About a year ago, the owner of two local bars made some racially insensitive comments on Twitter. As a result, I made the decision not to frequent his establishments anymore. The first of these, Ryleigh’s, was home to the Baltimore chapter of the US Tottenham supporters club, and as a self respecting Arsenal supporter, there was no way I was ever stepping foot in there. His second bar, Crossbar, is a German beerhall-style spot, serving huge liters of beer. Once the owner outed himself as a racist, downing liters at Crossbar was longer an option. That’s why it stopped me in my tracks this past weekend when a friend suggested we go there once the COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. It surprised me because this friend and I share many similar values and come down on the same side of many political debates. I got to thinking about whether my stance was actually hurting the owner, or myself.
With all of this in mind, for this exercise I wanted to find some writings about “cancel culture”. With the recent controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s comments about transpeople on Twitter, I took to Google to look for news articles offering perspectives. I experimented with the search terms, and typed in the following: “Should I still read harry potter jk rowling twitter“.
The first three results of my search were from The Guardian, the New York Times, and a link to Rowling’s Twitter feed itself. I read the Guardian and Times articles, ultimately settling on the one from the Times for my notes-taking exercise. Because I wanted to use a recent, news-worthy topic, I knew that Google would be the best tool for this particular job. However, I expect I’ll be using tools such as JSTOR to help me find a scholarly journal or article which will help me gain a historical perspective.
Rowling is clearly not the first person to be threatened with “cancellation”, and “cancel culture” is just the latest term for what is sometimes referred to as “consumer activism”. What I’m hoping to find are well-researched articles and papers – perhaps even a book or two – that focus on the effectiveness of consumer activism. How often have boycotts worked? Can they go too far?
I’d also like to find something that looks into whether it’s truly possible to separate the artist from the art. Should we all really stop listening to Michael Jackson? Should we not read Mark Twain? Should we stop watching films produced by Harvey Weinstein? What might be easy for some will not be as easy for others. I’m finding these questions intellectually stimulating, and am looking forward to getting some help in an attempt to answer them for myself.
Your final paragraph really resonated with me. Ive thought of this before: should the background of an artist stop you from enjoying their work? Every mind is unique in some way, is it wrong to look at a persons negatives as their leading characteristics? I listen to hard rap and punk music where the music is fueled by anger and rebellion mostly. Every now and then you’ll hear of some artist being arrested or accused of a malicious act and you see the true evil side of a person, and even though I would never hang out with a person I knew was violent, I still tend to listen to artists with morals I am against.
Mike, this is a very interesting topic and i’ll be anxious to see what you come up with. As a History major, things like this should stick out to me because of the balance between understanding what happened in our past and learning from it, or completely getting rid of it by either complete removal, or by ganging up on certain people and essentially bullying them into not listening to a certain artist, watch certain movies, etc. I also like the personal example you used to begin this. I used to work as a barback for a little while at the biergarten (beer garden) downtown in Syracuse, which happens to be a soccer bar as well, so I can identify with that- especially the part of choosing not to go to the pub that is a Spurs pub, I commend you for that!
News articles are something i’m choosing to work with as well, as long as they are written by someone who could qualify as an expert or at the very least a respected, knowledgeable person. We can also share in agony that Liverpool won the premier league… ugh
Hey Mike, I think that your idea for researching cancellation culture is great!
I am certainly looking forward to seeing what you find about the effectiveness of boycotting and if they can go too far. This is a particularly great topic as it is extremely relevant to our time.
I have recently received a record player as a gift from work and decided to go to my parents house to see what kind of music they used to listen to. I found a record of an old Bill Cosby standup. I was familiar with reruns of the Cosby show, but have never heard his standup so I was curious and listened to it.
Though the crimes that he committed are disgusting and unforgiveable, I found his comedy to be excellent. He may very well be one of the top comedians of his time and has undoubtedly done a lot for the black community.
Although it may be challenging for some people to separate the artist from the artist’s actions, I personally think it has to be left to individual choice and we shouldn’t erase the positive things that the artist has done.
This is certainly an interesting and timely topic, Mike, though I would encourage you to tune into some of the nuances here–i.e. the differences between rejecting individual artists (often described as ‘cancel culture’) and larger-scale ethical consumption movements (that withhold consumer dollars from companies that use those profits to engage in questionable practices or to support problematic causes). Both can be valuable ways of making a personal and/or political statement in a capitalist economy where we compute value in economic terms. The latter is going to be more directly connected to our examination of organizational culture.