Let’s Replace Cancel Culture with Accountability: Sonya Renee Taylor (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Sonya Renee Taylor’s talk titled “Let’s Replace Cancel Culture with Accountability” at TEDxAuckland conference.

In this TEDx talk, activist and educator Sonya Renee Taylor emphasizes the importance of radical self-love and its role in personal and societal transformation. She discusses her own experiences of being called out and the intense emotional responses it triggered, highlighting the brain’s fight-or-flight reaction in such situations.

Taylor advocates for moving beyond the binary approach of public shaming (cancel culture) and gentle correction (calling in), proposing a new method she terms “calling on.” This approach involves holding individuals responsible for rectifying the harm they’ve caused, emphasizing the importance of personal accountability and growth.

Taylor’s message is rooted in the belief that understanding and managing our emotional responses, combined with the vast resources available for learning, can foster more effective and compassionate interpersonal dynamics and societal change.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

I want to invite everyone to take a deep breath with me. I’m going to ask us to do that one more time. Take a deep breath in, and when you exhale, I want you to close your eyes, and I want you to think back to a time when you messed up. Maybe you said something problematic.

Maybe you told an inappropriate joke, said something insensitive, parroted a stereotype, and someone let you know. Maybe they told you publicly. Maybe they told you privately. Either way, I want you to think about what happened in your body.

Did your throat tighten up? Did you feel beads of sweat start to form on your brow? Did you get tense? Did you freeze? Did you want to run and hide? How did you react when you got called out or maybe called in? I want to share; my name is Sonia Renee Taylor.

You can open your eyes now, folks.

My name is Sonia Renee Taylor, and I am the founder and radical executive officer of The Body is Not an Apology. You can make your own company, and you can make your own name. We are a digital media and education company exploring the intersections of body, identity, and social justice. Basically, for most of my waking hours, I spend my days trying to convince you that you are inherently worthy, divine, and enough, exactly as you are in the bodies that you have today.

Radical Self-Love

I call this inherent sense of enoughness radical self-love. I’m not saying anything particularly new. This lovely lady has said stuff similar. These guys said this, too. But unlike these folks, I am absolutely not altruistic at all. I actually think altruism is bullshit. I do this because I am 100% convinced that your sense of a lack of enoughness is totally messing up my life, and I’d like you to stop it. Don’t worry.

Impact of Not Feeling Enough

My sense of not enoughness has also wreaked its fair share of havoc in the world. All of the things that we allow and accept and promote and ignore when we don’t feel like we are enough uphold the systems of injustice and oppression that we see in the world. And the world that we want to build, a world that is just and equitable and kind, a world of love and abundance and joy and connection that works for everybody and everybody, is a world that we have to first build inside of us.

And so I do this work of radical self-love in hopes that I might teach us how to do that, how to love ourselves radically so that we can stop harming each other with our stories of not enoughness.

This work that I do is about personal transformation and how personal transformation fuels social transformation. And in order to do this work, I have to investigate what are the things that are in between us and radical self-love. Some of them are things we know already: fear, shame, disconnection, but unfortunately, those are also the tools we are most often taught to use in our society. When we harm each other, when we do things that hurt each other’s feelings, we’re often taught to use those tools.

Experience of Being Called Out

We’re often taught to call each other out. About two years ago, I got called out pretty good. I was on Facebook, fishing for compliments. It’s a thing I do sometimes. I had been living in Aotearoa really briefly and I was feeling really lonely, so I got on Facebook and I asked my community to share with me experiences of how they’d been impacted by me. And I got about 40 or 50 comments. They were beautiful, loving comments.

And buried in the middle of those comments was one comment from a gentleman who said, “Sonia, when you violated me, it made me have to rethink everything I thought I knew about gender and sexual orientation.”

I read that comment and my heart fell to the floor. Immediately sweat started forming on my brow. My throat tightened up. My heartbeat was racing really fast. I felt nauseous like I was going to puke. Immediately after that, a sense of horror came over me. “Oh my God, someone has said I violated them on Facebook.” Immediately after that came defensiveness.

