WATCH: Let’s Cancel ‘Cancel Culture’: Watch our conversation on conflict, ‘wokeness’ and how to move forward

‘Cancel culture’ has become the weapon that fires scattershot. The concept has caused people — sometimes famous, most times not — to lose jobs, have contracts rescinded, become ostracized and shut down. Be told to shut up.

However, the term has also been weaponized to distract us from the very real possibility that people of ill will, while having every right to express themselves, also should face up to legitimate challenges to repugnant views. Is self-censoring always a bad thing?

Join us on May 7 from 12:00 - 1:00 p.m. for “Let’s Cancel ‘Cancel Culture’ ” where we will unpack this loaded term and give our audience some takeaways to move beyond it. We’ll hear from experts looking for solutions to the division cancel culture has created, when, and if, “canceling” someone is the right thing and how we can hold people accountable in other ways.

This discussion is part of the Herald’s participation in the annual 10 Days of Connection, which will run from May 1-10. This initiative was created after the 2016 elections, when six Miami organizations, including the Miami Herald, came together to confront heightened divisiveness through community-led events that invite people to step out of their comfort zones. More than 140 organizations participated in 2020.

Gail Price-Wise, co-founder of the Florida Center for Cultural Competence, is committed to improving communication among people of different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Price-Wise has developed online and in-person training curricula in cultural competence, language access and health literacy for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Florida Department of Health. She now focuses on the detrimental impact of miscommunication and mistrust on health provider-patient relationships, work that translates well when looking more broadly at what divides us as a society.

Angela Sailor is vice president of The Feulner Institute at The Heritage Foundation. She is an executive with more than 20 years of experience working in both in-house and advisory roles in the White House, Congress, U.S. State Department and the Department of Education. Her take on “cancel culture?” She wrote in a Miami Herald op-ed: “Cancel culture is a direct assault on the construct of forgiveness. It seeks not to fix, but to destroy. It’s the poison pill that fatally blocks a prescriptive cure for human weaknesses. It diametrically opposes forgiveness, an age-old virtue central not only to the Christian faith, but also to our nation’s founding.”

Pushpa Iyer is a professor of conflict analysis and resolution and director of the Center for Conflict Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. She specializes in identity conflicts, non-state armed groups, civil wars, peace processes and peace-building in post-war societies. She is an advocate of what she calls “compassionate courage” — or “empathy in action” — as the path that can take us beyond the hostility of “cancel culture.” She says it is an approach that not only can address systemic inequalities, but also ensure that change is equitable and widespread.

Moderator: Isadora Rangel

Editorial Board member, Miami Herald

This story was originally published April 28, 2021 at 11:27 AM.