Angela Lin 0:10
Today we’re going to talk about a very controversial topic, Jesse and I just had a heated pre discussion about this, we’re talking, canceled culture. So before we get into the many topics that can come out of this, we thought that we should define what each of us believes cancel culture means because I think there are a couple of different definitions floating around, and that the way that you see that probably colors, the way that you’re going to see the topics that we discuss anyway. So in my opinion, cancel culture is when someone says something that offends someone that a lot of people disagree with what they think is, like racist, or sexist or offensive in some other way. And that person then becomes the target of a mob of people essentially, largely through the internet, or through the press, or through some other public forum in which they are attacked for their reputation. They are trying, they tried to get people tried to get them fired or taken off of their public platform that they have, ie if they’re a celebrity. Essentially, they try to kind of ruin their lives as a consequence for what they said that was offensive. That’s my opinion.
Full Transcript (Note: Transcribed via AI, may contain errors)
Jesse Lin 1:37
Yes, so I definitely agree with that. I definitely think that canceled culture is essentially some kind of group backlash or reaction to something that someone has said, because they feel that that person has stated something that is, like, socially unjust or racist, or just otherwise offensive commentary that’s like unbefitting of a person in their position. And as a result, they are putting together actions to like remove the person from wherever they might have the most power. So that might be their platform. It might be their career, with the idea of showing that there are some intended consequences of the things that you say.
Angela Lin 2:25
Yep. I feel like cancel culture is a byproduct of the inability today to have really nuanced conversations. What I mean by that is that a lot of hot topics today, things like politics, race relations, other very sensitive topics, it’s hard to have an open dialogue with a lot of people, because people have very strong opinions about where they stand on either of those things. And so it’s very easy to kind of fall into, like, you’re with us, or you’re against us, like my side is the one who has the correct opinion, your if you say something that’s opposite, you’re incorrect.
Jesse Lin 3:05
From your perspective, I understand it, because we should have conversations like this episode, that recording right now to discuss, like, how we feel about specific topics, and so that everyone can get a better understanding of where everyone is coming from. But on the flip side, I do understand that there is like, a deep history of hurt around some of these sensitive topics. And people don’t, don’t feel like they should have to have a conversation around things that are like very basic things like our basic human rights for social justice things. And I can like feel and understand that frustration.
Angela Lin 3:41
Yeah, I agree with you on on certain topics, I think I I’m guessing which one you’re talking about, specifically, right now, race relations, um, but a lot of other things like politics, you know, that are not necessarily like your personal history, or like, you know, what has happened to you. It’s more just like your beliefs. So like, those are kind of those are the kinds of things where I’m like, I don’t understand why people aren’t willing to have just like a discussion around them.
Jesse Lin 4:13
But don’t you think politics is personal because politics can influence things in your life that are deeply personal people are very concerned about the woman’s right to choice. They’re very concerned about where LGBT rights might stand. So I think that the politics piece of it is also very sensitive to a lot of people because they see how the impacts of what a president or congressmen or Senate people can do to their lives. And for a lot of people, they’ll be like, why can’t you see that? Like, it’s very clearly, you know, it’s very clearly seen in the news, and you can find out what each person has a vested interest in and how they’ve previously voted and all that stuff.
Angela Lin 5:00
So I don’t disagree with anything you just said, I, I’m also very concerned that I can’t, if I needed to, I couldn’t have an abortion one day, you know, like all these issues are very important. But I don’t agree with everything that Democrats are putting out there right now. And that’s speaking as someone who’s voted democrat the entire time I’ve been able to vote. You know, I mean, like, this is more, what I’m talking about is that I feel like there is a backlash right now to anyone who’s trying to recognize any good that the opposing political party has done, or is proposing, and is fed some negativity for any dismissal of something that your party is doing or proposing, I don’t find a lot of people who are willing to have conversations with me about like, the things that the left is not doing, right. And it’s more just, like, just accept it. This is like the only way and like you’re either with us or you’re pro-Trump. And that’s, that’s what I’m hearing. And it’s very discouraging. And that’s what I mean about like, there’s no nuance anymore.
