make for a Happy Mother’s Day!
The right often cries crocodile tears about “cancel culture,” over such things as Mr. Potato Head becoming simply “Potato Head,” and Theodore Geisel’s family trust deciding to remove some of Dr. Seuss’ early work from publication because, like most people of his time, he had a lot of unconscious racism in a few of his books that no one read anyway. But, in these cases, there was no one complaining about a toy being called a male nor did anyone pressure the heirs of Dr. Seuss to update their catalogue, the toy maker and the Seuss trust just recognized that culture has grown.
It may be that originally naming sports teams “Red Skins” or “Chiefs” or “Braves” was more honorific than derogatory but if Native Americans say that it is offensive to them to have caricatures and cartoons of their ancestors used to sell sports paraphernalia, then isn’t it just a matter of curtesy for us to respect their feelings?
When the United Negro College Fund was established, the word “Negro” was not considered to be racially insensitive. When the NAACP was started, the term “Colored” was not considered to be racially insensitive.
But there is just so much racism in America that even benign words become bastardized over time, and an oppressed people will demand respect and recognition from the larger culture, sometimes, at first, it starts with a change in language.
I’m still not good at remembering that trans people generally prefer that they be referenced with the pronouns “they” and “them” which, in my harshly trained grammatical mind, still sounds plural and not gender neutral singular, but as you hear in the news every day that trans people are still being victimized in state legislatures, the military, in public restrooms, and girls’ track meets, we’re being asked to change our language in the hope that it will help to change our prejudice.
Getting it wrong and being corrected, as in my case, repeatedly, is a part of helping our culture to become sensitive to the unique needs and triggers often common in the trans community. And, yes, sometimes that may feel like cancel culture when you are starting from a point of fear and prejudice, but, if, in your heart of hearts, you really want to become a better person than you are now, then you just have to accept that some of the culture that we have been really comfortable with needs to be canceled.
I came of age quoting the famous serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. What I am saying today is that this kind and gentle perspective might be a bit too much of a light hand in a country with as many problems with prejudice and discrimination, beset with the violence of poverty and a government entrenched in indifference. So, I don’t use the classic form of the serenity prayer anymore. I have a new prayer:
There are some things, mothers and fathers, that you should not teach your children to accept.
So now, let’s pray for the serenity and the courage to change the things that we should never have accepted. . . we will seem unreasonable at first, but who wants to fit in well in a sick society? Have courage my friends. Challenge the status quo. Question authority. Be as unreasonable as you have to be.
