We need to do better at collectively responding to instances of harm in our movements
Cancel culture is rife in our movement spaces. We are fiery, with strong opinions and strong moral beliefs; we are relying on one another, perhaps for survival; we are hurting and we are complex, and we are all at risk of being cancelled. What’s more, probably all of us have done the cancelling.
At the 2024 Earth First! Winter Moot, there was a facilitated discussion about cancel culture and the practice of transformative justice (TJ) within our movements. This text is a response to that discussion, and builds on the ideas presented there, hoping that we will, honestly, do better at collectively responding to instances of harm in our movements.
Speaking about cancel culture in our movements is scary; not only because the right wing so frequently mischaracterises us — and I do not wish to give them any fuel; but also because we are, among us, so divided. Yet, if we are to continue and grow, we must address our rocky relationship with harm and accountability. I trust that we will discern between those who may have these conversations in order to destroy our movements, and those who may have these conversations in order to make them stronger.
1.
Based on the discussion at the Moot, a working definition of cancel culture in our movements could in theory go something like this: A tendency towards the permanent removal of someone perceived as ‘problematic’ from certain spaces and networks, or the public identification of this individual as an abuser, with no opportunity for penance — often as a result of one distinct moment of harm caused by that person, and often in the name of community safety.’ In practice however, it was agreed that both the act and consequences of cancelling someone are full of nuances.
It is also important to note here that there is a distinct difference between cancel culture in our movements, and cancellations in popular culture. J.K. Rowling, for example, is unlikely to lose her social network, go hungry, or have to move cities, as a result of her being ‘cancelled’. Moreover, the power we have as non-celebrity individuals to reach J.K. without public call-outs is limited: we use the tools available to us to have our voices heard. The same cannot often be said for those we share movement-spaces with. As anarchists, holding the respective power of all parties involved when we act in potentially, or intentionally, destructive ways is constitutional.
Generally, cancel culture is recognised as harmful to both individuals and movements – a form of punitive justice opposed to the abolitionist futures we are trying to enact. Although public call-outs often happen when there is no other visible option to stop harm, in far too many cases they are also turned to as a first resort. This can have disastrous consequences for both those being called-out or cancelled, as well as for the community as a whole.
First and foremost, cancel culture essentialises individuals as either victims or perpetrators of harm. Replicating the language of the State, this traps the affected individuals into binary categories, inhibiting their ability to transform and grow, and preventing them from being seen as complex human beings caught in a nuanced situation. In contrast, theories of transformative justice hold that we are all capable of causing harm — as well as capable of taking responsibility for it, and transforming our ways of interacting so that we are less likely to cause harm in the future. The victim-perpetrator binary also conceals how ‘perpetrators’ of harm are likely to have experienced harm, and dangerously obscures our ability to recognise harm as cyclical, rather than isolated. This is not to minimise at all the very real harm caused by people we live or organise with, only to challenge how we collectively understand and approach these instances.
Often, those who talk first and those who talk loudest construct a narrative (either intentionally or unintentionally; either with very good reason, or with more sinister intent) which places themselves or those they claim to speak on behalf of as the victims, and those they accuse as the perpetrators. As a community, we must have more care when responding to accusations; all too easily, we fall immediately into perceiving a victim-perpetrator binary, and then struggle to look beyond it. Following this, challenging any of the decided victim’s actions, or exploring the harm experienced by the decided perpetrator, can become social suicide. We do not give ourselves the space to look at these situations with nuance, or with complexity; we ignore what we all know — that harm often flows in multiple directions, and in this we do ourselves and our movements a disservice.
This is not to say that this is always the case, and this is certainly not to say that we should ever overlook hurt, or present disbelief to those who are hurting – only to suggest that we reconsider how we collectively approach and ‘hold accountable’ those who have been accused of causing harm. Horrendous amounts of pain have been caused when, after a rush to kick those labelled as abusers out of our homes, our movements and our entire social networks, we find out later that they also were suffering abuse, perhaps that this cancellation was even a continuation of that.
Furthermore, this is not a call for traumatised or hurt individuals to be forced to continue sharing spaces with one another, nor is it a call for people to ever have to forgive and / or forget any harm that has been done to them, if they are not able or willing to. Botched attempts at accountability processes (albeit with good intentions and limited resources) have left many scarred by the entire notion of transformative justice, and this is something we must be patient with, and sensitive to. In this, we must also be vigilant in not allowing our disillusion with transformative justice processes to mean that we turn towards punitive justice, or the State. What this is, is a call to the rest of the community to not totally abandon the person or people who have caused harm; to not completely cut off their support networks; to instead treat them like human beings, and members of a community who must be held accountable to the harm they have caused, so that they are able to work through it, make amends to the people they have harmed where this is welcome, and attempt to reduce the harm they may cause in the future.
2.
Too often, what happens is the following:
Following the initial revelation of harm, chaos ensues. There are a lot of strong emotions at this stage, understandably, and these are often heightened by the stress of the campaign or project which forms the context for these events. Often, it feels like this campaign cannot move forward until this conflict is resolved, creating a further sense of urgency. Although some effort may be made to hold the perpetrator accountable for their actions, they may eventually be asked to leave (perhaps with an accountability process deferred to an unspecified later date), and few people ever contact them again.
In some scenarios, this person is then entirely cut off from the movement. Sometimes, this results in a loss of shelter, community and food, a total breakdown in relationships, and an enormous amount of hurt. This hurt often then overshadows, and so prevents the understanding and processing of, the acts of harm which led to this in the first place. Further, this person may encounter violence or receive violent threats, with few people speaking up against this — for fear that they too will be cancelled.
