Watch THE new CBSN Originals documentary, “Speaking Frankly: Cancel culture,” in the video player above. It will air on CBSN on Sunday, August at 8 p.m., 11 p.m. 2 a.m. ET.
In this politically divided and social media-driven era, the “culture of cancellation” has affected almost every facet of American public life. Politicians, celebrities, CEOs, athletes, media executives, even influential people who make their point have experienced a “cancellation.” Here are the stories of 3 other people who were discovered in one aspect or another of a “cancellation” controversy.
That was in 2012. The president of Chick-fil-A at the time, Dan Cathy, spoke out against same-sex marriage and a backlash ensued. Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee asked Chick Wire-A for a Thank-You Day because he was “irritated by the virulent abuse” that opposed the fast food chain after Cathy’s comments. While supporters were covered up on demand at Chick-fil-A in solidarity with Cathy, the protesters did the opposite: ask only for loose glasses of water and express their war of words to employees.
In Tucson, Arizona, Adam Smith to order himself a glass of loose water. Smith, a successful young business executive, had recently witnessed his brother-in-law’s struggle on his way out. He felt entitled to participate in the occasion and film the full exchange and post it on YouTube. In the video, Smith is seen telling the service servant behind the wheel, “I don’t know how you live with yourself and paint here. I don’t get it. It’s a terrible business with terrible values.”
“It was my first demonstration. I think it was benign. I think I was sure I’d put it on video instead of fainting to protest and get into big crowds,” Smith told CBSN Originals. “I certainly didn’t think of the consequences.”
After uploading the video to YouTube, it went viral overnight. His employer won bomb and death threats and fired Smith for publishing it. Smith “canceled” before this terminology existed.
“As soon as I was fired, I lost the million dollars in shares that were awarded to me. I clearly stopped getting paid. I couldn’t repay my loan at the time. My wife and I were about to move out of space and let it go,” Smith recalls. “We had about 401 (k) of retirement cash that we were going to have to use and started using it.”
A few months after his dismissal, he got another assignment, but lost it as soon as the company noticed the video. A third task will be cancelled despite Smith’s disclosure of the video. A fourth task will be to offer lost in the same way.
“It was a year after the Chick-fil-A video and [I] was publicly canceled or embarrassed, and I still couldn’t find a job. I was running out of money. Arrangement… I tried to understand, how am I going to get back here? Smith says. He began to lose all hope.
“I took a look at my life insurance policy. It was a million-dollar life insurance policy. It contained no exclusions by suicide and I started thinking about it for a few weeks. Then I even started knowing precisely where and how I was going to do it. Take a look to make it look like a twist of fate. Try to make it look like a twist of fate so my kids don’t have that embarrassment, but at least they’d get the cash back and accept me: failure, mistake. out of the equation.” About two years after Smith’s video went viral, his family circle qualified for food stamps. About six months later, he made his first television appearance to communicate his joy and things began to change. In a week, he won a job that was being offered and is now CFO of a software company. Despite everything that has happened, he feels that joy has replaced him for the better.
One morning in June, Tammie Teclemariam, a food writer, scrolled on Twitter when she earned a tip in her direct messages. It’s a screenshot of an old Instagram post with a photo of Bon Appétit editor Adam Rapaport and his wife dressed as stereotypical depictions of Puerto Ricans at a Halloween party.
“Every time you dress up as a Halloween race, it’s a problem,” Teclemariam observed.
And the upheavals, I thought, went way beyond that bachelor photo. Although Bon Appétit was a coveted office for food journalists, he had heard his friends and colleagues talk about systemic disorders in the magazine, adding stories about how other people of color were treated and paid less.
“There’s a huge challenge in Bon Appétit that just cultural,” Teclemariam told CBSN Originals. “The kind of forgetfulness that happens when there are no other people of color in positions of power.”
At the same time, demonstrations for racial justice were taking place across the country. “During the week George Floyd killed, I went to a lot of protests and felt motivated to continue fighting for justice,” teclemariam says. “I felt very fed by my feelings at the time, and used them to focus on firing Adam Rapoport as editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit.
So he tweeted Rapoport’s screenshot on “brown face”. Within a few hours he resigned, acknowledging that the dress was “extremely ill-conceived” and admitting that he had had “blind spots as an editor”.
Some consider him a high-profile victim of the cancellation culture. In the New York Post, Kevin Williamson wrote about it in an opinion piece titled “The Warriors of Social Justice Lead a Dangerous “Cultural Revolution.” But Teclemariam questions this point of view.
