By Dr. Joynicole Martinez
Special To The Carolinian
We’ve gone from tar and feathering to typing a hashtag. We publicly ostracize and cancel people, organizations, and mindsets we find offensive. But, is this hypocrisy in the midst of calls for restorative justice and reparations?
A popular influencer apologized this week for racist posts on social media she made more than 10 years ago, prompting outrage from some Black social media creators who say they are tired of white creators constantly having their previous racist behavior unearthed without significant repercussions.
Brooke Schofield, who has built a following of 2.2 million on TikTok with her lifestyle videos, posted two apologies — one on Sunday and another on Tuesday — addressing backlash that stemmed from people discovering several of her Twitter/X posts uploaded between 2012 and 2015. She owned her words, acknowledged the influence of her environment, took responsibility for having the resources to seek out training and education and not doing so, and reiterated that she has grown since then and is not the person she was a decade ago.
Still, a flurry of Black creators expressed exhaustion at the frequency at which white creators are exposed for racist comments, and how quickly those creators are forgiven by fans. Some Black creators also said that they feel white creators who previously posted racist remarks emphasize that they have changed with little evidence to suggest they have. Some shared they believe white influencers often don’t understand how harmful their old posts or comments are.
Some people call it mob mentality. For others, it’s a modern social justice practice. Possibly it’s an impediment to free speech. Cancel culture is a concept so hotly debated that it remains in limbo, much like many individuals’ attitudes toward it. The one common theme everyone seems to agree on is that cancel culture involves taking a public stance against an individual or institution for actions considered objectionable or offensive.
A 2021 Forbes article defined cancel culture as nothing but “long overdue accountability for the privileged.” “If you don’t have the ability to stop something through political means, what you can do is refuse to participate,” said Anne Charity Hudley — North Hall Endowed Chair in the Linguistics of African America at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Canceling is a way to acknowledge that you don’t have to have the power to change structural inequality. You don’t even have to have the power to change all of public sentiment. But as an individual, you can still have power beyond measure.”
But is it an effective way to hold those in positions accountable, or is it punishment without a chance for redemption?
Rather than promoting accountability, cancel culture has come to “promot[e] ostracization over education, condemnation over compassion, and is deaf to redemption and change,” according to Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist.
If true, cancel culture flies in the face of restorative justice. Rather than having a conversation about how to restore those involved in offensive or criminal acts, perpetrators are just cancelled. There is no path to healing, to learning, or to making things right. Cancel culture is, in essence, very carceral in that perpetrators are merely punished, and are not given an opportunity to make amends or address the underlying issues which resulted in their behaviors.
The largely black-and-white approach of cancel culture seeks to punish, censor, and exclude, rather than encourage personal growth and learning — denying individuals the chance to amend their perspectives and behavior.
And if we truly want restoration - repair - reparations - we must offer an opportunity for amending, because that is the pathway to accountability and restoration.
In the era of trials by social media, in a sense, the difference between accountability culture and its predecessor is the same as the one between restorative justice and retributive justice. The former focuses on fixing the harm done by the perpetrator, making them aware of its consequences, and finally, integrating them into society by enabling them to be better individuals. The latter, much like cancel culture, is too fixated on the idea of punishment to effect any actual change.
After the release of Will Smith’s single, “You Can Make It,” social media was abuzz with statements around his redemption. He was offering up new music as a form of apology for his physical attack on Chris Rock. Largely seen as a positive influencer, there was a reputational fall from grace, and reviewers and listeners heard the song’s lyrics as an offering toward atonement. His follow up song, “Work of Art” acknowledges the dichotomy of humanity - light and dark, striving for good while battling innate evil - and this being held as the artistic beauty of what makes us human.
Accountability culture acknowledges that, as human beings, we do make mistakes, but can also learn from them and rectify our ways, if given the opportunity to do so. It doesn’t absolve people of the harm they cause unto others — particularly toward marginalized communities. Instead, it endeavors to hold them accountable and demand change.
To a great extent, then, the accountability culture critiques unjust systems and unfair structures, whereas cancel culture — in its present form, at least — is devolving into a device that demonizes individuals.
As cultural institutions leverage accountability culture and the power of social media in demanding reparations and retribution on behalf of history, the widespread victims of injustice seem to endlessly increase in count. Whether a member of an individual’s family tree participated in the inexcusable horror of slavery or the land theft and oppressors and the necessity of reparations. Even those apparently blameless or significantly applauded by the media fall short of innocence: Vice President Kamala Harris’ Brahmin ancestors historically oppressed the Dalits, the lowest members of Indian society.
This is an echoing reminder that none are free from some history of oppression or innocent of association with injustice practices. All owe retribution. For a cause so progressive and emphatically collective, it rings of the core of human nature: None are without fault. The Truth is that the more society exposes the oppressed and identifies the oppressor, the more it will come to light that all are fallen.
But we don’t want redemption, do we?
Redemption can be seen as repurchase of something sold or recovery by payment.
After the Civil War Republicans in Congress impeached President Johnson and passed the 14th and 15th amendments, granting Blacks the same rights to citizenship, suffrage, and protection under the law as whites enjoyed. With these new rights, Black Americans soon expanded their social and political power, electing the first Black US Senator (Hiram Rhodes Revels) in 1870 and establishing the first public schools in the South for Black folks. But what looked like progress for many was interpreted as anarchy and upheaval by people south of the Mason-Dixon.
By 1873, many white Southerners were calling for “Redemption” – the return of white supremacy and the removal of rights for Blacks – instead of Reconstruction. This political pressure to return to the old order was oftentimes backed up by mob and paramilitary violence, with the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts assassinating pro-Reconstruction politicians and terrorizing Southern blacks. Within a few years, Northern attentions were consumed by apathy and fatigue and the South slipped back toward many of the patterns of the antebellum era. So dire was the situation that historian W. E. B. DuBois described the period as one where “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
Restorative justice calls for repair. The definition of repair is to “to put something that is damaged, broken, or not working correctly, back into good condition or make it work again.” Reparations don’t call for a move back to old statuses, but a systematic path to the condition promised all humanity. We know the words, “All men are created equal…”
If we are calling for more than apologies over racist, derogatory, offensive, or different statements or viewpoints shared over a decade ago, then we certainly must declare more for justice based Reparations. The idea that Reparations simply requires giving a check or a lump sum of money to each person of African descent in the diaspora is short-sighted. Such an approach could not make up for the degradation our ancestors endured nor for the gross social and economic inequalities which systemic racism perpetuates today.
Apologies mean nothing if the offending behavior continues. That’s why one of the five conditions of reparations according to the United Nations (UN), includes Assurances and Guarantees of Non-Repetition. The exhaustion the culture is putting forth is fed by repetitive acts of racism that, because there has been no repair, fall as as a collective weight of hundreds of years in the cultural consciousness of people who have been harmed.
And though apology falls under another reparative category put forth by the UN, we are still looking for it. Satisfaction. Satisfaction is part of full reparations under international law for moral damage, such as “emotional injury, mental suffering, and injury to reputation.” In some instances where cessation, restitution, and compensation do not bring full repair, satisfaction is also needed.
