Hollywood is perhaps one of the last places to look for inspiration—practical, emotional, or otherwise—in times of crisis. Still, our gilded class’s response to the societal shitstorm that has dominated our minds and screens for the last four months has felt notably unfastened. In April, the comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres made headlines when she joked that life while quarantined in her ten-thousand-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion felt like “being in jail.” The same week, the Times reported on the four hundred inmates being held at Rikers Island for minor parole violations, despite a worsening pandemic. The inmates included Raymond Rivera, a fifty-five-year-old man who, after having his case delayed several months, contracted covid-19 in jail and died the day after state officials lifted the warrant against him. As public sentiment has turned from coronavirus-induced fear to sadness and anger following the tragic killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the celebrity response has ranged from milquetoast to head-scratching.
In a video shared to Instagram on June 2nd, the movie heartthrob turned Silicon Valley financier Ashton Kutcher choked back tears as he recounted a pre-bedtime conversation that he had with his two young children. He explained how his son wanted to be read to first, but Kutcher told him that his sister would go first because “for some boys, girls don’t get to go at all.” The story was meant to serve as a poignant and instructive allegory for the score of Instagram users who had commented “All Lives Matter” under a recent post of his where he had opined “BLM.” Around the same time, Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton and the founder and C.E.O. of Off-White, was being memed into a fine dust after posting a screenshot of his paltry fifty-dollar donation to a bail fund started by the Miami art collective (F)empower. And, on Thursday, a two-minute video for an initiative bluntly titled “I Take Responsibility” joined the ever-growing canon of the unsought celebrity P.S.A. The video features a coalition of white actors and entertainers asserting their culpability in perpetuating anti-black racism. Filmed in a sombre black-and-white and scored with saccharine piano, the spot shows Sarah Paulson, Stanley Tucci, Kesha, and others vowing no longer to “turn a blind eye” or “allow racist, hurtful words . . . to be uttered in my presence” and “to stand against hate.” The Web site for the initiative allows visitors to decide which vice they feel most guilty of (“Saying racism doesn’t exist,” “not being inclusive,” etc.) and to “make it better today” by pledging to do things like “donate to families affected [by racism]” before directing them to various organizations and petitions. Elsewhere, many celebrities simply invoked proverbial, and often literal, “prayer hands” emoji (🙏)—a de-facto “get well soon” to society and all its ills.
The missed notes have been particularly grating in the pop-music world, where many stars have built careers and amassed huge profits working within black musical traditions and selling their work to black audiences. As black communities are being disproportionately decimated by the coronavirus and black people continue to die at the hands of law enforcement, there are some who feel that figures like Drake should use their massive platforms to do more than, say, offer a fan the chance to fly on his private jet (On June 1st, Drake was challenged by fellow Toronto artist Mustafah the Poet to match a four-hundred-dollar donation to a black bail-fund network. The rapper reportedly replied, “Say less brother,” and posted a donation receipt for a hundred thousand dollars.) (...)
The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry that typically constitutes the “socially conscious” arm of a celebrity’s public-relations repertoire. Given all the vested corporate interests that celebrities have, and the timeworn tradition of rewarding famous people for the appearance of political integrity more than its actual presence, it’s wishful to expect every musician with more than a million followers to be schooled in the perils of systemic racial inequality, much less to be equipped to speak publicly about it. In fact, it would probably be in our collective best interest that not all of them did. Still, one hopes that, among the faction of the highly followed and highly influential who were jumping to post black squares and vague sentence fragments, there are some who could use their visibility to do more. The increased pressure on artists to monetize their personal brands and the subsequent professionalization of social media have turned these solipsistic Internet spaces into de-facto storefronts for mini corporations. Sadly, it seems that many of the famous names behind these accounts have also adopted the sort of risk-averse, politically opaque rhetoric favored by Fortune 500 companies—opting for tepid platitudes and lazy hashtag activism in lieu of more resolute (and potentially alienating) public displays. (...)
What shouldn’t be overlooked is the work that plain old non-celebrity people have been doing. Within the last few weeks, funds for, among other causes, pretrial bail for trans people being held in New York City jails, George Floyd’s young daughter Gianna, and Ramsey Orta—the man who filmed the murder of his friend Eric Garner in 2014 and was released from prison this year—have been flooded with contributions. Bail-fund organizers in particular have seen an unprecedented spike in support in recent weeks. Many people have been posting receipts of their donations and challenging friends in their network to match them.
What these examples show is not that every single celebrity has to commit to leading the revolution but what can happen if these platforms were treated less like public-relations buildouts and more like the powerful communication channels and resource vectors that they are. Ideological fluffiness on the part of people with huge online followings can be at its best a wasted opportunity and at its worst deleterious to more substantive activism happening on social media. A #blacklivesmatter post on Jennifer Lopez’s Instagram page reaches an audience larger than those of most regional television stations. And although reposting an aerial video of a street mural is nice, it lacks the efficacy of a bail-fund link to free those arrested while marching across it.
