Cancel culture did not arise just in the past five years. While it has been a phenomena that has taken center stage in recent years and in this author's opinion a part of a larger social manipulation to divide and polarize, there has always been a strange acceptance that people are disposable, especially if they do something inexcusable. It postulates that anyone can make that judgment, and have the authority to deem it final. It relies on the insistence that there is no further conversation: it's final. It relies on veiling or even erasing the context of an individual's life and their story, their history. It thrives on fear and lacks any form of curiosity or humanity. It is a false and arrogant cultural phenomenon that is the antithesis of belonging. And make no mistake, it’s been a deep facet of American culture for its duration.

It is estimated (and arguably underestimated) that one of two adults or at least 113 million Americans have ever had a loved one incarcerated, and that for every individual incarcerated, there are at minimum ten people impacted.

Close to 10% of all American children have experienced the impact of a parent being locked away. It is estimated that life expectancy of someone with a parent or loved one currently or formerly incarcerated drops by 2.6 years.

Yet day-to-day, few seem to be addressing this legitimate pandemic of the human spirit and the blunt aggression of living in a society infamous for being the “Incarceration Nation”, leading the entire world in how many it incarcerates (25% of total world’s total prisoners, but only 5% of that total global population).

While a general positive arc towards awareness that our country has a massive problem has grown exponentially in the past decade, there is hanging in the air a silence of strange antipathy towards the actual impacts on actual people. In the day to day habituations of American living, just how many of us are dealing with the impact that stigma and shame have in association with emprisonment--and not just that but the accompanying social outcasting and erasure--real and imagined (equally potent)?

What is going on in America?

Cancellation and justification of erasure and dehumanizing is one of the primary “unseen” yet very real factors that keep punitive systems working in the US. Beyond the systems themselves is a silent yet pervasive adoption of valuation terms upon human beings: how we belong, or don’t, how that is wrapped tightly (and intently) with identity; that somehow actions in absolute terms define one’s being, and so on.

I for one have seen them first hand, as the daughter of a mentally ill violent offender, who also arguably herself was the victim of malpractice by her then-psychiatrist. When someone commits a violent crime, they are dehumanized and no thought is given to the context of their past, or how these abhorrent behaviors became their identity as such. No thought is given to the treatment of offenders as less than human, even within a system that proclaims that it serves to rehabilitate or “correct”, as in naming many prisons “correctional centers”. The language betrays the real motive, the real driving force, behind American justice, at least the primary normalized form of justice that has snaked itself into our culture and somehow left to fester without any thought further to the general population, who may likely be quite comfortable with it being NIMBY-esque–and who’s to blame the public? Many who know not what is really going on. Until….a loved one is incarcerated, and cancelled, made inhuman and all within the context of it being justified. This is abhorrent, unjust behavior and treatment that we as a country have signed onto, and without likely knowing.

I don’t even want to go into the human rights violations and racism, the stigma and maltreatment of the meek and mentally ill, that occurs within prisons. Or the treatment of birthing mothers, or those with newborns. It is horrific in and of itself. What happens inside prisons, as our own Department of Justice said in 1973, doesn’t work. They say themselves that it makes criminals. And for our youth caught in the irresponsibly vague and ambiguous juvenile systems, it locks the limbic system in fight-flight and freezes neural development and plasticity, among many other things. It also convinces youth and adults alike that they ARE what they did, not that their actions were an expression of unmet needs and behaviors–which is a wholly separate thing from one’s identity. Oh no, we really go after them with sticks, to ensure they adopt the idea that they are bad, and they have to live with that as their identity. It is nothing short of sick.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about my life's journey, as the daughter of a wonderful mother who by society's terms is a monster. She is now in her eighties, and served 15 years, solitary confinement, and additional juggling around over 3 further years between jails and mental health lockdowns. I've been thinking about how what she did destroyed a lot of lives and relationships, although I can only speak from my own journey. I know for sure that people who seem like friends and community can, do, and often will, turn on you, when the worst happens.

When I think about being cast out of my own neighborhood and monitored by association, I think about the authority people felt they had to do violence in return to me, and to my family. I feel sad about that predicament, as it arguably was not unjustified--we all know that the worst can bring out the worst in all of us. Yet a long-lingering grief continues in my heart for that shaming, public shaming, outcasting, and erasure that I endured, and on behalf of my family. I to this day want to tell the people I used to babysit for -- at least three families regularly on that street -- how much their petition and actions impacted me. How their lack of any form of compassion appeared then, and even now, as being a very violent response to the horrific original violence. I think about the Amish and their somehow innate ability to not just say they forgive, but to behave authentically as such. I wonder what the difference is between my neighborhood then, and how Amish see life. The gap is wide, maybe even to this day.

While what my mother did was horrific, and requires accountability and also the type of perspective that allows for the unthinkable to come from inherently good people--which my parents were and still are--it has haunted me how it is anyone's gamble what will occur in the aftermath. In my work as a social justice leader, researcher and educator, I've heard the gamut of stories, from types like the one I lived and live to the ones where Grace seems absolutely infused into the entirety of the circumstances, where the community offers a higher understanding while still rightfully requiring accountability and repair. It is a mystery to me to this day.

What is not a mystery is how we can actively dismantle the tendency to entangle a person with their act, their behavior, and make it their identity. The criminal justice--and arguably all social systems in the USA--manipulate human worth and value on this scale: what you do, not who you are. Doing over being. Accomplishment over presence. Justified value over inherent worth. And so on.

So if you are currently struggling with a loved one, a child, a parent, family or friend, being in prison and the media circus, the stigma, all of it that comes with it, not to mention the behaviors and actions that are justified in how your loved one is treated in custody, you are NOT ALONE.

The statistical evidence I cite at the outset of this piece, I believe, is as other criminal justice related stats: highly under-estimated. If close to half of the adults in this country have been impacted by incarceration and at least ten people or more beyond that get the seismic impacts, seen and unseen, then we have more people in this country struggling silently than we could even imagine. This is on my mind daily.

I want our kids and youth to know especially that they have implicit value, just for being who they are. Since Mr. Rogers is no longer with us, sadly, as a kids public television show, to ensure our children never forget this key foundation of life, we have to remind one another. We have to push back on what the brilliant Tema Okun terms the Supremacist Characteristics--the valuation of accomplishment, doing, expediency, and all things surface forever stamping out essence--the value of a human life as is upon birth--the value of presence, of one's story, of one's unique and singular fingerprint-gift to the world.

Next essay: How restorative justice reconnects us and our humanity

*This is part one of a series of essays formulating an upcoming book devoted to the topic.