“How dare this person accuse me of violating someone? I’ve never violated anyone in my entire life. Who is this guy?” And then after that, another immediate sense of horror. “What if I did violate him? What if I’ve harmed someone and I don’t know I’ve harmed them?” Luckily for me, I’ve been working with radical self-love for a little bit, so I have a few tools. I took a deep breath, much like the one I asked you all to take when I first came out here.

Approaching the Situation with Empathy

And then I knew that I needed to call some friends, some people that I loved and respected, and ask for their opinions. And luckily, I have smart friends, so they gave me smart advice. And I reached out to this gentleman and I said, “First and foremost, I am so incredibly sorry for harming you. And if you’re open to it, I would love to have a conversation about what I did so that I can be accountable and make amends if that’s possible, but I also 100% understand if you’re not interested in that.”

“So please just know I’m deeply sorry for the harm I caused you.” Luckily, this guy was willing to have a conversation with me, and thank goodness my violation was not nearly as egregious as I thought it was. And we were able to talk through what had happened, but ultimately it’s not even about what happened. It was about how my body responded. It was about my response to what happened. And so I want to talk a little bit about the brain science of getting called out. This is your amygdala, or what I like to call your I-fucked-up brain. The amygdala is the part of the brain that controls emotion.

The Amygdala’s Role in Emotional Response

And when a word or body language or facial expression or tone feels threatening, our amygdala sends a message to the rest of our body saying, “Oh no, we’re in danger.” And our body signals our fight, flight, or freeze response. This heightened state often causes us to be cognitively impaired. Oftentimes it stumbles our communication. There’s a loss of words. I don’t know about you, but if you’ve ever been in like a really heated argument, and you know the exact thing you want to say to the person.

And then you start to flub it up, and you’re like, ‘No, that’s your heightened amygdala.'” It also impairs our social functioning, and so we are far more likely to see war even where there is no war present. We feel like we’re in danger.

And with that feeling often comes a sense of defensiveness, of wanting to argue our point to a fine chiseled tip, or maybe we storm out of the conversation, or maybe we unfriend the person who caused us the bad feelings, or maybe we freeze. We do nothing at all. Oftentimes people say that this state makes it really counterproductive to getting someone to understand how they have harmed, and these people are usually proponents of calling in. And calling in is when we let someone know that they’ve harmed us, but gently, nicely.

The Concept of Calling In

The point is to invite someone into a conversation about how they caused harm, and then help them figure out ways to cause less harm in the future. Not long ago, I got called in. I was on Instagram. I’m on Facebook and Instagram a lot. And I casually mentioned how when I was back in the United States, at the airport I was targeted for intense screening by the Transportation Security Administration.

And I mentioned how I felt like they were treating me as if I was planning a jihad. I made this comment very flippantly, and then I went on about my evening. A few hours later, a Muslim woman messaged me, and she said, “Sonia, I’m a follower of your work and I really appreciate what you do, but I want you to know that the way that you used that term was very hurtful to me. In my religion, jihad simply means an intense struggle, but the word has been twisted to mean violence and is often used to create Islamophobia in my community and with the people that I love.”

She was so generous and so kind in the way that she shared that with me. And what was my body’s response? My throat tightened. I felt sweat form on my brow. I immediately wanted to tell her she obviously misunderstood what I meant because I wasn’t even saying it that way. I had all the same responses inside that I had when I got called out on that public Facebook thread. But luckily, I’ve been working with radical self-love, so I knew to take a deep breath and take another deep breath.

Apologizing and Learning

And then I wrote her back, and I thanked her for being so generous and sharing that with me. And I told her that I apologized for causing her harm by using that word in that way and that I promised that I would change the way that I used that language in the future. And then I got off and I went back onto my stories and I told all the other people that followed me how I had made that mistake and how I planned to move forward. She called me in, and she was incredibly generous to do it.

The Experience of Calling In

I have also called people in. I once used the strategy to address a woman in my community who had posted a pretty racially charged review of an event in our community. I offered a lot of labor when I wrote her, and I really tried to help her understand the offense that she had caused. Ultimately, I really think that that choice to walk with her was transformative for her and for my community, but it didn’t happen without taking a tremendous toll on me. I started having panic attacks during the weeks that that was happening. I couldn’t sleep. I was fatigued. My throat was tight.

