We've dismissed the term cancel culture for a long time because we saw it mainly as a way for people in power to evade accountability when confronted with mistakes.
What’s often forgotten is that the roots of this practice lie in Black liberation movements, where calling out harmful behavior publicly became a vital way to seek justice outside of systems that fail to protect marginalized communities. Over time, however, the term has been co-opted and repurposed—often by those in power—to deflect criticism. Rather than taking responsibility for the harm that was caused, people often focus on how the injustice is communicated. This shifts the attention away from the root of the issue. We believe it's crucial to listen to people experiencing violence and injustice, no matter how it is delivered. There should always be space for righteous anger.
However, the more we reflected on our own behavior during conflict, we realized there is more going on. We noticed how punishment and fear of punishment–so deeply ingrained in our culture–affects how we show up in our relationships and results in hurt and disconnection in cases where more effective conflict resolution could be possible.
We experienced this not only in personal conflicts, but also when trying to help organize for Palestine and collective liberation over the last year. There is a growing number of people in movement spaces highlighting the importance of finding more effective and connective ways of working together.
As big believers in the transformative magic of conflict resolution, we feel drawn towards better understanding the underlying dynamics of cancel culture and how they show up in ourselves, our personal relationships, and our movements.
Our Perspective
We are exploring this as two white Germans.
This means we're currently focusing on:
- How German socialization affects our conflict behavior
- The process of white Germans waking up to being complicit in structural violence
- Doing the necessary shadow work to be able to show up in movement spaces in increasingly healthy ways
- Learning from experiences of being on both ends of giving and receiving feedback
We’re aware that learning to process conflict with care and nuance often requires time, support, and emotional bandwidth—resources not equally accessible, especially to those most affected by structural violence. So part of this work, for us, is to take responsibility when we do have access to those resources, and not expect others to carry the emotional weight of our discomfort.
Learning Process
The following resources currently help us look into our own punitive tendencies and conflict patterns:
- Book: We Will Not Cancel Us by adrienne maree brown
- Article series: Because We Need Each Other by Erika Sasson, Celia Kutz, Kazu Haga, and Shilpa Jain
- Book: Nonviolent Communication - A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg
- Article: Thoughts on cancel culture and conflict by Hanna Williams
We've already added quite a few concepts and will keep adding and updating them as we learn more. Also, we'll probably write posts documenting our learning process. For example, see Jan's Conflict Update.
First Thoughts
Here are a few topics we've been learnining and thinking about over the last few months:
- Conflict avoidance: It has become increasingly clear to us how big of a topic conflict avoidance is in our culture and how it is fueled by fear of punishment and fear of "negative" emotions in general. We've seen this in our personal conflicts as well as in movement spaces. Hanna Williams also made an interesting point that cancel culture can be seen as a form of conflict avoidance: when we can't hold the tension of considering a different perspective. Our current goal is to increase our capacity and resilience to be able to sit with the discomfort of conflict in presence.
- Lightning rod: When we witness and experience violence and don't find ways to intentionally ground ourselves, we carry the hurt with us and run the risk of involuntary discharge. While we want to stay mindful not to pathologize strong emotional responses, we've noticed how unprocessed pain can sometimes spill out as sudden outbursts or treating comrades like enemies over disagreements. We're currently experimenting with various grounding techniques to minimize this and get better at transmutation. We're learning to distinguish between punitive discharge that severs connection, and righteous expression that can deepen understanding or call attention to harm.
- Shadow: Repressed and denied aspects of the self can get very creative at finding ways to express themselves. Waking up to our own complicity in structural violence can mean a lot of repressed guilt and judgment of ourselves. Also, we've been socialized in a society that outsources conflict resolution to hierachies and punishment–authoritative tendencies that we carry in us as individuals, but often deny. Not recognizing this can lead to us trying to change everyone around us as fast as possible through blame and finger pointing. The awakening process might even unconsciously kick off its own stages of grief, which could amplify this even more. We're currently working on moving towards acceptance, learning to love all aspects of ourselves to be able to treat others more lovingly as well.
- Responsibility Mapping, Drama Triangle and Fetishization can be helpful concepts to understand dysfunctional conflict dynamics and mechanisms that deny more affected people of their agency. When not taking this into account, we might do harm by subconsciously trying to be "the good white person," maybe to overcorrect the guilt we're repressing (see shadow point above).