Holding Grace in One Hand, Anger in the Other

I’m not an absolutist. The full human experience includes making (many) mistakes over our lives, which is reason enough to extend grace and be open to second chances.

However, the tendency to dismiss someone who’s caused harm doesn’t arise out of nowhere, and cancel culture has made full-blown dismissal feel routine despite its ineffectiveness. adrienne maree brown explains this in her book We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice. Cancel culture often functions as a punitive, disposable tool that mimics carceral systems rather than fostering true accountability, healing, or systemic change. 

And yet, this week I found myself angry about Rashad Robinson’s “second chance” and the lack of cancellation following his 2024 resignation from Color Of Change, which ended “an era of toxic leadership and lack of accountability” during his tenure as President. Color Of Change has a history of ineffective leadership that has undermined its advocacy work, as I’ve noted before, based on my experiences while employed there from 2021-2022. There were also allegations of sexual assault and bullying, along with deep layoffs during his tenure as President.

But none of this has stopped him from being a USA Today bestselling author, which I learned while scrolling on LinkedIn. After clicking his page, I also saw that he’s still speaking at events and consulting with organizations as a strategist. He’s still touting himself as a changemaker and leader committed to justice and change. Is this what extended grace looks like? Being allowed to hold your place on the social ladder despite acting as a complete antithesis of a social justice leader, with no public apology for your actions? Should I and others learn to be okay and not give in to cancel culture despite facing real harm?

Rashad is just one example of someone who still has social and relational capital despite his actions. There are so many more examples I could name. Martin Luther King Jr. was an adulterer, yet he still has a national holiday we observe annually. Should federal fraud indictments against regional Black Lives Matter chapter leaders, like the one in Oklahoma, delegitimize the whole BLM movement? César Chávez was exposed this year over allegations of sexually abusing women and minors decades earlier, yet many people and organizations still chose to celebrate him on César Chávez Day.

This is a tension and a complexity I’ve been pondering. I’ve read Brown’s arguments that cancel culture devolves into a reactive, destructive cycle rather than a healing one, even though it stems from a valid desire to address real harm. I understand that social justice movements can and should address conflict and harm without replicating the systems they seek to dismantle. Anyone navigating the nonprofit-industrial complex should have the skills for principled struggle and collective care.

But I found it hard to operate within and practice that mindset this week. At what point is enough, enough? What happens when people aren’t held accountable, or don’t hold themselves accountable, for the harm they’ve caused? Do we let it go and walk away, sitting in the discomfort and frustration of not knowing whether or when they might act harmfully again?

I don’t want to be in a space where my closure comes from someone’s downfall or cancellation. That’s not productive or helpful to anyone. And it took me writing this to realize the root of my anger and where to place it, and that’s in the systems that make harm possible and perpetuate it. There will always be individual bad actors or good actors who make poor choices in fights for justice. That’s being human.

I used to believe we needed to become better people to build better systems. Now I see we need both: people willing to grow and systems intentionally designed to support us amid our imperfections and mistakes.