Dialog across difference #20: Cancel canceling

In "How We Win,"* George Lakey helps describe how to build a mass movement. In one interview with young campaign superstar Daniel Hunter, the negativity and counterproductivity of cancel culture is illustrated. Hunter describes his interactions with a young college student who came from a very rural conservative Christian home and community, and Hunter tried to help him see the humanity in others--BIPOC, LGTBQ+--and the young man opened his mind so forthrightly that he wrote a letter to the campus newspaper urging others to also stop dehumanizing. 

Instead, because the young man didn't use up-to-date terminology and expressed himself in ways that his woke classmates found inadequate, they attacked him in the campus paper and on campus radio. 

The young man showed up at Daniel's door, in tears, and said he would never, ever again try to stick up for minorities. 

Of course not. The ones who should have praised him, welcomed him, and guided him instead chose the cancel culture gotcha tack, thus reverse-recruiting an earnest convert by their oafish self-righteousness. 

Cancel cancel culture. Learn to call in, and stop calling out.

*Lakey, George (2018). How we win: A guide to nonviolent direct action campaigning. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.