People should never be censored under any circumstance, no matter how awful a book is or what a person says or a comment made on twitter. Unfortunately I personally believe we are seeing censorship more than ever before all because of political correctness and over all overly sensitive to what people say.
I am claiming all of this because it has gotten to a ridiculous point. One of my most favorite comedians is Dave Chappelle, and he is arguably the most influential comedian of the 21st century. He used his profound writing skills to change the course of comedy as we know it and popularized modern phrases. When people shoot a basket and say “Kobe!” most of the time they don’t know Dave Chappelle was the one who started it. Another famous saying that he created was, “I’m Rick James bitch.”; these incredibly popular phrases were solely created by this man. He is the reason why the tv show, Key and Peele was even created.
The thing, this would have never been possible if Dave was censored or given mass criticism from the public. Today there would be absolutely no way his show would have aired on cable today. Go on youtube and just watch a couple of his skits and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. I’m not just saying this either, he has four stand up comedy shows on Netflix and the LGBTQ community was outraged at the things, so much so that they labeled him as transphobic in all these online news articles, trying to demonize him when in reality they mis understood his whole concept and intent. Dave explains, “I never seen somebody in such a hilarious predicament, and not have a sense of humor about it,”. He goes into much further detail in his shows so I’ll leave that to you all to look it up.
What I am trying to get at is, if you disagree with what is being said or how it should be said then do not retaliate by not shutting them down but by having a constructive conversation.
Dave Chapelle is definitely a strong example of this. What I love about him is that he addressed his opposition saying “If you don’t like my content, then you don’t have to watch it. But don’t ruin it for the millions of people that do enjoy it”. He is not pressing his content on people that don’t want to see it, so why should they discourage others from experiencing it for themselves? His Netflix specials hold a special place in my heart. Yes, maybe there is some content that can confuse young teens with hormonal issues, but I feel that 99% of content can be consumed with understanding. When I see artists release the “Clean Version” of an album, I get discouraged that they are catering to the small part of their audience rather than standing behind their work.