In this four-part series, we are exploring the phenomenon known as “cancel culture.”
We hope to invite more people into conversations about how we work through tension and conflict in our movements, and to offer viable pathways for recognition, prevention, intervention, and healing. Given the profound political moment we are in –– with the unraveling of many democratic rights and freedoms –– it feels more important than ever to strengthen the ways in which we come together on the left. Our capacity to mobilize is strengthened by our ability to work through disagreement and come back from conflict. This series is our humble attempt in this direction.
You’ve been with us through this series on Because We Need Each Other –– from our prologue about our initial gathering, to our best attempt to explain and understand what this phenomena is, to our invitation to look for early warning signs –– and we’re here for our final (for now) offering focused on widening the field of interventions and healing.
Without demonizing cancel culture, we simultaneously recognize that, as a singular approach, it can suffocate our organizations and movements. In a punitive and overly vigilant culture, when there is less space for making mistakes, we know there is less space for creativity and experimentation and less connection within and across the movement. Fear –– of being wrong, of being called out, of being taken down –– does not build the kind of imagination, leadership, and relationships we need for the kinds of complex and multi-layered changes we are seeking in these turbulent times and for our interrelated future.
How can we imagine and create integrative interventions from frameworks of learning and healing? What could those look like and how can you use them in your contexts? How can change and accountability be pursued without shutting each other down or pursuing unnecessary polarization, separation, and alienation from each other? We know from our experiences that how we deal with conflicts, hurt, and harm can contribute to our work in very meaningful ways, with the potential to bring us even closer together with greater clarity, alignment, and power.
So let’s get to exploring other avenues. We don’t pretend to have all the answers, but we are excited to share what we have learned and dialogue with you about what is possible.
Framing Healing Interventions
Let’s imagine a scenario in which there’s an accusation that someone in a movement or an organization has caused harm, and there are growing calls for that person to resign from the organization or leave the movement. You start to see people taking sides, and although you have your reservations about what the right course of action should be, you start to feel afraid that any dissent will align you with the harm that’s been caused. We heard many examples like this at our initial group gathering. So now what?
Here are some parallel processes you can undertake, whether you’re watching someone take the heat or whether it’s happening to you on any side of the equation. We don’t want these steps to sound linear, because they can be a little one step forward, one step sideways, and some may not apply to your situation. So please receive these in the spirit of offerings rather than as linear “action steps.”
Also, the suggestions below are more geared to the wider community surrounding the challenge, rather than the people directly involved. For those at the center, it can be hard to step back for perspective and/or see other options. Yet almost always, there is a larger group around the situation that can play a vital role. We invite you to be active in co-creating generative pathways forward, rather than piling on or standing by as a passive bystander.
Slow Down to Discern
It is important to begin by grouping the different types of allegations before imagining what to do about them. This is by no means a science, but it will help us to parse out the different possible responses. The first type of allegation involves physical or sexual harm or abuse, or organizational fraud or corruption –– the type of allegation that might be picked up by law enforcement if someone decides to make an official report. A second type of allegation is often more diffuse, including abuse of power, workplace harassment, and racialized or gender-based aggressions. A third type of allegation is one that –– although presented as a case of harm –– might be classified more aptly as some form of conflict, disagreement, or a case of mutual harm.
Before moving into some tools and techniques for responding to harm, we need to discern between these different types of allegations. We can undertake a thoughtful assessment as to whether this allegation involves physical or fraudulent harm; whether it’s the type of harm that would be responsive to a non-legal intervention; or whether it is something more akin to discomfort, disagreement, or dispute.
The bulk of this essay will focus on how to work through the second type of allegation, in which one person is called out for causing a specific harm. For example, imagine an executive director who routinely expects staff to do work in ways that mirror systemic oppressions; or, imagine a seasoned leader who is called out for racial insensitivity. In both of these cases, the leader has complex relationships that intersect with their responsibilities to individuals and to the collective.
As you read on, we invite your continuous discernment. The techniques described below have been written to help with this second type of allegation. They might not be as relevant for something that has risen to the level of criminal charges, though some of it may be helpful for a conflict mediation or compromise.
We also invite you to examine what course of action to take and whether you’re the right person to make that decision. This involves assessing not just the severity and legality of the allegation itself, but whether or not you need to consult others. Regardless, slowing down in all situations is helpful. Checking in to see how activated you are, and then taking some breaths and decelerating instead of jumping into urgent action, will serve in generating more creative options and deepening your understanding of the whole.