“I think when a motion for social justice develops a very undeniable nickname, it’s helping others laugh or lessen this motion,” Teclemariam says. “So calling what I’m doing overrides the culture would equate the retirement of other people who have instituted a racial hierarchy in a very tough and very elitist media business with the movements of a celebrity. That’s not what it is. It’s not gossip. “
Teclemariam believes that “cancellation” is not the first tactic other people use to make a statement, however, consider it an effective tool for those who would not normally have the strength to influence the type of replacement they need to see.
“It’s the absolute last resort, but it’s any option for many of us who suffer in sight,” he said.
After Rapoport’s departure, the magazine, which is owned by Condé Nast, published what he called “a long-awaited apology.” Bon Appétit said he claimed that he also had a “white-centric vision” and promised to dismantle his “toxic culture from top to bottom.” But behind the scenes, the dissension continued. This month, five presenters from the popular video series “Bon Appétit Test Kitchen” announced their departure, raising considerations about the lack of diversity and wage inequality.
Teclemariam says it has been incredibly difficult to identify in the industry despite its ratings. “It’s just that to make an area for myself, to locate a task in the media, I had to make an area for myself,” he said. “It would be for me to seek a genuine job opportunity, anything that would give me enough cash to have a life or start a circle of relatives or think of something bigger than paying my salary if those other people are still in power. “
Since posting the photo on Twitter, Teclemariam has gained more than 13,000 fans on Twitter and has continued to use its platform to hold other difficult food media accountable. On June 29, Teclemariam shared accusations about the abusive behavior of L.A. Times editor-in-chief Peter Meehan toward staff. Two days later, he resigned.
Last year, Maria Tusken, a yarn producer owner, TuskenKnits, was embroiled in a scandal that has confused the Community of Weavers on Instagram. It began when another fabric influencer, Karen Templer, wrote a debatable blog post. On January 7, 2019, Templer, who is white, wrote on his blog about his enthusiasm for an upcoming trip to India, saying it was “like being presented with a seat on a flight to Mars.” Templer’s message continued: “If I can move on to India, I can do anything, I’m pretty sure.”
The reaction was brutal. Commentators called Templer for employing “another” language that fueled an imperialist mindset. The backlash to the blog post has led members of the fabric network to open up on reports of racism. Templer apologized for his language, but Maria Tusken discovered that the complaint was unfair.
“In a week or two, everyone was talking about how racist Array’s weaving network was… And everyone was falling in love just to apologize for being white,” Tusken said. “And I felt bad for Karen Templer. I didn’t know her personally, but I saw the crowd converge towards her.
Sixteen days after Templar’s blog post, Tusken posted a YouTube video condemning Templer’s appeal. She said the network “hostile in the call to social justice.”
“No one protects her, no one says it wrong, that is not her intention. And I felt like I had to do something because no one else Array,” Tusken said. But he underestimated the consequences.
“At that moment I didn’t realize how protecting Karen Templer would be for me and my business,” he said. “After a few days, those other people online, the crowd that chased Karen came here after me.”
Some who felt that the fabric network takes into account their racist tendencies cited their video as an example of “white fragility.” Tusken began receiving messages reporting her; he was called Nazi and white supremacist.
“That’s the worst,” he says. “Thousands of people who hate you. It’s hard until you’ve experienced it.”
Negative attention has had a negative effect on Tusken’s business. He was unable to attract advertising workers or new consumers and was wasting fans on social media.
But in the early 2020s, Tusken made the decision to turn the tide and embrace his new notoriety in the weaving world. He launched a new wool collection called “Polarized Knits” that mocked political correctness and cried out culture, with products named after the terminology he had heard during the controversy: “Gaslight”, “Virtue Signaling”, “Othering”, “Wrong-Pense”.
Tusken’s new children’s collection has begun to attract attention and has been earned from critical colleagues of the social justice movement. “The creation of this collection of threads has given me a lot of confidence,” Tusken said. “I felt like I was being proactive and just looking to be nice to what those other people had done to me and others.”
Despite the difficult situations that followed, he regrets taking his place.
“I didn’t apologize for anything, and I think that’s what you have to do to combat that, because if you apologize like Karen Templer did, it belongs to them now. So everything she does or says is a theme for the crowd.” Tusken said. “… And since I didn’t apologize, I can do whatever I want. I can run my business any way I want, and I’m not subject to what they call me all the time and I have to constantly apologize and check to explain myself.”