Cancel Culture & the English Language

November 28, 2021

However, the dangers cancel culture poses to meaningful discourse and in undermining democratic nations like the United States motivated me to write my first (and perhaps last) truly political essay. I sent the essay around to more than 20 mainstream news and cultural media outlets before Iona Italia, Editor-in-Chief at the international humanist magazine Areo accepted it for publication. Sadly, the magazine folded about 18 months after they published it. As such, I’m recreating it here. The title is an homage to George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, which I read in my honors English course during my senior year of high school. Both his essay and my own feel even more relevant now than when they first were published, given the Trump Administration’s eradication of several thousand pages of data related to climate change, diversity, equity & inclusion, vaccines and other health research and mandates by states like Florida, Texas and others to delete entire episodes of U.S. history from school curricula.

CANCEL CULTURE & THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
by Sandi Sonnenfeld

Proponents of cancel culture call for the rejection and vilification of any institutions, individuals or facts that make them uncomfortable or conflict with their worldview. Both as a professional writer and as a college writing tutor and former college English instructor I find a recent example of this trend particularly troubling—an article published by the Conference on College Composition and Communication in which five college writing instructors demanded that university professors stop requiring African-American students to use standard English in the classroom because it is

socially constructed … rooted in white supremacy, whiteness and anti-Blackness and contributes to anti-Black policies (e.g., English only) that are codified and enacted to privilege white linguistic and cultural norms while deeming Black Language inferior.

Standard American English is “rooted in whiteness,” in that the American colonies were subject to British rule for more than 100 years before they became independent—and Great Britain is a white-majority country.  That white Europeans suppressed and supplanted indigenous cultures and languages when they conquered the Americas and introduced Black slavery to the New World, including forcing these slaves to give up their languages, does demonstrate the harm white supremacy causes, an injustice further perpetuated through the institutionalization of slavery upon the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788. It must be noted, however, that if the argument centers around language itself being rooted in “white supremacy,” one would logically have to reject not only standard English, but French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and any other language used by white-majority nations which participated in the slave trade or subjugated people of color during three centuries of colonialism.

Additionally, those who seek to eradicate racial injustice by rejecting standard American English for its origins in “white supremacy” deliberately ignore the fact that language continually evolves.  New grammatical forms and words—hundreds of words per year—are added to the American English lexicon, including grammatical forms and words adopted from social media, popular culture (on which Black Americans have had an outsized influence) and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) such as words like chill out, lit, and woke. Today’s standard American English is not the same as the English spoken in America two hundred—or even twenty years ago.

Moreover, no longer requiring students practice standard American English in the classroom would only disadvantage them. English is currently the most widely used language in the world; being able to speak and write English well enables people to effectively interact and communicate with others around the globe. And learning the rules of standard English doesn’t just benefit students who don’t speak it at home. All students would benefit from more thoroughly learning the basic grammar rules and rhetorical techniques of standard written English, beginning as young as is practicable. I believe many Americans of all colours, races and ethnicities would welcome this: when I tell people how I earn my living, many wince, stating they wished more of their colleagues had better standard English writing skills.  

I agree that American institutions—and American society as a whole—should acknowledge that many black Americans speak AAVE, which also is sometimes referred to as Black English or Ebonics.  This variety of English, which is an integral part of black culture in America, should be treated with respect rather than erroneously seen as somehow inferior. I also believe that AAVE fluency can benefit people in the modern US marketplace. Just as American businesses increasingly value workers who can speak multiple languages in a global economy, those who speak AAVE can arguably add value to corporations by reaching and marketing to the millions of black Americans who are also fluent in AAVE, perhaps lessening the pressure many of them may feel to code-switch between AAVE and standard English.

Moreover, just as many musicians incorporate Black English in hip-hop lyrics, the American publishing industry should do more to embrace black storytellers, including those who use AAVE in fiction, poetry and other forms of creative writing as an authentic voice is essential to any work of self-expression. 

But to stop requiring the teaching and use of standard English would in no way help achieve racial justice. On the contrary, sharing a common language, lexicon, diction and grammar only make it easier to exchange and introduce a diversity of ideas, and this is likely to produce a society consisting of a bigger, more diverse and inclusive tent, rather than several smaller, separate, homogenous ones. Standard English serves as one of the best tools we have to keep talking to each other regardless of class, race, religion, ethnicity or geography.

As a manifestation of cancel culture the demand to omit the teaching of standard English is deeply illiberal. It reminds me of a poignant scene early in Milan Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: twenty-year-old Mirek, angry at his girlfriend Zdena, removes her picture from his photo album—as though that will help him forget he loves her. Kundera compares this to how the Czech propaganda bureau airbrushed Vladimír Clementis out of all photos related to the Czech Communist Party after he was hanged as a party traitor in 1952. In an interview discussing the underlying theme of the novel, Kundera noted, “After the Russian invasion of 1968, every Czech was confronted with the thought that his nation could be quietly erased from Europe.”  