Jesse Lin 6:11
I mean, regarding the other piece of it, I will just say that, I can’t speak for a lot of people, because the truth is, even though neither of us grew up, like particularly rich, we’re also not like we don’t belong to like the lowest class of people. Right. And we haven’t suffered the most egregious, I think, of ways that some people in the country have suffered. And when I’m talking about that, I’m talking about people who are like, extremely poor and neglected, that are like living in the middle of the country, in parts of the urban areas where people have just been, you know, not paying attention to that population for a while. They’re going to point us and say like, it’s a privilege for you guys to be able to debate the nuances of who you like we don’t like. Yes, I understand that that matters, because who you like is going to represent these policy agendas are going to make all these changes, it matters. But from someone who has been pressed for so long, and so hard to see people arguing about who you like and don’t like, on a face level, I can understand why that would upset people because they’re like, we’re out here, were suffering the consequences. And you guys are kind of just over, they’re not really affected by the consequences, debating about how these things will affect you, and not necessarily us.
Angela Lin 7:34
What you just said had a lot of nuance in it a ton of different topics that we could break out, but one of the things I want to discuss that you mentioned is this idea of like liking or disliking some someone at face value, right, and what that means in terms of the way we make our voting decisions, the way that we identify with ourselves and with other parts of the community and things like that. And this is where I’m like, maybe I’ll get cancelled right now. But I want to part of what I want to talk about what the nuance is that I think, why I tried to say that politics shouldn’t be so sensitive is that a lot of what I meant was when it comes to talking about political figures, so I’m not pro Trump. I didn’t vote for Trump. I’m not going to vote for Trump. I just may not vote for Biden, I may leave a blank thing, I don’t know anyways. But when it comes to politics, I feel like people automatically associate certain traits with key political figures like Trump that they cannot get past. So no matter what he says, no matter what he does, everything is wrong and evil, because he is misogynist. He’s sexist, he’s racist, whatever, right? Like people have already given him these labels. So they’re not willing to look past those things. When he actually maybe didn’t say the thing you thought he said, or he actually made some good decisions were made some good global relationship, you know, impacts like he’s nominated for a Nobel Prize, because he just brokered peace treaties between two Middle East countries like that happened, and that was Trump, and people don’t want to talk about it, because they’re like, but that can’t coexist with this like rapist persona that I have with him. One of the things that I’ve been doing is trying to be more objective in the way that I read news. And so especially because a lot of the major news outlets today are left leaning, they are writing in a certain way to appeal to a left leaning audience. So I try to kind of like counter those same points with right wing people’s perspective of the same thing or like reading people’s videos and comments that are on Twitter. Like if there was an incident that happened on the ground to see what actually happened. So I’m trying to like verify what the reality is right? And one of the things that’s been interesting to me is like, Trump is like the epitome of right, like very politicized, very heated, like identity driven politics, because you’re, if you’re a Trumper, you are automatically associated as a certain type of person. If you’re anti Trump, you’re associated with a certain type of person as well, right? And one of the things I’ve been trying to dissect his whenever he speaks, is what he says as incendiary as everyone’s making it out to be or did they happen to the news outlets happened to clip, a specific phrase of what he said, that sounds really crazy, because that’s he just speaks off the cuff. Right? He has a very, he’s not very polished. He’s not a politician prior to this, so he is not very, like, refined in the way that he talks, it’s easy to find really crazy sounding things. But if you listen to the entire three minutes of what he spoke about, it’s not at all what that 10 seconds was. So I just feel like, there’s a lot of stuff that people like to latch on to and warp into a much bigger thing that was not even the truth of what happened. So a specific example, is many years back when he was quoted as saying, all Mexicans are rapists, and murderers. And that was what made it into the headlines of like every media outlet, like that exact quote, and go back to the actual speech, he didn’t say that you never said those exact words, he said something to the effect of, you know, Mexico is sending some of their worst people, those people are rapists, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s not the same thing. I think all Mexicans are rapists and murderers, which is what was quoted. So I just think there’s a lot in that that’s kind of like clipping, like two second attention span culture that is making it easy to villainize specific political figures, Trump and others, to make them come out to be someone that you will never accept anything that they say, or any policy that they’re trying to push, even if there is some beneficial, you know, beneficial thing attached to it. And then on the flip side with, like, someone you admire on your side of the party, like you’re much more willing to forgive something that they have said, that may be on the same equal like horribleness as the other side, just because they’re on your party. Right?So there’s a little bit too much identifying with these political figures at the surface level. That is like having a lot of waterfall effects into the way that you receive information and make decisions.