Clarify your own role
We’re imagining the reader of this essay is someone who is connected to the community but who is not front and center to the call out. Perhaps you’re thinking, What can I do to help? I love everyone involved, and I also love my community. How can I be of service to my community in this moment of turmoil?
Before you start participating in any intervention, check in with yourself about what is coming up for you: How activated am I by the allegation? Am I biased towards one person or another? What does it remind me of? Getting acquainted with your own triggers will allow you to move with more ease and with fewer projections. You might also ask yourself what role, if any, you may have played in allowing the harm to come to pass –– not from a place of shame but rather from potential shared responsibility which might ease the collective process. You can play a helpful role in healing your community if you’re paying attention to yourself and staying calibrated. Once you’ve slowed down and checked in with yourself –– making sure you’re not operating from your triggers or projections –– and if you feel ready and willing to help, a good next step is inviting the person who has felt harmed to tell you their story.
Listen Fully Without Interrupting or Fixing
If you have the honor of hearing someone’s story of harm, consider listening to them without interruption and without trying to solve the issue on their behalf. One of the gifts we can give people is our undivided attention. And when we interrupt someone’s story of harm because we’re trying to solve their problem, we don’t give them the chance to fully express themselves. We also center our own capacity to solve a problem, instead of making space for them to guide where things should go. With enough space and attention, people can begin to see for themselves what it is they might need, which is the first step in getting their power back.
Offer Support Without Prescribing the Outcome
It’s important to recognize that support for the person who feels hurt or harmed –– for their wellbeing, for their healing, and for their capacity to hold someone who hurt them accountable –– can be done without co-signing everything they think should happen to the person who harmed them. Here’s an important step: separate your support for the person harmed with your assessment as to how things should be handled. They are distinct pieces of the puzzle.
Test Your Assumptions about the Allegation
Examining the allegation is another key intervention. We know it can feel uncomfortable to ask follow-up questions, as those may be interpreted as undermining the person who made the accusation. Here, it is important to be humble and open with language, which will of course depend on the context. For example, speaking to the “accuser,” you might take this approach: “Thanks for sharing what has happened. I really want to learn more and understand the situation to figure out together what kind of intervention will work. Are you open to being asked a few more questions about it?”
If, in our example, the allegation is that a leader exercised racial insensitivity in ways that foster a hostile work environment, we could ask more about what happened and what the impact was. We can also explore the spectrum of truth in the experience rather than saying someone is lying, and also not assuming that their take on the situation is the full truth. While there is rarely an incentive to invent an allegation, we know that not every allegation is true with a capital “T.” Aiming to understand how much is perspective/perception and how much is fact, with humility and kindness, can be a helpful intervention to open the door to potential dialogue around the situation.
This might be a moment where you want to invite a conversation around whether this is indeed a question of harm, or whether this could be considered a disagreement –– even an offensive disagreement –– but not harm per se. The bar for using the word “harm” should be reasonably high, seen as something damaging and injurious. This could be a good moment to re-open the initial question of discernment: what is the landscape of this incident, and are there multiple layers of disagreement masquerading as harm? How much can we tolerate being offended, and when does it cross the line into harm? There are no easy answers to these questions, and yet our courage to ask them will help us to open up the possibilities for repair.
Leave Space for Curiosity and Possibility
When someone with no direct knowledge of a situation says, “This guy always does this, I knew it,” you can respond with curiosity, reminding people around you about what is known and what is not known. “Actually, I feel really sad for what the person who was harmed has experienced, and I don’t think we know yet if this was a pattern of behavior or a one-off incident.” This type of conversation is nuanced but not impossible. Without undermining the dignity of the person harmed, you can begin to parse what’s true from what is projection.
Another response might be, “I’m so sorry this happened to (the person who felt hurt or was harmed). I’m curious to understand what was happening for (the person who did this) and their sense of choice, or what was going on underneath it all.” Of course, these statements are very context-specific and won’t work for everything. Certainly they won’t work for cases of well-documented patterns of abuse from people in positions of power, which is not the kind of scenario we’re talking about. Yet in some scenarios, two things can be true at once: we can support a person who felt hurt or was harmed without closing every door on the person who is considered the cause of it. Remaining curious and pushing back on untested assumptions can puncture conventional thinking and prevent pilling-on to one viewpoint.