My mouth was dry. The beads of sweat were forming all the time. I was exhausted with people accusing me of reverse racism for having told this woman how her words had harmed me. The same amygdala response that I was having when I got called out was the same one I was having when I got called in, and it was the same one that I was having when I called someone else in.

Why? Because our threat response is trained to be activated when we perceive a threat. And as a woman of color, as a person who lives at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, challenging oppression is an inherently threatening activity. People are often fired. They’re evicted. They’re abused. Far too often, they’re even killed for challenging oppression. And it really doesn’t matter how peacefully we say it.

Public Naming and Shaming vs. Calling In

So there are lots of folks who suggest that the trend of public naming and shaming folks is harmful and counterproductive to social justice movements, that it would be much better if we called people in. It would allow them to synthesize the information and hopefully change their behavior. It would be better for social change. And for the most part, I agree with these folks. I mostly agree with these folks.

I think that in this digital age, when we’re often rewarded for typing the pithiest, wittiest, sharpest digital sword directed at someone, it can be pretty ugly and often to the detriment of our humanity. But I think that those folks are missing an important part of the conversation that I want to talk about with us. Firstly, not every communication is designed for the betterment of humankind.

If you are stepping on my foot with your stilettos or your combat boots and I yell at you, “Hey, get off my foot,” I’m probably not trying to stop you from stepping on feet worldwide. I just need you to get off my damn toe. Calling someone out is often about allowing oneself to express what is very rightful and righteous anger at being repeatedly harmed. In a world where we are taught violent and horrible messages about race and class and gender and age and size and ability and sexual orientation, it is likely that all of us have said something offensive in these categories and harmed someone.

The Burden of Calling In

And as people who have to live daily with the identities that are most impacted by these harmful messages, it is likely that we have had hundreds of people step on our proverbial toes. And secondly, I just want to remind us that calling in puts an undue burden on the person who was harmed. Now not only do I have to nurse my broken toe, I have to teach you how never to break anyone else’s toe again and make sure you don’t feel guilt or shame for having stepped on feet. Me and my toe have no damn time for that.

And this is why I am proposing a new way that we might be able to address harm when it happens. Yes, there will be times when it is appropriate to call someone out. Harvey Weinstein needed to be called out. There will be times when calling in is the best strategy. As an able-bodied person, I should absolutely call in other able-bodied people when I see them operating from ways that are ableist. But I don’t think we have to be bound to the binary in this particular situation. I think there are other options we could do. And I propose that we should all spend a little bit more time calling on.

The Concept of Calling On

We know now that our amygdala is likely to be activated whether we are called in or called out. Why? Because your amygdala is your business. We are responsible for the responses and perceptions that we have. And whether the other person has the best or worst intentions is likely to matter little if we don’t have any practice in slowing our threat response, taking a deep breath, and responding based on all of the information that we have present.

After all, having your amygdala activated isn’t all that bad. If you can have a productive exchange in this time, it actually builds brain resilience, which is the seat of innovation and good ideas. When we call on each other, we return the responsibility of rectifying harm back to its rightful owners. I don’t have to publicly berate you, nor do I have to nuzzle you to my bosom and carry you gently to enlightenment. I can share with you how you harmed me and what you did, and entrust you with the work needed to repair that harm, and hopefully to do a bit less harm in the future. I can call on you to learn better and do better.

We live in an age where literally most of us have the entirety of human knowledge tucked into our back pockets at any given moment. There is no intersection of identity or experience in the world that someone has not written a book about, blogged about, podcasted, or YouTubed. The information is out there. We can learn what we did and why it might have caused some offense. We have the ability to figure it out.

When we’re called on, we’re being trusted that we desire to be in right relationship with other human beings on the planet. When we can name that we have been harmed and we can be accountable to the harm that we caused, and we can do that by choice, not by force or by hand-holding, but simply by desiring to be better human beings to other human beings. We can call on each other. And so I’m calling on each of us to step into the possibility of doing a bit more calling on in our lives.

Thanks.