The Evolution of Cancel Culture & ‘Wokeness’

Cancel culture, by today's standards, is a laughable subject. People often associate it with Gen Z and their tendency to point fingers. But cancel culture once existed in a completely different form than what we know now (which, I know, is hard to imagine). In the 2010 Tumblr era, cancel culture was not labeled as cancel culture, but it has some of the same fundamental ideas. Fandoms would create blogs that brought awareness to some of the ‘imperfections’ of their favorite celebrities, and a blog called “Your Fave Is Problematic” was at the forefront of this movement (Greenspan). The once anonymous person behind this blog wrote an article in the New York Times where she stated that the blog's purpose (at the time) was to create “vengeful public shaming masquerading as social criticism” and that she would only take down the threads if the celebrity publicly apologized (Kaplan). But what really catapulted cancel culture into mainstream media was the #MeToo movement in 2017-2018. This was the first time (definitely not the last) that people’s careers and entire lives were being destroyed by the power of social media. 

Unlike cancel culture, wokness originated with a different goal in mind. After the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014, the phrase ‘stay woke’ circulated in black communities to express “keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics” (Romano). But like most things, the mainstream media stole this word from its original meaning and repurposed it into something meaningless and largely controversial. Expressing involvement and activism was now labeled as ‘being woke’ by the left, and as ‘a joke’ by the right. Wokeness had standards that nobody could meet, and the concept of being woke became performative and was seen as a “status seeking label” (Romano). In 2017, Saturday Night Live released a skit about wokeness (SNL). The skit was a fake advertisement that imitated brands efforts to be ‘woke’ and inclusive. Despite being funny, this video perfectly represents the mockery that has been made out of the woke movement and shows exactly how the original message has been drastically changed.