Address the Elephant in the Room: Identity
The most difficult thing to even write about is the question of the role of identity in furthering our separation from one another. And yet, this essay would be incomplete without referencing the ways in which both identity and a sense of victimization can be weaponized to shut down conversation. In our movement spaces, people sometimes preface their remarks with reference to their identity: “As a person who is [identity], I think x, y, z.” On the one hand, this can be a powerful and important way to surface perspectives that might be otherwise invisible to people who don’t share that identity. And on the other hand, it can also serve as a way to insulate oneself from reflection, curiosity, deconstruction, etc. If we disagree with “x, y, z,” are we not also implicitly disrespecting the identity that has been attached to the idea?
We have to be able to separate the identity of a participant from our wholesale acceptance of the accusation. No one person from any group identity speaks for all people from their affinity group. Spend any time with many people who share one identity and you’ll hear loads of disagreement about what constitutes xenophobia or racism or misogyny or any other “-ism.”
At a time when fascist practices and ideas are growing, we want our movements to feel like the antithesis; a space for freedom, complexity and interconnection. Some dialogue we could invite here: “I definitely hear a connection between this experience and your identity(ies) and those of the other person. Maybe we can slow down and parse this out? Not to disregard it, just to make a little more space and explore what is happening for you and the many threads that might be intertwining here. Do you feel open to that conversation?”
Right-Size and Complexify the Allegation
Let’s say you’ve slowed down and asked follow-up questions, and now you feel confident that the allegation contains important truths that need a response. We still may want to dig deeper. For example, could we ask if the responsibility for a hostile workplace and racialized aggressions are caused by one person, many people, and/or contexts, existing systems, and normative behaviors? If a person is in power, they certainly bear responsibility for the culture that is being practiced. And, the question remains, How much does this one individual control the culture and climate of a broader environment? As a corollary, there’s an important follow-up: Who else might be responsible for this situation?
There is a difference between taking responsibility for your actions and being scapegoated. American culture tends to romanticize an individual’s capacity to save the day. Similarly, this culture can over-punish an individual for what is a larger social problem. Toxic individualism often ends up getting played out during call-outs in ironic ways in which, for example, leaders of color have been accused of creating or enabling environments rife with white supremacy, or women have been accused of reinforcing the patriarchy. There is no doubt that any person from any identity can expand or benefit from racialized or patriarchal power structures. And, we’re noting the tension of whether it’s realistic to expect one person’s level of power and responsibility to undo systems of oppression that remain largely unchecked in our broader society. We can ask, What is fair to expect from our leaders and participants as individuals?
Nothing in this essay is offered as a way to help people shirk their responsibilities. We know that finger-pointing at the ills of broader society has been a time-tested form of deflection to deny individual agency. The purpose of the questions we offer here is not to minimize accountability, but simply to right-size the accusation without undermining the call for change. We want to invite more honest conversations about the roles each of us play in maintaining and sustaining systems of oppression, in both visible and invisible ways, in order to ensure an interplay between our senses of collective responsibility and our capacity for grace.
Ask Questions about Process
Another line of inquiry revolves around the opportunity given to the person accused to remedy their behavior before taking it out to the broader public via social or mainstream media. Of course, it is vital to be able to use public shaming to demand change when nothing else has worked. (Though, interestingly, leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. flipped shame on its head by using their actions to inspire the higher morality and goodness of the powerful and unaccountable, rather than belittling them.) Regardless, the questions you might ask are: What else has the person making the accusation tried before resorting to the public process? Have they reached out to the individual(s) in question and raised their concerns? Have they asked someone else to bring it to them? Has the person accused made any efforts to address the problem? Even if they haven’t fully or adequately solved the issue, have they made good faith efforts to try?
If the person making the accusation hasn’t tried anything privately in good faith, the question becomes, why not? Certainly it could be that the powerful person is too powerful, vindictive, or in denial for that to have worked. And, if we have a sense that the person accused may be open to feedback but the accuser hasn’t tried, then we do have to ask whether there is something else motivating the call-out: Is this a projection for something else they can’t control? Is this some sort of retaliation for a bad outcome? What’s going on for the person making the accusation to warrant them going public before bringing constructive feedback to a more private setting? What is underlying or justifying the public nature of the call out?
