Note: This article was written for the New York Times’s 10th Annual Student Editorial Contest. The contest was to “make an argument in 450 words or fewer about something that matters to you, and persuade us that we should care, too.” This entry is from Noah Granados, a rising Senior at Don Bosco Prep.
The first time I noticed cancel culture was in 2020 when I received a notification on my phone that one of the characters from my favorite television show, The Flash, would not be returning for the next season. I immediately conducted research to understand the situation causing him to no longer be on the show. In my investigation, I discovered the actor had been “canceled”. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the term canceled to mean “to withdraw one’s support for (someone, such as a celebrity, or something, such as a company) publicly and especially on social media.” This is exactly what happened to the actor who was boycotted for tweets he had made a decade prior. He was blacklisted from Hollywood and has not appeared in any shows since.
Although I cannot justify what he said, agreeing with the popular opinion that it was completely unacceptable, I still maintain that a person’s career should not be ruined because of words spoken at a different era of his or her life. This especially applies to opinions voiced by someone when he/she was a teenager.
More recently, in social media news, I discovered that a football player committed to the University of Florida had his scholarship revoked because of a video posted of him singing along to an explicit song. The football player lost everything he had worked for because of lyrics from a song he did not write. Teenagers have always said things they should not. Part of maturing is learning what is acceptable to voice in public versus what is not. However, with social media, teenagers are losing the ability to learn for themselves as cancel culture dictates to the world how one should think and present themselves.
Alessandra Dubin from Insider.com stated that “cancel culture shames the person into realizing their individual beliefs aren’t always acceptable, but it fails to educate the person on why these beliefs are problematic and hurtful.” Rather than show teenagers that what they said was wrong, cancel culture aims to ruin their lives and leave them undesirable to the world.
Cancel culture does not benefit society, it only teaches teens to be afraid of everything that they say. A December 2021 article from Newport Academy noted: “Many therapists report treating teen clients who suffered from depression, anxiety, and suicidality for months after being canceled by peers.” The pressure that cancel culture poses upon teenagers in today’s society leads to poor mental health in teens. Cancel culture leaves no room for mistakes, leading to teens having a substantial amount of stress about everything they do or say. Ultimately, cancel culture itself should be “canceled”.