Colbert why cancelled

As the debate intensified, I, too, thought that we had reached a point where hashtag activism had circled back onto itself—a moment when the earnestness of a conversation like NotYourAsianSidekick had been compromised by self-promotion and race hustling. But journalists and pundits are particularly sensitive to charges of self-promotion and hustling because we so often use Twitter to self-promote and hustle.

Unlike Park, we usually do this without any particular ideological motivation—and, if we are honest with ourselves, I think we can admit that one reason we may find Twitter activism distasteful is because it interrupts our online socializing with questions we might not want to answer. CancelColbert started with Suey Park, a twenty-three-year-old writer and activist, who, in December of last year, came to Twitter prominence when she set up NotYourAsianSidekick, an online conversation that encouraged Asian-American women to voice their frustrations with traditional feminism.

The hashtag has generated tens of thousands of tweets, which in turn led to wide coverage from mainstream media organizations. The resulting discomfort has nothing to do with the intentions of the joke or the political views of the people laughing at it. If we take CancelColbert at face value, we can easily dismiss it as shrill, misguided, and frivolous. But after speaking to Park about what she hoped to accomplish with all this a paternalistic question if there ever was one , I wonder if we might be witnessing the development of a more compelling—and sometimes annoying and infuriating—form of protest, by a new group of Merry Pranksters, who are once again freaking out the squares in our always over reacting, always polarized online public sphere.

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