Jesse Lin 13:04
Well, yeah, I agree with that. I mean, everyone likes to think that their shit don’t stink. Right? The reality is that a lot of the things that were castigating the current administration for a lot of that stuff happened before President Trump was in office. But the thing is that I feel like most people are discounting him out, not necessarily because there aren’t good things that he’s doing, but that most of the things that he’s doing causes people to want to disconnect. So it doesn’t necessarily matter that he, like, if you’re looking at the specific thing he said, I understand what you’re saying that he didn’t actually say that those like everyone coming from Mexico were rapists, drug runners, whatever. But he didn’t come out clearly to say that – to disassociate all these things, from the context of it, I still feel like many people that he’s talked to, from his base, take those words seriously. And until that’s been disassociated by him, it’s still the truth that he’s put out. I think that’s a problem to not clarify what your intentions of of what you said, when you know that people are being impacted by what you said.
Angela Lin 14:18
Yeah. All right. We’ve spent too much time on politics. That’s only one piece, the very salient example of where it’s like very difficult to have these kinds of discussions that you and I just had. So in the name of having like open discussion, one of the things I feel like cancel culture has diminished a little bit is the ability to really exercise your like freedom of speech, because it’s exactly what cancel culture is trying to like, cut down on is that depending on what you say, like you may face really crazy consequences because other people disagree with you. And it may not even be as egregious as like KKK – I’m putting out there that I’m going to lynch someone in 2pm today, you know, like, there’s like a line that you can draw. And so we want to talk to talk about two recent examples of where, basically, where people have said stuff that they’ve been, like, ultra canceled for that. And this is where we’re tying it back to our Asian identities, because it has to do with Asian communities. So one of the most recent issues is the USC professor who was giving a lecture on like, global languages, like many languages around the world, and he happened to give an example of in Chinese, this, it, there is a filler word that is very often used as kind of like saying, like, or, um, you know, over and over to fill, fill the gaps. And one of the ways that that phrase is pronounced can sound like the N word. And he said it in his lecture many times, because in Chinese, someone might actually say it many, many times in a row, because they’re just kind of like, um, like, like, like, you know, they’re just like, they’re thinking, and they they say many times, and the African American students and and other students in his class, a lot of them took offense to that. And they called for his removal, he was definitely suspended. And then it was like, I think it was pending, if he would get removed.
Jesse Lin 16:34
Okay. I mean, so here, I definitely don’t agree that this is like a right place where someone should be canceled or face some kind of consequence about it. I mean, like, it’s very clearly a different language. And obviously, like, different things in different languages sound like other things, and other languages. And I think what would have helped was, would have just been, as you mentioned, a conversation between a student and the professors, the students and the professor, so that they could have a discussion about, okay, this word makes me feel uncomfortable, but actually doesn’t mean what you think it means at all. And that should have been that. I think part of the problem is that there isn’t the same approach that I would like to see in many places, which is for people to evaluate things critically, before, as you were mentioned, mentioning, evaluate critically before they pass judgment on something. And I think in this case, the problem lies with both the people who were accusing the professor, but also with the administration at USC for simply just removing the professor without first investigating what the situation was. And it does a few things that I think you’ve mentioned, it shows that as soon as you scream foul about something, something adverse will happen to someone without investigation, that is like kind of not what we want to happen, because we don’t want everyone to be able to accuse other people of things willy nilly. And then everyone gets punished before there is a clear understanding of what has happened. So yeah, that’s my stance on it.
