Actor Don Cheadle does not include himself among the list of celebrities warning about the dangers of cancel culture and believes that its dangers have been overblown.
Speaking with Fox News, the “Avengers: Endgame” star said that cancel culture is only real “if you listen to that noise.”
“I guess it’s real to the degree that you listen to that noise. I don’t know that people are purely canceled because … I don’t know that there are any pure irredeemable situations unless it’s been deemed, not that you have said something off, but that you are that way and that there is stuff in your past that is consistent with that thing that you said, that one-off thing that looked like a one-off moment,” he said.
Cheadle added that the nature of social media has created a “live by the sword, die by the sword” environment and that people who often participate in it are dismayed when the system comes back to bite them.
“I think if you live by the sword, you die by the sword… I think that cancel culture, a lot of that is just a fabrication,” he said. “It’s not really real. I don’t think a lot of people who are crying about being canceled are really ‘canceled.’ I think they just don’t enjoy the spot that they had before. And they’ve gotten flack and blowback. Now they want to talk about it in terms of something that is untoward or unfair.”
“To have some belief that there was going to be fairness in social media, to begin with, is a bit of a fallacy,” he added. “You’re playing around on the third rail and things can turn on you fast. We’ve all had versions of that happen, I think, especially when you’re on Twitter and it’s just moment to moment. It’s easy to step into some stuff. But yeah, I think that’s the risk you take. Right? If you want to poke your head up and be a loud voice, then you take the risk of the culture looking at you and going, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to listen to you. Next.’ That’s what it is. Don’t play.”
In the same interview, Cheadle said he is “more hopeful” about the future now that Biden is in the White House, though he did emphasize the need to pressure elected leaders.
“I’m definitely more hopeful for the future. But I do think that hope without action is fruitless. And we have to, for all of our leaders, continue to be vocal and continue to be constituents that speak up and show up,” he said. “If there is no political cost often for these candidates and for people who get into office and become our representatives, they don’t feel any pressure to do anything.”
“So it’s always a balance of who’s got the big chair and who are the people behind them, and then who are us out here as citizens and how are we behaving?” he added. “And what are the things that we are forcing our leaders to do? And how are we doing that? Because if that’s not the entire mix, then things don’t get done because bureaucracy is much more powerful. Inertia is one of the strongest forces on the planet. And it’s much easier not to do anything than to do something. So hope is great, but action is better.”
John Cleese, Ricky Gervais, Bryan Cranston, Rowan Atkinson, Ethan Hawke and many others have all denounced cancel culture in one facet or another.
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