[ed. Not to mention all the generic corporate bs we've been subjected to lately. See also: What Do We Want From White Celebrities Right Now? (The Cut).]
In a video shared to Instagram on June 2nd, the movie heartthrob turned Silicon Valley financier Ashton Kutcher choked back tears as he recounted a pre-bedtime conversation that he had with his two young children. He explained how his son wanted to be read to first, but Kutcher told him that his sister would go first because “for some boys, girls don’t get to go at all.” The story was meant to serve as a poignant and instructive allegory for the score of Instagram users who had commented “All Lives Matter” under a recent post of his where he had opined “BLM.” Around the same time, Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton and the founder and C.E.O. of Off-White, was being memed into a fine dust after posting a screenshot of his paltry fifty-dollar donation to a bail fund started by the Miami art collective (F)empower. And, on Thursday, a two-minute video for an initiative bluntly titled “I Take Responsibility” joined the ever-growing canon of the unsought celebrity P.S.A. The video features a coalition of white actors and entertainers asserting their culpability in perpetuating anti-black racism. Filmed in a sombre black-and-white and scored with saccharine piano, the spot shows Sarah Paulson, Stanley Tucci, Kesha, and others vowing no longer to “turn a blind eye” or “allow racist, hurtful words . . . to be uttered in my presence” and “to stand against hate.” The Web site for the initiative allows visitors to decide which vice they feel most guilty of (“Saying racism doesn’t exist,” “not being inclusive,” etc.) and to “make it better today” by pledging to do things like “donate to families affected [by racism]” before directing them to various organizations and petitions. Elsewhere, many celebrities simply invoked proverbial, and often literal, “prayer hands” emoji (🙏)—a de-facto “get well soon” to society and all its ills.The missed notes have been particularly grating in the pop-music world, where many stars have built careers and amassed huge profits working within black musical traditions and selling their work to black audiences. As black communities are being disproportionately decimated by the coronavirus and black people continue to die at the hands of law enforcement, there are some who feel that figures like Drake should use their massive platforms to do more than, say, offer a fan the chance to fly on his private jet (On June 1st, Drake was challenged by fellow Toronto artist Mustafah the Poet to match a four-hundred-dollar donation to a black bail-fund network. The rapper reportedly replied, “Say less brother,” and posted a donation receipt for a hundred thousand dollars.) (...)
The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry that typically constitutes the “socially conscious” arm of a celebrity’s public-relations repertoire. Given all the vested corporate interests that celebrities have, and the timeworn tradition of rewarding famous people for the appearance of political integrity more than its actual presence, it’s wishful to expect every musician with more than a million followers to be schooled in the perils of systemic racial inequality, much less to be equipped to speak publicly about it. In fact, it would probably be in our collective best interest that not all of them did. Still, one hopes that, among the faction of the highly followed and highly influential who were jumping to post black squares and vague sentence fragments, there are some who could use their visibility to do more. The increased pressure on artists to monetize their personal brands and the subsequent professionalization of social media have turned these solipsistic Internet spaces into de-facto storefronts for mini corporations. Sadly, it seems that many of the famous names behind these accounts have also adopted the sort of risk-averse, politically opaque rhetoric favored by Fortune 500 companies—opting for tepid platitudes and lazy hashtag activism in lieu of more resolute (and potentially alienating) public displays. (...)
What shouldn’t be overlooked is the work that plain old non-celebrity people have been doing. Within the last few weeks, funds for, among other causes, pretrial bail for trans people being held in New York City jails, George Floyd’s young daughter Gianna, and Ramsey Orta—the man who filmed the murder of his friend Eric Garner in 2014 and was released from prison this year—have been flooded with contributions. Bail-fund organizers in particular have seen an unprecedented spike in support in recent weeks. Many people have been posting receipts of their donations and challenging friends in their network to match them.
What these examples show is not that every single celebrity has to commit to leading the revolution but what can happen if these platforms were treated less like public-relations buildouts and more like the powerful communication channels and resource vectors that they are. Ideological fluffiness on the part of people with huge online followings can be at its best a wasted opportunity and at its worst deleterious to more substantive activism happening on social media. A #blacklivesmatter post on Jennifer Lopez’s Instagram page reaches an audience larger than those of most regional television stations. And although reposting an aerial video of a street mural is nice, it lacks the efficacy of a bail-fund link to free those arrested while marching across it.
by Jordan Coley, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Confluential Films / YouTube[ed. Not to mention all the generic corporate bs we've been subjected to lately. See also: What Do We Want From White Celebrities Right Now? (The Cut).]