Angela Lin 18:09
Yeah, I completely agree. I also feel like what you were talking about, were way early in this conversation about like, the reason people don’t want to have nuanced conversations, especially like race related conversations is because they don’t want to have to explain to you, the hurts of like that they you’ve gone through and like the context of their experience. And this is an example where I feel like, that’s so true. But people are only thinking about that within their personal context. What I find problematic about this incident is that by finding faults in this professor using a Chinese word, in the context of teaching about Chinese language, they are contextualizing, the Chinese language in a Western context, because they’re saying Western language is the only important and the like one true language. And so everything else has a secondary position to that and relationship to that. So thereby, the Chinese word has to subordinate to the English language where that first those sounds came from. And actually Chinese has existed for thousands of years, and English has not. So I have a lot of problem with people using only their perspective when it’s convenient, and not choosing to learn other contexts and other perspectives that might prove them wrong.
Jesse Lin 19:40
I don’t know I don’t want to say it’s a silly case, because I don’t want to discount how anyone is like feeling in this situation. But like, if it’s a language class, and it’s conducted in a different language or a communications class, and it’s conducted in many different languages, I think there should be some cognizance of the fact that you will hear some things in different languages that might sound like other things in the English language, which may not sound good, and that you shouldn’t take those things at face value. There’s another example right? You wanted to talk about?
Angela Lin 20:11
Oh, yeah. This one’s pretty funny, but I was like, um, this happened a while back maybe like a month ago, but there was a new boba shop, bubble tea depending on where in the country you are. There’s a new boba shop that opened in Colorado, and it’s called to be fair, its name is Trap tea house. Keep that in mind. But it was like opening day of this boba shop huge line out the door. And then there’s this video that went a little bit viral. That the woman who shot the video uploaded herself where she went up to the people making boba for her. And she went on this tirade about how they were appropriating black culture and like she thought this was a black owned business and like you guys are stealing from black people and I heard was like the guy making boba had the biggest side-eye happening right now in that video and then everyone in line was like, what the hell this is boba – are you trying to tell people that boba was a black people thing? Because it’s not. And then there’s a the customer who happened to be right behind her was black. And he tried to calm her down and be like, look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s like not cultural appropriation at all. And she called him the C word. And I was like, What the f? What was hilarious is that she then posted it online. And then the black community and the rest of the internet community in general, just like completely trashed on her because they’re like, girl, no, this is like, not what this was supposed to be about.
Jesse Lin 21:50
Yeah, so I think this is a very clear example of a cancel gone wrong, where it was just like, like, what are you even mad about? I’m not even clear what you’re mad about. I unless, unless somehow the owner of the boba place was like, pretending that it was a black owned business or black enterprise. But like if there’s no misrepresentation there, like everything that she’s saying is false. And the truth is that we blend a lot of different things between cultures all the time. We see tons of people with Asian tattoos all over their Asian character tattoos all over their body. frickin Nicki Minaj dressed up like Chun Li in a music video, FKA twigs. I love her to death. She dropped a music video recently, where they were basically doing like wire foo fighting. And it was beautifully done. I loved it. But that’s I’m saying like, there are many of these things where like, people take a shine to specific things in different cultures. And they really love that. And so they show and they represent that. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Angela Lin 22:48
Yeah, that’s going back to nuance in, you know, conversations, I think, because it’s so heated right now, this race relations topic is so heated right now, everything is cultural appropriation, there was no such thing as cultural melting pot, which is what America is, like we as the founding of this country, and onwards, like this has always been a country of immigrants coming from different cultures, coming together making new stuff by mixing together those different cultures and like, borrowing from one and making it a different thing, you know, and that’s always been something that’s like, very beautiful. And now all of a sudden, like, every single thing is actually just cultural appropriation. And in this particular case, black people were not happy with her because they’re like, I’m sorry, are you trying to claim trap? Is that why you’re like trap houses? Is that why you assumed it was a black owned business and you’re trying to claim trap houses for us? News alert none of us want to claim trap houses to black culture, because that’s drug dens. And we don’t want to be associated with that. Like, why would that be something that you are trying to claim for our people. So it was just very problematic. Yeah.
