Tbh I hate debating so-called "cancel culture" because I'm busy and it becomes tiresome quickly.

But there is obviously a core generational tension at play. here, which I discuss briefly in The Ones We've Been Waiting For: https://www.amazon.com/Ones-Weve-Been-Waiting-Generation/dp/0525561501

Basically: you can't talk about "cancel culture" without talking about zero tolerance policies in schools

So, Chapter 2 (ironically titled Harry Potter and the Spawn of the Boomers) is all about how trends in Boomer parenting created millennial attitudes

Basically: Boomers were super-parents. They were more obsessed with their kids than any previous generation, and invested more time and energy into keeping their kids safe and making sure their kids would "be the best they could be." They were the first real helicopter parents

And one aspect of this new Boomer super-parenting was a new obsession with bullying.

Kids have always been teased/bullied in school. But In the 1980s and 1990s, Boomers started to talk about the Bullying Problem as something that would harm their kids

Because of this new fear of bullying, schools started to implement "Zero Tolerance Policies," which meant imposing severe, draconian punishments (expulsion or suspension) for even one instance of bullying (pushing someone on the playground, for example)

Zero Tolerance policies were especially harmful for black and brown students, who were systematically over-disciplined and bore the brunt of suspensions and expulsions, often pushing them directly into the school-to-prison pipeline

Many others have done great research illustrating how Zero Tolerance policies fed the school-to-prison pipeline and increased mass incarceration of young Black men, bc Black kids were more likely than white kids to be expelled for doing normal kid stuff (teasing, shoving, etc)

But Zero Tolerance policies were implemented nationwide, even in privileged white communities without school-to-prison pipeline issues.

And more broadly, the Zero Tolerance policies contributed to how millennials learned the relationship between "crime" and "punishment"

Zero Tolerance meant that pushing someone off the swingset could mean banishment from school forever. It meant that a 4th-grader who called a classmate a mean nickname could be suspended for weeks. I knew of a kid who was suspended for nibbling a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun

This was the justice framework that millennials absorbed: one wrong move and you're out.

So there's nothing new about so-called "cancel culture." Boomers literally trained millennials in the ethics of ruthless consequences. "Cancel Culture" is just Zero Tolerance, all grown up

[fin]

[no I will not debate you about whether so-called "cancel culture" is GOOD or BAD, it's just here and here's some historical context for it, goodbye I have work to do]