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America’s racial fairytales Are those with the power to cancel people wielding that power responsibly?

Being a bit rude to a stranger might ruin your life — in fairytales, and on American Twitter. Credit: IMDB

Being a bit rude to a stranger might ruin your life — in fairytales, and on American Twitter. Credit: IMDB


October 5, 2021   7 mins

For all their romance, adventure, and happily-ever-afters, fairy tales have a way of illuminating the everyday frictions of life in a crowded world — and particularly how things can go wrong when a person primed for grievance meets someone who’s not at his best. Hence the perpetual presence in these stories of the conflict-seeking, hypersensitive fairy, who roams the countryside, often in disguise, testing the manners of the peasants and princes and rewarding the ones who prove polite — but also, more importantly, unleashing magical hell on the ones who don’t.

A vain young prince turns away the homeless hag seeking shelter at his castle, and is transformed into a repulsive beast. A girl insults the old crone who asked for a drink from her family’s well, and spends the rest of her life unable to speak without snakes and spiders falling out of her mouth. A couple makes an unfortunate oversight on the guest list for their baby’s christening, and the offended party casts a curse that puts the entire kingdom in a hundred-year coma.

On the surface, the moral of these stories is that kindness will be rewarded. But they’re also cautionary tales about being on your best behaviour in a world where offending the wrong person might just ruin your life.

It’s not hard to see how this notion would have resonated with people who lived in the highly stratified societies of old, where a lack of deference to your lordly betters could get you beaten, imprisoned, or executed. But unlike the hapless folks who accidentally pissed off an all-powerful sorceress, people who lived under lèse-majesté or similar statutes at least had a pretty good idea who the members of the ruling class were. One of the things that made these fairy tale scenarios so frightening was that anyone who asked you for an annoying favour might have the power to destroy you, and any moment of weakness or pettiness might be your last. By the time you realised that you’d bogarted a cabbage from a neighbour with magical powers and a penchant for kidnapping, it was too late.

In this way, the latest viral outrage from the annals of American culture feels a bit like something out of the Brothers Grimm. It happened last week at a dog park in Brooklyn, when two people got into, well, the sort of conflict that people at Brooklyn dog parks get into. Words were exchanged, tempers flared, and eventually, one party whipped out a cell phone and began recording the other — who walked away, but too late.

The curse was already cast.

The man with the recording, an author and activist named Frederick T. Joseph, posted it to Twitter with claims that he’d been “racially assaulted”: the woman on the video, he said, had threatened to call the police and unleashed a “racist tirade” in which she told him: “Go back to your hood.” Within 24 hours, his followers had identified and doxxed the woman, Emma Sarley, who was immediately denounced as a monster and fired from her job. (“Emma has been terminated,” Joseph told Twitter followers, in a thread about the incident that he updated with every development.)

The practice of cancelling ordinary people for minor public rudeness or crudeness has been a common practice for nearly 10 years now, even before the existence of YouTube compilations like “10 Karens Who Got What They Deserved”. In one early example of the phenomenon, a woman named Adria Richards overheard two men making a juvenile joke about “dongles” as they sat together at a tech conference, snapped a photo of the offending parties, and posted it on Twitter to demonstrate the tech industry’s supposed hostility to women.

The man who’d made the joke was fired (although surprisingly, within a few days, so was Richards.) But rather than serving as a cautionary tale about the dangers of rushing to judgment, the incident known as Donglegate has become a sort of template for posting first and asking questions later. In 2018, a Chipotle employee was publicly branded a racist and fired after she declined to serve a group of black men who hadn’t paid for their food. (Chipotle quietly rehired her after it was revealed that the men had a history of “dine and dash” theft and had targeted the restaurant before.) A year later, a video of Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann smiling in front of a Native American protestor resulted in wall-to-wall media coverage, death threats, and the mass condemnation of a group of high school kids as evil white supremacists — even after additional footage revealed that the true story was somewhat more complicated.