Not only does this process resemble punitive justice, this punishment can be harshly disproportionate, misdirected, and counterproductive to the goals of our movements.
There are many reasons why this may happen, not short among them being that we are vastly ill-equipped and under-resourced to deal with, alongside an active campaign, the extraordinary amounts of harm we cause one another — and for this we must be gentle to ourselves. However, this does not mean that we should accept cancel culture as an inevitability, and not strive to do better.
We have a dangerous tendency to label anyone offering support to a perpetrator of harm as either ‘an apologist’, or as someone not taking that harm seriously. We have little space in our collective imagination for the idea that we can both be hurt by what someone has done and support them through coming to terms with this harm. This tendency means that it can become a social risk to maintain ties with someone who has caused harm. Moreover, holding someone accountable for their actions in this way takes an enormous amount of emotional labour and time; as most of us are already teetering on the edge of burn-out, it is little surprise that we rarely prioritise this work.
We urgently need to overcome the idea that supporting (which does not necessarily mean maintaining friendship) those who have acted in harmful ways makes us ‘abuse apologists’. We are not siding with ‘them’, we are siding with the community as a whole. Maintaining contact with those who have been ejected from spaces or groups can be critical, not only in helping them process the harm they have caused so that they are less likely to repeat harmful behaviours in the future, but also in building resilience as a community. Demonstrating that there are alternatives to cancellation makes us all feel more respected, more valued, and more secure.
More sinisterly, cancel culture is sometimes used as a tool against those we merely don’t like, or don’t like living or working with. These people are not offered the second, or third, or fourth chances that we more willingly give to those with more social capital, or power, within a group. In situations like this, we all follow those at the top of the social pyramid, for fear that otherwise — the same may happen to us. This mirrors the consumer culture we claim to abhor – a culture of ‘throwing away’ that which we find ‘faulty’, or no longer like. This culture makes all of us feel replaceable. It means we are afraid to ask questions, or be honest about the things which we have done in the past. It is unsustainable, and it makes our movements unsustainable, too.
We need to start calling out harmful behaviour itself, and collectively learning from this, rather than pathologising the person who — like all of us, has caused harm.
3.
Despite the overarching narrative in this text being that cancel culture is problematic for our movements, it is imperative that we also recognise call-out culture — a related but ultimately different practice, as a legitimate form of self-defence for otherwise silenced communities and individuals, extending back generations. Similarly, calling people out publicly extends invitations for collective validation, which can be invaluable in times when we otherwise feel we are shouting in the dark. In this way, manifestations of cancel culture are often unavoidably entangled with the mechanisms which oppress marginalised identities in modern society.
Despite anarchic intentions to hold all people as equal, these systems of oppression are also reproduced within our movements; it is essential that we bear this in mind when deciding whose voices we trust, whose voices we allow to shout, and why we condemn some for participating in cancel culture whilst elevating others. If we are to tackle cancel culture, we must take on the myriad reasons it is so prolific in our communities in the first place.
Far too often, it is those with less social capital – often along classed, racialised, neurodiverse and gendered lines, who bear the brunt of cancel culture and face non-negotiable and immediate exclusion from our movement spaces. Additionally, those holding more social privilege are more likely to be considered having legitimacy when acting in ways associated with cancel culture. White supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy are prominent in our movements, even as we try to enact ‘justice’ and pursue safety in our spaces. When participating in cancel culture, we must be aware of these power structures, and we must ask ourselves how our prejudices may be playing into the ease with which we are expelling someone from our community.
Equally, the rhetoric of transformative justice, and accountability processes, have consistently been used (in a warped way) by those with more privilege to continue to platform their own voices, whilst further silencing those they have harmed. If we are to engage in the principles of transformative justice in our movements, we must be very conscious of to whom we offer and deny these paths to forgiveness, and how we will enact these principles thoroughly and consistently, rather than merely when it suits us.
When used with authenticity, the principles of transformative justice can offer us some remedy to cancel culture, encouraging us to build our communities around the values of trust, honesty and mutual transformation — rather than the fear and threat of exile produced by cancel culture. Let us see transformative justice not as a set of tools to pick up and drop, or an isolated process to be employed only when it suits us, but as a way of interacting with one another, every day, in a way which consistently makes space for empathy and compassion. Let us see it as an invitation to live with the trust that we can help one another become better versions of ourselves.
Learning as a community how to better deal with harm when it occurs in our spaces, rather than leaving it up to the individuals who are directly and more acutely experiencing it, is hard and important work — as is learning to take collective responsibility in dealing with harm and conflict before it reaches the point where ‘cancelling’ seems like the only option. Harm hurts all of us, and we are often totally under-equipped to deal with it. This text does not intend to invoke blame or guilt on those who are merely doing the best that they can, but it is an invitation to do things differently.
Further, although this text is centred around how we treat those who have perpetrated harm in a community, it must be made clear that, priority still lies in supporting those directly affected by that harm. This text does suggest, however, that often we do not have to choose. Supporting those labelled perpetrator should not mean abandoning those labelled victim (or vice versa) — nor forcing them to share space. If we are to build resilient and sustainable communities in the face of multiple crises, treating people as disposable should not be an option; it leaves scars on all of us.
Finally, we should not demonise those who lean into cancel culture when they are hurting and otherwise powerless to stop that hurt. The realities of our lives, movements and relationships are messy, and we must have empathy for all those we are in relation with. Holding all of these realities, whilst maintaining our principles, whilst also being realistic about the harm we are able to prevent… is really hard work. Let us be gentle with ourselves, and with each other.
I write this with anger and I write this with hope.
~ Billie Bracken
Images: Perchance
