Ye and the End of Cancel Culture

Here’s how this society is going to function. If it is unfair for Ye, aka Kanye West, to blame Jewish people collectively for the way he has been treated by individual Jews, it is unfair for people to blame Caucasians for the way individual white people have treated them. We are not going to survive as a peaceful society if we abandon the Biblical influence of respecting individuals as persons not tribal units of external identity markers.

My Polish immigrant ancestors did not own slaves. They broke bread with their Black neighbors and worked hard to overcome anti-Polish systemic prejudices and exclusion. If they had immigrated to Saudi Arabia instead of America, they would have been marginalized even more. Same for Black people. If my Polish ancestors had immigrated to Japan, they would have experienced alienation from insider privilege even more. If they had visited North Africa hundreds of years ago, they might have been enslaved alongside many other Poles and Europeans trafficked as slaves by African slavers. If we roll history back even longer, Neanderthal ancestors were systematically killed and literally devoured out of existence by a homo sapien race that continues to use their name as an epithet of inferiority to this day.

Human hatred and in-group preferences snowballing into exclusion have been with us since the dawn of time. It is only through the Biblical inheritance of sacred personhood that we as a species have slowly begun to become self-aware of our collective violence and correct course in fits and starts. So-called cancel culture is just an attempt to roll back the gains humans have made in protecting the individual from the collective, whatever color or creed it may have, in the name of vengeance for victims. It is fine to rebuke celebrities for racializing the sins of individuals but it can only be done when it is applied consistently across all races and identities. By what standard can we expect a person to feel shame for historical or current actions done by others that look similar to them if that standard is only applied arbitrarily to one racial group—white people?

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