Jesse Lin 24:02
I mean, I think these are like very egregious examples of, like, I don’t even want to say it was like well intentioned thing gone wrong. It was more like, these are egregious examples of people immediately having a gut reaction to something where there was nothing to react to. So I’m always glass half full in the sense that like, I don’t like to think of things super negative, so I don’t feel like everything now is cultural appropriation are more people pointing the finger and saying that’s cultural appropriation when it’s not Yes, I agree with you there. But I don’t think that following that people are being immediately canceled or suffering negative repercussions like as you mentioned in this Trap Tea house example people are like well, what are you mad about like nothing? Yeah, so I think most people’s more it’s emboldened some people right to be more egregious and how they’re like pointing things out that are like nothing. But also like the majority of people still are, like, have some common sense and wits about them. And they’re like, this is not clearly not an example of what you think it is.
Angela Lin 25:10
Well, let’s talk about emboldened people. This is the perfect example. So we also wanted to talk about the fact that everyone has become their own kind of news outlet now, because there’s so much just like, your phone can record anything, you can go live in any moment, and you can like suddenly become viral and get a ton of people watching your shit if you happen to catch a crazy event that’s happening in, you know, at a protest with police, in a boba shop, like whatever you happen to be capturing. And this thing has been such an interesting phenomenon to me, because I feel like there’s definitely some pros that come with this, like we’re catching a lot of really bad behavior that you would otherwise not catch, especially with, you know, police misconduct and like, because now people are emboldened with our phones to like, put people on blast for shit they’re doing. There’s there’s definitely good that’s coming out of this. I also think there’s all like bad coming out of it. So the boba shop is like a kind of funny example of that. But I think people are just feeling like, they want to, like catch everyone in the act of like doing something bad. So they’re whipping out their phones for like, every little thing. And there’s so many consequences that I’m like, I don’t know if it’s good or bad. There’s both but maybe it’s like the bad outweighs the good. I don’t know.
Jesse Lin 26:40
It’s hard to say, because there’s such a huge torrent of things coming at you. I think a lot of people will point to the police misconduct stuff as like a really clear example from both sides. Because some people will be like, oh, well, you know, it doesn’t capture the full story, because you don’t see like, what happens before. And then other people will be like, well, what’s happening in the clip is not appropriate. And this is where I think a lot of people will run the gamut. But from my perspective, a lot of the things that I’ve seen from a police officer perspective is not appropriate in terms of the use of force.
Angela Lin 27:18
Yeah, well, the reason why I’m like I don’t, I think it might be worth more bad than good is because I am one of those people that is trying to like piece together what the truth is. And so I see how like crazy things, you can interpret things the wrong way, if you only happen to see one certain piece of that story. So like, especially a lot, because there are still a bunch of protests and violent riots happening, like, yes, I think you and I have had this discussion a lot. But like, yes, most of the protests are peaceful protesters. However, there are also violent rioters that are causing crazy harm to people and property that happened to latch on to these peaceful protests and take it into their own worlds, right? And there are people getting killed, and raped and like crazy shit happening at these these violent portions of these protests. And I’ve seen a lot of clips where if you happen to only watch one certain angle of like, the 10 seconds of a clip, you would definitely say like, oh, my God, it was like this person’s fault, then you see a different angle capturing the full 30 seconds, and you see that that person was being chased with a gun. Prior to that they had they were thrown, you know, a Molotov cocktail in their way, like they were provoked with violence first, and they were acting in self defense. But if you happen to only watch the second half of that video, and that’s the only thing you see, because you don’t care enough to investigate further, because you have a 10 second attention span. That’s what you believe. And then that has ripple effects of people, you know, telling other people and then like creating these narratives and making it into something that is not the truth. And that’s a lot of what’s happening right now. And that’s very scary to me, because then you’re just taking something that’s totally untrue, because you’re only seeing a portion of it, and you’re making that the truth.
