Language Becomes Electric
Cancel culture isn’t left or right anymore — it’s everywhere. And we need to talk about it.
I don’t agree with the far right and what they’re doing to free speech and targeting enemies, but I understand it.
I think about a time when I was in graduate school at the University of Oregon. We were at a party — drinking wine, smoking pot — and this liberal white woman with Rastafarian hair was sitting in the living room with us. She looked over at me and Andrés Montoya and said:
“Man, I wish I wasn’t white.”
Most of the young progressive people in the room just kind of nodded as if they understood. But for me, it was strange.
Why?
Why wouldn’t you want to be white?
White is the privileged class, etc., etc.
But watching how the others responded to her, as if they knew exactly what she meant, I suddenly understood. We were in a cultural shift — one where people of color could play what they called the “race card.” And even though I know that term has been exaggerated by the political right, it was true.
We could play the race card. And I did — many times, mostly unconsciously.
Why won’t you rent this apartment to me?
Is it because I’m Mexican?
That was often my default. I don’t think I abused it — but I used it.
One time in Eugene, when I was in the MFA program at U of O, it was maybe 1 or 2 a.m. All the writers, philosophers, and creatives of color had been at a party — a good one — and afterwards we went to a 24-hour diner. A Denny’s-like place, packed with people.
Some of is were drunk, about ten of us, all of us Latinos, spread out at different tables.
Our waitress was a white woman in her fifties who looked like she’d been smoking all her life, so many wrinkles. She reminded me of a coffee-shop archetype: cat-eye glasses on a pearl chain, a salon-set hairdo. She was working hard — really hustling to take care of everyone.
At one of our tables, two of our friends from Latin America started going after her.
They said they didn’t get their coffee in time because they were brown. That white people were being served first. And it’s true we were the only Latinos in the cafe, but I don’t think the lady was treating us any different.
I was watching this woman run around, sweating, trying to keep up with the crowd. I hated how they treated her — how they tried to make her feel bad for being white. She was just a working-class woman doing her job. We were graduate students, who would probably never have to work all or lives at a cafe serving drunk people.
Andrés and I looked at each other. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. His mom was a working class white women, all her life working hard just to pay rent and give her kids what she could.
We should have said something to defend the lady. But we didn’t.
This was around 1994. And in the university setting, things got worse. Anyone who spoke out — or even misspoke — in a way that bordered on racism could be ostracized. Years later it even got a name: canceled.
And yes, sometimes cancellation was justified — when someone went on a racist rant, or when a celebrity revealed how deeply misogynistic and racist they really were. But often, it wasn’t.
Language was being used as a weapon to eliminate certain voices.
And now we are seeing the same thing from the other side — where people are being “canceled” not for saying something racially or culturally insensitive, but simply for criticizing the ruling power.
If you speak out against Charlie Kirk, for example, you can be canceled. They don’t call it cancellation, but it’s the same thing.
It was abused before. It’s abused now.
I think about Malcolm X, after JFK’s assassination, saying “the chickens have come home to roost.” It got him in trouble. They attacked him. How could you say that?
This tactic is universal. And today it’s being used so effectively that it can silence teachers, comedians, anyone who speaks out.
I’m a university professor. I’ve been in academia a long time. And I understand the paranoia — that fear of saying the wrong thing.
Sometimes in class I just hope I don’t blurt something culturally insensitive, because when I lecture, I follow language wherever it leads.
For example, I might call a woman a “girl.” I don’t mean to. I grew up in a culture where that was normal — where even adult women were “girls.”
Look at those girls.
The girls are great.
Girls’ night out.
But when I say it now, I feel bad.
Even with my wife, when we’re cuddling, I’ll say without thinking, “You’re my girl.” And she’ll say, “I’m not a girl. I’m a woman.” And she’s right. I apologize. But sometimes it just comes out.
What we need, if we want to be a nation, if we want to be a people, is to understand that discourse shifts depending on who we’re talking to. We shouldn’t cancel or attack people simply for the language that flows through them.
People were canceled ten years ago. People are being canceled today.
The problem is using language as a weapon — as a way to attack those who don’t agree with you.
I’m gonna close with a quote from Greg Eagan a sci-fi writer I just barely discovered. He writes, “Language evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to describe subjective reality.”
Maybe that’s where the problem lies. We are using words thinking we are describing reality (our side is good, their side is bad). But what we should be using it for is to cooperate and to make the best physical world that we possibly can.