Love it! My eyes have been opened.
Even if the coach and school did this because they expected to be canceled, that doesn’t mean that cancel culture have gone too far. All it means is that some people think that cancel culture has gone too far.
Blaming Cancel Culture has gone too far!
Football coaches are also notoriously sensitive to distractions. If your name comes up in a non-football capacity, you better be a real game changer on the field, or you’re history.
ffs. People were making the argument that since there was no public outcry, it could not have possibly been done as a result of fear of the PR headaches of a public backlash. I’m pointing out that creating an environment where such backlash was more likley makes people and organizations handle these things differently, and you can chalk up that cultural change to the impact of heightened public sensitivity to bad behavior. I was only attacking the logic that if it never caught the public’s attention then it couldn’t possibly have been impacted by what people are calling cancel culture.
Your assertion that I’m being disengenuous is absurd. Have you ever known me to be shy, coy, or otherwise afraid to take a controversial stance around here? The way you assume that because I’m willing to attack a particular piece of logic in someone else’s argument I must somehow be the enemy with badthink is exactly the sort of tribalism that kills good discussion. Your reaction is inappropriate and bad for debate.
And as for the rest of you, I don’t see what benefit you get by playing dumb and pretending not to know what people mean when they say “cancel culture” - it’s fine if you reject the term, it’s fine if you think it’s good for society, but don’t act like you don’t know what it is or that it doesn’t exist. There is a lot more willingness to call out shitty/intolerant behavior and use public pressure to punish it. This very well could be a good thing in general, it certainly makes people more careful about being shitty or doing less of it. Conservative whining about “cancel culture” are mostly whining that they can’t get away with being a shitty person like they used to. But don’t pretend that this change didn’t happen or you don’t know what people are talking about. There has clearly been a cultural shift in recent years.
That is a lot of verbiage just to say, “No, I refuse to define it.”
I define it well enough, and more importantly, it doesn’t matter how I define it. My point is that if an action is taken in expectation that a backlash is possible, even if there has not yet been a backlash, the the culture that is expected to lead to that backlash still impacted the decision. The threat of “cancel culture” can motivate firings and other punishments in anticipation of a backlash, and thus, actual evidence of a backlash is not required to demonstrate that something happened as a result of “cancel culture.”
I’ve defined it a few times – you need some sort of internet or physical mob protesting something, or it’s just not cancel culture. Cancel culture implies the unjustified firing of someone for something that shouldn’t be fired, and only because they internet or physical mobs were demanding it.
This just isn’t that. I agree that companies have gotten better at firing people for sexual harassment and hate speech. Maybe that’s partly a result of uprising when people have done really awful things. However, this episode is not an example of that.
When a lot of people call “cancel culture”, I call “a willingness to react to perceived wrong”.
Oh man all of those Oklahoma football fans are going to vote for Trump now. Quick engage pander mode!
I disagree that “cancel culture” is a real problem, but I agree with Senorbeef that if it were a problem, it could manifest through fear of mass action. This dynamic is why anti-CRT laws are such a problem: although precious few teachers actually teach CRT in the K-12 system, the laws are written in ways that intimidate teachers so that they’re worried about teaching non-CRT stuff. (I’m vastly oversimplifying here, I know).
If people were constantly getting fired for trivial bullshit, and if organizations were constantly getting doxxed or harassed or boycotted over trivial bullshit, then it’d be understandable for a company to fire someone as a way to avoid getting harassed/boycotted over said trivial bullshit. I don’t think that happens very often, at least not in the “woke mob” sense (there’s definitely a right wing freakout brigade that, say, sends threatening/harassing messages to people of color who work in the gaming industry, just to take an example from the last couple of days). But if it did, folks would pre-emptively respond to such actions.
No, I agree with SenorBeef on this. There is no need for each incident to be accompanied by an actual or virtual baying mob. It is enough that an incident is assessed in light of the threat of such a mob.
If people are scared of saying something and remain silent for fear of arbitrary, biased judgement and the ignoring of context and intent then that is a culture that is ultimately harmful.
I couldn’t care less how it is labelled (and trying to do so just gives people the opportunity to quibble about definitions) but certainly over the last decade I have seen things change in my own corporate world. There are things that people want to say, discussions that would be helpful, reactions to misguided and unhelpful policies that simply cannot be talked about for fear of career suicide.
But how often do such such serious scenarios actually have to happen in order to create the atmosphere in which self-suppression of opinion might happen?
Dude resigned, and that’s “cancel culture”? Did he cancel himself? What a crock.
Any white man who reads that word, and decides to say it out loud is pretty fucking dumb, if nothing else.
Again, this is already assuming that people get fired and organizations are boycotted for trivial bullshit. It’s literally question begging – cancel culture is a thing, he was fired for cancel culture, because if he wasn’t fired, he would have been fired by cancel culture, because cancel culture is a thing.
For trivial bullshit? For reading a word accidentally over someone’s shoulder? How about more than once or twice. I’m sure you can find some nutty HR department that overreacts to something trivial here and there, but this is not something that happens often in the real world.
To me “cancel culture” is what Jon Ronson discusses in this book. I find the term problematic because it tends to presume a few things:
- Every misstep and poor decision can be rectified.
- An institution doesn’t have the right, or business decision model to say, "look, this action or behavior is so egregious, we need to separate ourselves from this person
- The public always get what they want.
Working in academia and in educational non-profit circles, and consulting on DEI, I am all too aware that inappropriate comments, microaggressions, and microinvalidations happen all the time. Perhaps for the first time ever, there are consequences for some of the more egregious examples of racial and sexual harassment, to name two types.
The University of Oklahoma have a very strong business case for not being perceived or known as a place that tolerates the use of racial slurs. It’s literally bad for their business model. There might be some morality in there, but in the world of big-time college football, I’m sure either Cale Gundy, who is an ou alum, realized that his behavior could be weaponized by other schools or even people at his university, and it would ultimately prove deleterious for the institution he cares about, or it was made clear to him that this would be the case.
There’s nothing wrong with realizing you made a poor decision and it’s time to apologize and move on. There’s also nothing wrong with an institution making the same decision. In fact, Cale Gundy, if he so chooses, handled this in such a way that if he truly wants to be in the business of coaching, he’ll likely be able to do so… just probably not at Oklahoma, and probably not right now.
That’s an unfortunate name.
I dunno. It is Oklahoma, after all, not California. If they really wanted to keep him, I doubt it would have been an issue. While the university PR department might have had its hands full, the state itself and the vast majority of the boosters wouldn’t have had an issue.
There’s something else going on behind the scenes that none of us hoi polloi is privy to. I suspect this just provided a convenient excuse.
Agreed. I keep telling folks this, if your job security and good name means anything to you, don’t say this word. Ever.
I can think of one case where a professor used the word to explain what James Baldwin actually meant in his famous quote “I am not your Negro.” (Hint: He didn’t use the word “Negro.”)
Somebody complained, there was an investigation, and the professor was not sanctioned.
So even in the most appropriate pedagogical spaces, the word is fraught with danger. If you’re not a professional I highly recommend you stay away. Or get Dick Gregory to write an opinion piece defending you, if you do.
If reading Mark Twain aloud, except to small kids, the word must be said. But outside of such context, it should be avoided.
Yeah, since it doesn’t seem to be. However, there are things we don’t know.