Soften Your Approach and Invite In Real Accountability
How can you support someone who has caused harm, who may be facing public shaming or a list of demands? This is tricky because, in any scenario in which the consequences seem out of proportion to the harm, people get understandably defensive. If you have the opportunity to support someone in this circumstance, there are two stages of support. The first stage is to spend time listening attentively to their experience of the conflict, including ways in which they might disagree with the characterization of harm, their frustration with what they perceive to be out-of-proportion consequences, and, often, harm that’s been done to them and that no one has ever apologized for. Here, the goal is not to agree with their assessment of everything (again, it’s not the truth necessarily with a capital T), but rather to ensure that their experience is also being heard with empathy. This can soften the knee-jerk defensiveness that gets in the way of self-reflection.
At the second stage, you may need to spend time explaining to them what the harm was and how it impacted the community. People often skip this step and make assumptions that the person knows or should have known, but we really need to take the time to lay it out clearly and work it through. Once they begin to understand the impact, you can remind them of the opportunity this moment brings. People generally don’t like to be held accountable, especially in our punishing world. And, like it or not, they now have a chance to make a meaningful shift in how they move in the world and to connect with how they may be impacting their community and, at best, to make it right. They have an opportunity to learn something, to change something, to be different. This can be a transformative moment. To get there, to truly face themselves, they need steadfast non-judgmental support.
The only times we’ve seen people really begin to understand the impact they have on others is through loving and supportive healing processes that ask them to address and change their behavior, without demonizing them: “I love you, and I believe you can do better.” The both/and is really important. These processes take time and effort, and yet it is nothing short of mesmerizing to see real accountability in action. It takes bravery and support to get there –– as transformation almost always happens when there’s love present –– and yet rarely happens under the harsh floodlights of punishment or shame.
Reintegration Into Community
Conflict does not have to lead to public humiliation, the loss of community, and permanent exile. In fact, if we learn to respond skillfully to these moments, they can create repair, lead to growth, and strengthen our relationships and movements. Ultimately, our end goal must be repair and the reintegration of the person who may have caused harm back into community, albeit with boundaries. If this is not explicitly stated at the outset of a process, the cultural tendency for disposability (which can impact victims as much as those who cause harm, if not more) may lead us to easily forget an individual and simply “move on.” By contrast, a good process is focused on attentive reintegration for everyone involved.
Once an accusation goes public, it can be hard to imagine that person being welcomed back to the community/group. Even if an accountability process happens that both parties are satisfied with, there is rarely a public statement that goes out to let others know. This can lead to a permanent sense of hyper-vigilance for the person who was accused, where they are constantly wondering who read the original public statement and is still viewing them in that negative light. Accountability, repair, and/or reconciliation are incredibly challenging processes for all parties. When done successfully, they need to be celebrated. If the parties involved in the process are willing to share their story with the broader public, then we can all benefit from the lessons learned and we can restore a sense of wholeness for everyone.
Because We Need Each Other
Fighting oppression, being in touch every day with massive injustice and an unbending system of control, can deflate the spirit in deeply distressing ways. Sometimes, it can be easier to just try to win at something, or against someone, because small wins signal that all this work hasn’t been in vain, that we aren’t totally impotent in our efforts. Yet, while we can certainly continue to demand more from the people who we know can do better, we also can’t afford to lose anyone else from our movements, especially in these challenging times.
If you are impacted by conflict and threats of cancellation, we invite you to take every opportunity to slow things down, test assumptions, and give people the support they need to unpack their defenses and their projections. Let’s not get frozen at the first stage of reaction and jump quickly into action. Ask more questions and expect complicated answers. Get more comfortable holding multiple perspectives as valid at once, without letting it suffocate our support for one another. What we practice at the small scale will ripple through our systems and affect change at the larger scale. We can move towards greater interdependence at each stage of a process and recognize that most of us want healthier and more generative outcomes, even if we don’t always know how to get there.
So, there’s a tremendous opportunity in (re)imagining and exploring accountability in deeper ways. Though we have less models than we’d like of people in power taking responsibility or willfully sharing power, we do have some, and we can make new models together. By remembering that healing is a collective process, each of us can play a role in shaping and supporting it. These inquiries and conversations can help us develop those new models. We can get better at shaping our work and movement cultures to prevent or greatly reduce harm. And, while we can’t change the harm when it happens, we can use our power in co-creating repair and accountability. Those are real wins.
Because, at the end of the day, we need each other.
——Please share your stories, reflections, and questions with us at contact.weneedeachother@gmail.com. We hope to deepen the dialogue with you.
