How do we think about cancel culture?

Cancel culture is rooted in the ethics of white supremacy

Question: How do we think about cancel culture?
Position‹3 of 4›: Cancel culture must be cancelled
Argument‹8 of 8: Cancel culture is rooted in the ethics of white supremacy

Despite its supposed social justice agenda, cancel culture actually has its roots in white supremacy. Its practice of shutting down dissent perfectly matches oppressive tendencies of the past.

The argument

The term "cancel culture" does not quite communicate how drastic the actual practice is. At its heart, it is the decision to overrule an idea or person by wiping them from the present, and "cancelling" their existence. They are not only boycotted, but ignored, shunned, and in many cases verbally abused. But this practice should be eerily familiar to those familiar with Western history. The ethical foundations of cancel culture come from white supremacy. Historians point to American slavery, and European colonialism as older forms of cancel culture, in which certain groups were stripped of any meaningful identity to subordinate and control them. Cancel culture uses similar methods. They not only reject a person's ideas or views, but then go on to negate their whole identity. The arena may now have shifted from farmlands to the internet, but this authoritarian style of power-grabbing remains unchanged. Cancel culture is an old power wielded in a new way. But it doesn't change how harmful the practice can be.

Premises

[P1]Cancel culture goes beyond boycotting to wipe out a person — shunning, ignoring, and abusing them while negating their whole identity. [P2] Historians liken this to older forms of identity-stripping power such as American slavery and European colonialism, the same authoritarian method moved from farmlands to the internet. [C] Therefore, because it is rooted in the ethics of white supremacy and remains deeply harmful, cancel culture must be cancelled.

Counter-arguments

The argument that cancel culture is a white supremacy tool is laughable when one considers that it's precisely the white supremacists, and their associated beliefs, that cancel culture targets in the first place. Cancel culture empowers minorities and all those who have been marginalized, and takes down those who abuse their power and platform to oppress those people. It is literally anti-oppression; it is about as far from white or supremacist as one can get.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The description is an unsourced maximum: boycott, shunning and abuse are grouped together with "wiping them from the present", and no case is cited in which anyone's existence was cancelled in the sense claimed. Public criticism of a person's views and organised campaigns to remove them from a platform are also different practices, treated here as one. [Rejecting P2] The analogy cannot bear the weight. Slavery and colonial rule were systems of legal ownership, coerced labour and state violence, and the comparison with online opprobrium is attributed to unnamed "historians" while sharing only the abstract notion of an identity being denied. An analogy is also not an origin: the premise claims that cancel culture is *rooted in* white supremacy, which would require showing a historical or intellectual descent rather than a resemblance. The counter-argument raises the obvious difficulty and it goes unaddressed — the practice is most often deployed against people accused of racism, which is hard to square with white supremacy as its ethical foundation.