Cancel culture is a widely debated phenomenon. Some argue it holds the powerful to account. Some argue it’s an example of ruthless modern puritanism. Others argue that it doesn’t even exist. But what if the object of outrage shares every bit of anger and disgust that Twitter directs towards them? If they feel the political injustice just as viscerally? If they want to cancel themselves?
Jessica Krug, activist and professor of African American history at George Washington University, revealed in a Medium post last week that, for years, she has been lying about her ethnicity. Claiming to be an Afro-Latina from the Bronx, her article reveals that she’s actually a white Jew from Kansas. Of course, this revelation has sparked much discussion about power, appropriation and ‘anti-black violence’, as Krug herself describes her behaviour.
But Krug’s desire for retribution in the form of cancellation poses a whole different set of questions.
“You should absolutely cancel me” she writes.
While she says herself that she doesn’t know what this cancellation would look like, cancellation often involves a process of public shaming, a tarnishing of one’s reputation, potentially followed by losing one’s job or future employment.
But the way Krug goes on to discuss cancellation seems to signify something else, involving not just her public self, but her very existence. “I absolutely cancel myself. […] I don’t believe that any anti-Black life has inherent value” she writes. “My politics are as they have ever been, and those politics condemn me in the loudest and most unyielding terms.
“I have to figure out how to be a person that I don’t believe should exist.”
The meaning of cancellation in Jessica’s words does not merely evoke public outrage and “restorative justice”, but seems to be a plea for self-deletion.
“I thought I was reading a suicide note”, one of Krug’s former student observes.
“The disquieting nebulousness around the definition of cancellation”
“When you say someone is cancelled, […] You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, kill yourself” Taylor Swift told vogue last year, on the subject of her own cancellation. It’s this disquieting nebulousness around the definition of cancellation that makes Krug’s article so disturbing, as she discusses the lack of “inherent value” in her own life as a “culture leech”.
Cancel culture is a controversial facet of modern culture, and the case of Jessica Krug is a complex issue. But in this instance, the lexis of cancellation is all too disturbing.
Georgia Goble
Featured image courtesy of @markuswinkler via Unsplash.