When self-described progressives participate in cancel culture, they are engaging in the same kind of totalitarian tactics used by the former Soviet Union (as well as current-day Russia, North Korea, China, Venezuela, Syria and other dictatorships that trample on free speech, freedom of the press and other civil liberties). 

Cancel culture also undermines democratic principles such as free speech and a free press which enable the publication of ideas. Earlier this year, more than 200 Simon & Schuster employees signed a petition demanding that the company cancel its planned publication of former vice president Mike Pence’s memoir—and refrain from publishing any books written by former members of the Trump administration. While I disdained Pence’s actions as vice president and found his recent claims that systemic racism doesn’t exist in America ignobly fatuous, members of the publishing industry who advocate suppressing differing views (as long as such views do not call for violence against an individual or a group) display hypocrisy given their chosen career.  

Cancel culture is not, of course, strictly the purview of the woke left, as was demonstrated when House Republicans stripped arch-conservative Liz Cheney of her leadership role for telling the truth about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The far right, particularly white nationalists or religious fundamentalists, often embrace cancel culture as a form of ideological purity.

The Trump administration took cancel culture one step further by rejecting anything, including scientific facts, that interfered with Trump’s personal and political agendas. For example, Scott Pruitt, Trump’s first head of the Environmental Protection Agency, ordered the deletion of thousands of pages related to climate change from the agency’s website.  President Trump even attempted to manage the COVID pandemic by canceling it: repeatedly announcing for nearly three months how the coronavirus would soon “be gone” or “miraculously disappear.” And an expansive Texas law recently signed by ardent Trump supporter Republican Governor Greg Abbot not only has banned public schools from any discussion of critical race theory but even prohibits giving students academic credit for internships that involve advocacy work related to racism.

The ability of Google, Amazon and other technology companies to access and mine huge amounts of personal data compounds the dangers posed by cancel culture. Data mining has enabled Big Tech to customise and personalise the spread of information so fully that Americans are less likely than ever before to watch the same movies, hear the same music, read and learn from the same books, be exposed to the same ideas, or even hear about the same news events.

Thus, America today is not a nation whose citizens feel connected to each other through shared experiences and values. Instead, personalisation of information-sharing and the deliberate spread of misinformation via Facebook and other digital channels have led to disunity, isolation, the fragmenting of belief systems, and the loss of a collective American identity. Even more problematic, many Americans no longer accept the concept of objective truth, opting instead, as Stephen Colbert once brilliantly put it, for “truthiness.”

I get it. Too many Americans are, as the great civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer said more than 50 years ago, “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” We are tired of the misinformation, the divisiveness and the rancour constantly coming at us—not only from political leaders and pundits but from people we work with, our neighbours, even, sadly, members of our own families.

Few of us, given recent events, feel safe. Ironically, I think fear drives cancel culture. If something feels unpleasant, contradicts one’s perspective, or challenges one’s belief in how a society or system of government should function, too many Americans favor the easy fix by opting to eliminate or erase those people, institutions or ideas from our lives and our history. Yet doing so only dooms us to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Perhaps that’s why after writing and publishing fiction set in contemporary times for more than two decades, I recently decided to write a historical novel. It is set in seventeenth-century Moscow and based on the lives of the five daughters of Tsar Alexis I, who—due to both security concerns and strict religious and social rules—were forbidden to study, marry or bear children, and could only leave the Terem Palace at the Kremlin when hidden behind a canopy so no one of lesser rank would see their faces. Working on such a story would certainly seem to offer a temporary respite from our twenty-first-century troubles. But in addition to the gender issues this novel raise, what compels me to tell this story is just how closely the endless spread of gossip, misinformation and demonization of political opponents that took place in the Kremlin more than 350 years ago parallels the way social media and cancel culture function today. As culture reporter Megan O’Grady recently observed in “Why Are We Living in the Golden Age of Historical Fiction,”

Too many for too long were left out, the true architectures of power concealed. [The] novels that reveal the emptiness of the old stories destabilize our ideas of history rather than affirming them—which is, after all, one purpose of literary fiction. In our days of sloganeering and apocryphal tweets, it’s also a form of resistance.

Literary fiction can be a form of resistance against those who believe in an us-versus-them, yes-or-no mentality, and who make no allowances for maybes, I don’t knows or somewhere in-betweens. Cancel culture embraces dogma over freedom of original thought and values identity politics rather than valuing individuals for their unique gifts. And, as a storyteller, perhaps what I find most disturbing of all is that cancel culture rejects chiaroscuro—that glorious complexity of life’s shadowy ambiguities, in which flawed, conflicted protagonists often find themselves forced to make difficult choices—and do not always choose well.

This essay originally was published in slightly different form in Aero Magazine on Nov 23, 2021.

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