Jesse Lin 29:23
Yeah. So I think in terms of closing, where we’ve landed, is that it’s really important to try and keep an open mind where you think that there is the possibility that like, there might be more to discuss, right? Like, if there is the opportunity to have a conversation with someone about something. I think that’s a good chance and opportunity that you should take, not only to understand the topic that you’re trying to discuss further, but also understanding like the other person’s perspective on it. I will couch that like from my personal opinion like, this is not going to be the case for everything like, for example, for people who are ardently against LGBT rights, I’m not going to have a conversation with you like, I don’t see the point. And if you don’t think my right to exist, is my right to exist. I’m not going to talk to you about that. But I think where there are, spaces are, for example, when people are questioning certain things about the LGBT community, like why are there so many different identities? Like why do people feel like they need to feel a specific way or not feel a specific way. And there’s the intention of trying to understand, I think there’s an opportunity to have a conversation there and really help a person understand why these things are here. And hopefully, create for them, the same mindset that you see things as well. So that’s my perspective on it.
Angela Lin 30:59
Yeah, I will add that something that I’ve learned in my relationship with someone who is very different from me, remote is very different for me with very different opinions on a lot of different things, is that it’s very easy to assume that the way that you are thinking about a certain topic and like the associations that you have with that topic is the same way that the other person you’re talking to also views that same thing. So for example, when we opened up this topic about politics, I was mostly thinking of like political figures and the like surface value attachment to them. Whereas you were thinking about, like, the policies that come from politics, and like the personal impact of those decisions on your rights and your life, right. So like, different interpretations. But if we didn’t bother to explain that a little bit more, we could have had like, very misinterpreted conversations with each other and like, potentially very heated discussions. Right. And so I agree with what you said, and I feel like, you should just always assume that what you’re assuming is not what the other person had, like, be curious about what what they mean, like, what they’re really talking about, and then maybe you actually can find more common ground than you think. And back to the the, like, universal topic of cancel culture, right? I think you and I have agreed on this, which is like, you know, first try to understand if it’s a topic that is you’re open to discussing as well, like, have an open mind have that discussion, if you still like very much disagree, or you’re like, offended by what someone’s saying, just opt out of that conversation, you know, block them if you need to out of your life, but like, I think to going to the extreme of canceled culture, especially immediately of saying, like, I’m going to ruin you that’s like very extreme, and should not be like the default means to approaching people and conversations.
Jesse Lin 33:02
Mm hmm. Okay. Well, this has been a very deep topic about something that’s very contentious. So we hope that you will continue the conversation with us after listening to this episode. So if you have any thoughts, opinions on cancel culture, and things of that nature, please feel free to reach out to us on social media, or email us at telluswhereyourefrom. Wait, tellustelluswhereyourefrom@gmail.com. The YOURE is Y-O-U-R-E.
Angela Lin 33:37
Yes. And I’m going to start plugging this in every episode from here until we do that episode, but we’re doing a listeners episode soon. So if you have a story that you want to share about around this topic around any of our previous topics that we’ve done, again, please write us in because we’re starting to collect those stories. And it’s a chance for you to share your stories with the broader community on our podcast, so please write us. And with that, come back next week for a fresh new episode. Hopefully, it’s not going to be as contentious as this episode but who knows.