The Cruelty of Cancel Culture and Public Shaming
In 2019, I started my second year of teaching as a high school choir director at my alma mater. It had been my dream job since I was a student — the choir program was the main reason I majored in Music Education in college, and it meant a lot to me. Even after I graduated high school, I helped run summer rehearsals until my choir teacher retired in 2014.
When I applied to teach at my alma mater, I was in the midst of a three year break from teaching. Frankly, if this job hadn’t opened up, I probably wouldn’t have returned to the teaching profession.
I knew what it was like not being a teacher, and it was pretty great —
I had free time, I slept through the night, I didn’t have to filter what I shared online, and I could be myself without others’ input. I had freedom. Nevertheless, my alma mater’s choir program held a special place in my heart, and that overrode all logic.
Sadly, the choir program I stepped into didn’t have a place for me.
From the moment I stepped into the job, I felt an impending sense of doom. In fact, I had this constant, intrusive thought that I’d get fired. There was no tangible evidence to support these thoughts — I had high scores in my teaching evaluations, and I was dedicated to my job — but somewhere inside of me, I knew it wasn’t going to end well. These feelings were illogical of course, and I recognized that, but they haunted me.
Spoiler alert: I got fired.
After winter break, I started to feel sick to my stomach while teaching. As it turns out, this feeling began the day two parents and a student went to the School Board to complain about me. I didn’t know this happened until two days afterward, when a local news reporter asked me to comment on a story she was writing about the choir program.
The reporter messaged me on Facebook during the school day, only a few hours before the article was to be distributed, conveniently leaving me little time to process and respond. With the guidance of my union, I provided a written statement, but it was cherry picked and added only after the article started circulating.
The local news story was outlandish, not to mention damaging. On top of basic information that wasn’t factual (e.g. the number of students in my classes and my teaching methods), I was called a bully who “belittled” kids, based on the testimony of one of my senior students. Some students reached out to the writer explaining that I wasn’t this person, but those comments weren’t taken into consideration, nor acknowledged.
The news article generated Facebook comments from a mob of keyboard warriors, most of whom I’ve never met. There was some support, but the negativity was louder.
I got fired shortly afterward, which got made into a second story. On the outside, it looked like I must’ve done something wrong for it to go that far.
I didn’t do anything wrong.
Nevertheless, my teaching career was destroyed publicly, as well as my reputation. This happened two years ago, and I’m still recovering.
The circumstances that led to such a witch hunt were complex. I’ve considered chronicling the events in writing, but I still can’t bring myself to do it. I probably never will.
That said, I’ll explain two contributing factors in brief:
- I was teaching my students to read music (yes, my high school choir students could not read music; evidently they’d been taught by rote prior). While many students appreciated this, others viewed it as a personal attack.
- I’m not religious. I didn’t scream this to the rooftops, as much as I lived with my boyfriend (now husband), and refused to lead prayer. In an area that voted for Trump due to their “Christian values,” I was their own personal antichrist.
It was the most stressful time of my life. I couldn’t do anything right. Attempts to encourage and uplift my students were rarely met with anything but hostility. Most parents couldn’t stand me, refusing to believe I had anything but malicious intentions. My administrators constantly pulled me into meetings to tell me everything I was doing wrong.
Made out to be a villain across the board, it was clear that I was unwelcome.
Two years later, I can confidently say I wasn’t the bully; I was the bullied.
That wasn’t always clear to me. For months, I’d spontaneously cry in my husband’s arms, overwhelmed and distraught, genuinely grappling with whether or whether not I’m a bully. Of course he reassured me that I’m not, but I needed to believe that on my own at some point. It was difficult for me to see what happened objectively until recently.
It’s taken me two years to start to tell this story because it’s impossible to tell it without it sounding like hyperbole. I wish it was.
Unfortunately, “cancel culture” is prevalent these days.
As evidenced by my story, it doesn’t happen to celebrities alone; public shaming happens to normal, everyday people. And even if it only happened to celebrities, that wouldn’t make it okay; celebrities are humans too.
Cancel culture, public shaming, and the like are wrong.
Yes, people do awful things. But positive change occurs when people examine their behavior, thoughts, and opinions, not when everyone’s going after them. How do we expect people to do better using shame? It’s not a safe space for the people getting attacked, and most will default to defensiveness instead of growth.
Plus, I firmly believe a lot of the things people get shamed for simply aren’t true. The articles written about me certainly weren’t.
I hope people will try to understand how traumatizing it is to be publicly shamed and to take news articles on people’s character with a grain of salt, famous or not.
Instead of “canceling” people, we should hold people and organizations accountable.
If we can do it in private, that’s ideal. Things are never black and white, and these conversations should be had with that in mind.
Frustratingly, conversations about cancel culture are dominated by people who participate in public shaming rather than people who’ve been shamed. It’s a nuanced topic, and I believe people who’ve gone through it should be the ones leading the narrative.
Unfortunately, there’s not a public shaming support group (if there is, sign me up), nor an easy way to find us. But I’m here, and for now, can we please do better?
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