Emma Sarley’s cancellation unfolded with lightning speed in part because it seemed so familiar: Americans had already been through one viral outrage in which a white woman at a dog park racially antagonised a black man and suffered the consequences. But like many sequels, this one was both flimsier and more far-fetched. Not only did the 27-second video lack any context for how the encounter began, it didn’t actually show Sarley saying the five words that doomed her to being denounced as a racist. And the charges against her were brought by a man with a pretty extensive history of public grievances that turned out to be either embellished or outright fabricated — including one remarkable incident in which he claimed that the owner of a rented Airbnb was conducting Satanic rituals in the basement. The peculiarities were enough to give at least some devout progressives pause, including Nikole Hannah Jones, who admitted on Twitter that the stunt seemed irresponsible and made her uncomfortable.

Of course, none of this mattered amid the mad rush to judgment that cost Sarley her job and reputation. And while time will tell if there was more to the story, there will be no prizes for having declined to join the mob (unless you count being angrily lambasted for your non-participation by online vigilantes who possess an enviable degree of confidence in their ability to read other people’s minds.) Even among people who agree that Sarley’s punishment was grossly disproportionate to whatever she might have done, there’s a tendency to shrug it off as something she could’ve avoided, if only she were more careful. “This is just the world we live in,” they say. “If it were me, I would simply never say or do anything that could cause me to be accused of racism.”

Obviously, these people never read fairy tales.

Otherwise, they might realise how easy it is for even a careful person to suffer extraordinary consequences over the most ordinary sort of conflict — if they’re unlucky enough to encounter the sort of chronically-aggrieved someone who has both the motivation and the platform to escalate something like a minor spat at the dog park into a full-blown attempt to annihilate your life. After all, cursed characters like the cabbage-stealing pregnant woman aren’t punished for doing evil. They’re punished for being rude.

And as with contemporary cancellations, these are as much stories about people losing their minds over minor transgressions as they are about the transgressors themselves. A man is sentenced to live as a beast, all because he didn’t want to let a random stranger stay overnight in his house. An entire kingdom, cursed to a deathlike sleep because someone felt snubbed at a birthday party. Sure, the cursed could have simply been nicer, kinder, more generous and less petty. But the all-powerful fairies and witches of these fictional worlds could also engage a little restraint and stop going scorched-earth on ordinary human beings at the slightest hint of offense.

By this same token, the New York Times-bestselling author with a massive platform and an enormous amount of social and cultural power might have genuinely believed that a random 25-year-old stranger was “racially assaulting” him when she (allegedly) suggested he take his (allegedly) aggressive dog back to his own neighbourhood. Maybe he was even correct about her motivations. But his choice to blow up her life over it was just that: a choice.

And it’s one with alarming implications. The costs don’t stop with the cancelled person; nobody really wants to live in a world where such low-grade conflicts, an unavoidable part of daily life in a big city, become punishable by social and professional death. Where anyone could be a secret surveillance agent with the power and motivation to wreck your life. Where the only way to be sure of your safety is to avoid offending these people by behaving perfectly at all times — and that’s assuming you can keep up with a continually-evolving definition of what “perfect” behaviour should look like. Who among us can claim to have always been a perfect paragon of politeness even on his most difficult day? Who is this certain that he always will be?

In a country founded on robust speech protections and personal liberty, which relies on high levels of social trust to keep functioning, things begin to unravel when that trust erodes. It’s not good for a society when people start surveilling and snitching on each other. We stop sharing, stop collaborating, and start thinking about keeping an oppo file on everyone, the better to get them before they get us. It’s also not good to normalise the existence of a class of secret police whom you offend at your own peril, not least because once you create that category, everyone — including the actual police — are going to want a part of it.

This isn’t merely theoretical. Every time the American public starts getting too gung-ho about punishing people for hateful, hurtful, or otherwise offensive speech, the state inevitably jumps on that bandwagon, leveraging the momentum for their own purposes. If people should be protected from hurtful speech on the basis of race, sex, or religion, they say, surely other identity categories should be granted a certain noble status… like, say, being a member of law enforcement. And if it’s only fair that Emma Sarley have her life ruined for insulting Frederick T. Joseph, the cops are sure you’ll agree that we should punish other acts of disrespect just as harshly — like flipping off a police officer. Or stamping on a “Back the Blue” flag. Or having a bumper sticker that the local sheriff finds obscene.

