I see a phenomenon happening that I want to unpack a bit:

We tend to overvalue traits and undervalue actions.

1/

Let’s work backwards: When a “favourite” gets “cancelled” bc they’re “problematic,” we go through the cycle where people who’ve been repeatedly harmed by them are like “yeah, duh” while protected people are like, “omg what this is so sad—I’ll burn everything they made.”

2/

The shock come from two things:

Protected people are in protected bubbles

We have a hero worship problem

2/

The latter is actually a massive problem and I could probably write a dissertation about it but the tl;dr is that hero worship causes us to idolise perfectly imperfect people.

Then, we do one of two things:
Protect them at all costs;
Shun them into social hell.

3/

The spoiler is that we all are “deeply problematic;” that’s kind of the fuckery involved in living under the infrastructure of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

We internalise all the -isms and anti-ness and have to actively fight against it moment by moment.

4/

None of us are good people. None of us are bad people.

We *all* go around doing things that protect some people and some ideas and hurt some people and some ideas.

We are, the sum of our complicated actions.

5/

Our existences and actions are very complicated. The less aligned we are with the idealised white, cis, hetero, abled, neurotypical, rich narrative, the more complicated our decisions become, especially as we can internalise and conduct harm that hurts our own identities.

6/

See any time someone will say, “I’m an immigrant and this doesn’t offend me.” Ok cool. You don’t represent everyone bud.

In saying things like this, we seek majority acceptance at the cost of delegitimising our peers who are harmed. See? Complicated.

7/

Back to the good bad people thing.

When someone supports the good-bad people idea, I ask:

If a bad person does a bad thing and a good person does a good thing, do we punish them the same?

What about with a good thing? Do we reward them the same?

8/

We tout that we’re constantly learning but I actually think we leave very little space for people to learn.

Simultaneously, I think we give some people endless chances to learn the same lessons that they fail to learn (see Alyssa Milano, Rebel Wilson, etc).

9/

The people who get the endless chances are the ones we hero worship. We defend celebrities we don’t even know because we have a perception of who they are to us, convoluted by media and attraction, often.

Instead, I’m curious about valuing repeated recent actions.

10/

Digging up something someone said 30 years ago out of context, I’m going to look at how they respond to the critique *now.*

Are they doubling down?
Are they remorseful of the error?
Have they apologised to the communities they harmed?
What self-education have they done?

11/

If any of those answers feel unsatisfactory to the communities harmed, then that person still needs to do work and show up better next time.

We can critique the past action and the recent action together.

12/

Making it about actions de-emphasises personal favouritism (foundation of hero worship) and emphasises accountability. We can’t change perception of us in any tangible way—it makes us stuck in a good-bad pedestal-purgatory dichotomy.

But actions: we can all adjust.