Cancel culture

I don't know anybody who is perfect, but I see a lot of people who love to criticize others for not being perfect.

https://news.yahoo.com/unites-young-people-against-obama-210538828.html


BBC•July 8, 2020

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Last October, former President Barack Obama challenged cancel culture and the idea of being "woke" - a term describing being alert to injustices and what's going on in the community - saying change was complex.

"I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgemental as possible about other people," Mr Obama said.

"The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws."

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African American Studies Senior Lecturer Jason Nichols of the University of Maryland says deciding which monuments ought to go should depend on the reason the person is memorialised.

"Statues and monuments are supposed to show where we want to be - the people in the past who have shown us a path to a better and unified nation, the people who represent the ideals that the nation aspires to," Mr Nichols told the BBC.

"We have to talk about the Confederacy, we just don't have to praise it in public."

He says that ideally, all statues belong in museums that can provide context and there is never a reason to bury history, adding: "I do think that some people do try to take this moral indignation a little too far and extend it beyond these Confederate monuments."

"The key difference is we praise Lincoln for what he did right, not what he did wrong," Mr Nichols says, noting that while people like Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders and did not outright condemn slavery, they still put forth important principles that were positive in the long-run.

"That is the major nuance with Confederate statues - we're praising them for tearing our country apart."

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