There’s a true sympathy and depth of feeling that leads some on the Left to want to compensate for historic wrongs, centuries in which black Americans suffered abuse and discrimination, by elevating allegations of racism today to a special category of Bad — in which case there can never be such a thing as an overreaction to perceived bigotry. It’s well-intentioned but ultimately condescending; what are we to make of the notion that a wealthy, educated, highly successful and influential black man like Joseph is nevertheless so defined, and so damaged, by his race that he can’t be expected to wield his considerable social capital responsibly? To think twice before destroying a less powerful person? To exercise restraint when his neighbours get on his nerves?

That’s a fairy tale in its own right — one whose narrative works against progress, against individualism, and, ironically, against diversity in a place where people of many wildly different backgrounds have to coexist in close quarters. America, a nation of immigrants, has been more successful at this than most. We bond over our common humanity, we work for the betterment of our communities, we rub shoulders with all sorts of people — and occasionally, we butt heads the way neighbours tend to do. But in a free and equal society, that needn’t stop us from living happily (or mostly) ever after, side by side.


Kat Rosenfield is an UnHerd columnist and co-host of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Her latest novel is You Must Remember This.

katrosenfield

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J Bryant
J Bryant
2 years ago

The headline for this article is: “Are those with the power to cancel people wielding that power responsibly?”
My answer to that question is no one should have the power to cancel anyone else.

Matthew Powell
Matthew Powell
2 years ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I’ve said before that I find it perplexing that workers can be fired for actions which have nothing to do with their competence nor are a criminal offence.

Why on earth are employers allowed the right fire employees based on their private lives?

J Bryant
J Bryant
2 years ago
Reply to  Matthew Powell

Excellent question. Despite the extensive coverage of cancel culture it’s hard to find in-depth articles describing strategies for legal recourse against cancellation. Once upon a time the ACLU (in America) would have been all over this type of behavior but, sadly, that organization is now thoroughly woke.
If you haven’t read it already I recommend Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Woke, Inc” where, among other things, he outlines some legal theories that could be used to push back against corporate wokeism, such as limiting the protection afforded by LLC status to only those corporate actions taken directly in furtherance of business, not politics.
Ramaswamy is a business wonderkind who now appears to be laying the ground work for a political career. His book is quite self serving but it does provide useful insight into why and how corporations became so woke and, as mentioned, he suggests strategies for pushing back. We’ll probably need some high profile cases to clarify the law in this area.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
2 years ago
Reply to  Matthew Powell

The whole problem regarding cancel culture isn’t helped by the lax labour laws, in America especially. It’s far too easy to sack an employee over there so workers, many of whom are already struggling financially, are understandably reluctant to fight back too much in fear of losing their livelihood.
Change the law so you can’t sack somebody for something that happens on social media outside of work hours and you’ll take away much of the power these people have instantly.

Kat L
Kat L
2 years ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

it depends on which group you belong to.

Jonathan Weil
Jonathan Weil
2 years ago
Reply to  Matthew Powell

American labour laws are a lot less protective (of employees) than ours.

D Glover
D Glover
2 years ago
Reply to  Jonathan Weil

I believe that most American workers have their medical insurance through their jobs. Lose your job; lose your cover.
Brits are less threatened in this way.

Tom Lewis
Tom Lewis
2 years ago

Who can forget Benedict Cumberbatch’s grovelling apology, to save his career (did it work ?) when he called ‘black’ actors ‘coloured’, rather than ‘POC’. A classic example of offence being taken when no offence was given, or intended,
An ever movable feast, and deliberately so, of potential offence, guarded by the self appointed gatekeepers, designed with one aim, to ensure that, even when you’re trying to be correct, right on, and as inoffensive as possible, you can be had, brought down to size, destroyed.
I think it used, in the olden days, to be called fascism.

Last edited 2 years ago by Tom Lewis
D Glover
D Glover
2 years ago
Reply to  Tom Lewis

This rule about ‘coloured person’ or ‘person of colour’; who makes it?
In the French language they have an authority (Acadamie Francaise) to legislate correct language. We don’t. So, who banned ‘coloured’?

and occasionally, we *utt heads the way neighbours tend to do

Last week I tried to post the statement ‘every joke must have a *utt’ on this forum and had it rejected. This article uses the offensive word. The censorship is right here already

Last edited 2 years ago by D Glover
Neil Cheshire
Neil Cheshire
2 years ago
Reply to  Tom Lewis

The irony of the Cumberbatch grovel for his violation of the abstruse semantics of ‘coloured’ rather than ‘person of colour’ is that the largest and oldest civil rights organisation in the US is the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Last edited 2 years ago by Neil Cheshire
Chris Mochan
Chris Mochan
2 years ago
Reply to  Tom Lewis

Reminds me of the utterly confected outrage when some judge used the phrase “sexual preference” and we were all expected to go along with the notion that this was an offensive comment, and always had been. The goalposts move in real time, and the whole point is to try and ‘catch’ people to cement your place among the righteous.
The Western World is coming to be dominated by the type of snivelling creep who used to be shunned by all normal people. Tell-tales, curtain-twitchers and the kind of people who used to write to the BBC. For some unclear reason, they’ve gained power.

