My Year of Grief and Cancellation

What was I trying to accomplish with my anonymous Tumblr?Credit…Paige StampatoriFeb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETIf you were on Tumblr in the early 2010s, you may remember a blog called Your Fave Is Problematic. If not, its content should still sound familiar to you. The posts contained long lists of celebrities’ regrettable (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ethnophobic, ableist and so on) statements and actions — the stuff that gets people canceled these days.That blog was my blog. I spent hours researching each post; as you can probably imagine, my search history was pretty ugly.Your Fave Is Problematic had around 50,000 followers at its peak, in 2014, when I was a high school senior, but its influence was outsized. I got in a feud with a prominent young adult fiction author over his inclusion. One actor submitted himself, perhaps as a dare (or a plea) to dig up his worst. “Problematic fave” became a well-worn meme; even after I stopped posting, my blog was cited in books, articles, podcasts and think pieces. Through it all, my identity stayed private.The blog started, as so many anonymous online projects do, as vengeful public shaming masquerading as social criticism. I was fine-tuning my moral…
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