D Ward
D Ward
2 years ago

I have a friend that grew up in Romania. Her stories about how they had to watch everything they said and whom they said it to were horrifying when i first heard them 10 years ago. Now we are in the same place. Astonishing.

Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago
Reply to  D Ward

Not really astonishing. It’s what the left does, takes the words out of peoples’ mouths, deprives them of vocabulary and makes it impossible for them to articulate their case. George Orwell warned about it in 1984. Romania was a leftist state, and the west is now in the grip of the left. There should be no astonishment that a pig grunts.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago

As in so many of these things, the person doing this seems far more repugnant than the real victim. And here he is claiming victimhood. He is hardly a wise and responsible adult.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
2 years ago

Behind all of this is the ‘social justice’ ideology. But that ideology doesn’t stretch to being just, no matter your colour or your ethnicity’s history. I don’t care what colour you are, it isn’t just to destroy another human because you allege they’ve offended you. It’s malicious and plain evil. It takes us back to a pre-rule of law society where the local baron could destroy someone on a whim. Offence-hunting ‘social justice’ is diametrically opposite to being just.

Last edited 2 years ago by Judy Englander
pdrodolf
pdrodolf
2 years ago
Reply to  Judy Englander

Great comment. Who knew Social Justice Warriors could be so unjust?

Tom Krehbiel
Tom Krehbiel
2 years ago
Reply to  pdrodolf

If the question was meant seriously, I’d say “anyone who has followed them at all”. But I assume that it was actually facetious and rhetorical.

David Bell
David Bell
2 years ago
Reply to  Judy Englander

In a word, it’s bullying.

Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago

Even among people who agree that Sarley’s punishment was grossly disproportionate to whatever she might have done, there’s a tendency to shrug it off as something she could’ve avoided, if only she were more careful. “This is just the world we live in,” they say. “If it were me, I would simply never say or do anything that could cause me to be accused of racism.”
See, there’s the problem right there. Not saying anything which could be interpreted as racist by a reasonable person won’t help because you’re not dealing with reasonable people. The people who go around screaming “racist” are not acting from any place of sincerity. Narcissism, the idea of the self as special, unique and somehow actually better than others is a disease that is killing our society. 999 times out of a thousand, those accusing others of racism are actually accusing them of refusing to kiss their narcissistic backsides and call it ice cream: essentially, they’re accusing them of refusing to acknowledge the narcissist’s superiority. It’s always about power, it’s never about racism.

Last edited 2 years ago by Francis MacGabhann
Mikey Mike
Mikey Mike
2 years ago

A year later, a video of Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann smiling in front of a Native American protestor resulted in wall-to-wall media coverage, death threats, and the mass condemnation of a group of high school kids as evil white supremacists — even after additional footage revealed that the true story was somewhat more complicated.

Somewhat? What is “somewhat” about the kids not being guilty of any of the things of which they were accused? You should probably check some less partisan sources, ma’am.

Mo Brown
Mo Brown
2 years ago
Reply to  Mikey Mike

Indeed. “somewhat more complicated”? More like “quite the opposite”.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

Maybe dog parks in certain places in America should be renamed Great Dog Runs, or GDR for short. A place where you can step back into the recent past and experience the lives of East Germans who had had to be very careful about what they said and in whose earshot they said it. They could not even look over their shoulder knowing that even that gesture would draw suspicion. People learned to keep their head down in the old GDR. If not, the barking of denouncements came the usurper’s way.

The West Germans, on the other hand, were the creative bunch. Things stagnated in East Germany. No surprise that Kraftwerk came from the West, for example. And that’ll be the outcome of a fearful people who must tip-toe through their daily lives lest they are revealed to be very naughty people for having spoiled all their good works and kindnesses as a result of one dastardly, miserable, heart-breaking, insane thing they did …. that put ‘em in the doghouse. Let’s face it: nobody wants to end up in the doghouse. But because of glorious technology, strangely enough the good country could go to the dogs. Just like that!

Barry Stokes
Barry Stokes
2 years ago

Take a look at the film ‘The Lives of Others’.Set in the GDR…….the Stasi are now alive and well in the West.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
2 years ago

In Priestly’s “An Inspector Calls” members of a family are called out for exercising their social power to cancel the employment and other life opportunities of a factory girl who has supposedly been driven to suicide by their revenges over perceived slights on her part. Perhaps a halt to this trend to wreck someone’s life over petty slights will only occur after a few high profile suicides by the victims. Racial minorities now appear to be able to exercise the petulant power reserved to princes and the socially superior in former days.
It is surely time for employers to develop a better sense of proportion before they dismiss someone for a petty piece of ill judged behaviour or comment.

Last edited 2 years ago by Jeremy Bray
hayden eastwood
hayden eastwood
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

The irony is that minority groups and their advocates claim they are disempowered, while all the while exhibiting great power

D Ward
D Ward
2 years ago

The other irony is that GCSE English pupils study “An Inspector Calls” as part of their syllabus

Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

I’m afraid suicides won’t stop this. The left doesn’t care about individual lives, only about their ideology. If people start killing themselves, the left will just assume that means they’re not doing enough lefty stuff and they need to double down.

hayden eastwood
hayden eastwood
2 years ago

Correct, suicide will be taken as proof of guilt and seen as a just and proportional punishment.

Jim Cox
Jim Cox
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

Just one more step by the Left to exercise complete control over our lives. This is one to the final steps toward a Communist state. Read Saul Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals”, published in 1970, for the instructions he gives to radicals who want to bring about a socialist state. This is all happening right before our eyes.

Mo Brown
Mo Brown
2 years ago

This article oddly omits discussion of the real tragedy and the logical conclusion of all of this behavior – re-segregation and the destruction of hard earned racial progress over the years and decades. Common people tend to avoid hypersensitive fairies who can unleash magical hell on them at any moment.

Ian Moore
Ian Moore
2 years ago

What the do-gooders who enable this nonsense don’t realise is that the main protagonists in this situation, those carrying out these “cancellations” will not stop at “equality”. This is a power grab, pure and simple, now they have the podium they are not giving it back. No doubt there are genuine people somewhere in this sordid mess, who are interested in real social justice, but the vast majority see this as a way to grab money, power and eventually control over the masses. Gleefully and naively aided by bien pensant imbeciles who think cancelling, tearing down statues, defunding police, sloganeering, flag waving and all the other myopic rubbish is in their best interests. You only need to look at places like Sweden now, where the “social elite” decried ordinary Swedes as being racist over deeply irresponsible immigration policy are now living in fear of what they have done. People in America, and all the other places following suit, need to wake up and deal with this properly.

Positive action should never and can never be to the detriment of anybody else, otherwise you are just transferring problems.

Steve White
Steve White
2 years ago

There used to be State power to destroy the lives of others such as in the time of McCarthyism even though it was legal in theory to be a member or supporter of the Communist Party. Now it is networks that form a mob and pressure employers and State.

William Hickey
William Hickey
2 years ago

“He screams in pain as he attacks you.”

Kat L
Kat L
2 years ago

yah, that train has left the station, never to return. this country is imploding, cancel culture is just one of the cancers metastasizing the whole.

Dawn McD
Dawn McD
2 years ago

Everything mentioned in the last paragraph is what these Marxists want to destroy. They have no use for our individualism, our common humanity, or actual diversity. Their idea of diversity is literally skin deep, a room full of people who look different but have no diversity of thought.
We need more people, and especially more employers, to grow a spine and not cave in to the cancellation mob in a panic. This is supposed to be a country of due process, not Judge Dredd.

mike otter
mike otter
2 years ago

Used to be a great metal/h-core band in UK called Hang The b*****d- a phrase u can interpret nay way u like with regard to this article

mike otter
mike otter
2 years ago

Used to be a great metal/h-core band in UK called Hang The B’stard – a phrase u can interpret any way u like with regard to this article

Last edited 2 years ago by mike otter