Truthfully… #IDontBEYThatWay #IDontGAMEThatWay

A Critique of the Hierarchy of Celebrity

I’ve definitely been riding and dying for Beyoncé and many different celebs discussing resistance and revolution as of late. I appreciate folx with popularity using theirs to popularize such resistance culture and or movements of resistance, up to a point. Cause like most all cultures, if you borrow something to propagate your own individual popularity or profit from and or commodify certain aspects of a culture that belongers of said culture are demonized and criminalized for daily, without real cultural exchange, or taking the true context and meanings out of such symbology of its culture, you might be wading on culturally appropriative waters. Which colonization tends to normalize.

I think that because colonization runs so deeply and because many of us have internalized the subordinating effects of Social Hierarchies(visible, invisible, and fluctuating) I see a bleak future where many people perpetuate this brand of cultural appropriation. Artists, along with the creative class, growing less interested in authenticity in meaning what they actually say and put out not matching what they do, and the public conforming to the leadership of “woke celebrity” and those who have garnered the most social capital underneath capitalism’s culture of rugged narcissistic individualism. This has often been called the #EntertainmentIndustrialComplex or the#HollywoodIndustrialComplex

Everyday People should probably aim to stop heedlessly following celebrities and those with the most social cultural currency and search deeply internally for their own opinions, self determination and autonomy. While critically engaging with their Media of capitalist ideology. Because more often than not these Celebs got a lot more at stake to lose within the confines of capitalism and sustaining their positions under structural poverty. I say this with acknowledging my own internalizations of hierarchy and likeliness to hear out a more popular persyn rather than a less popular one. And to point out the necessity of pushing to decentralize importance in a world that says many of us aint shit.

It’s like, ya ok, so you’re a celebrity, you can pull a Jessie “Butterscotch” Williams and get that romantic standing ovation from your fans, but the truth is… I dont trust that MOST of ya’ll know what you talking about when it comes to relating to the most downtrodden of us and how we’re to get free….

Some examples of “Woke Celebrity Politics”:

Be peaceful?

(while facing systemic genocide)NAH

Stay calm??(while facing likeliness of incarceration on top of poverty or because of structural poverty) NAHHH

Go to your nearest legislator??? (while the State’s Law and Order on stolen land, imposed on stolen people will always ever be white supremacy, anti-indigenous, anti-blackness, class imposing, violent and criminalizing)OH HELL NAH

Thanks for catching up to oppressed people… and a fight that’s been raging on for literally centuries. Many of us weren’t born knowing and fighting, there’s no need to pretend like we were. Not trying to shame the new heads or those with a platform to do something, but interrogating where the platform often comes from. Reconsidering pyramid-like hierarchies that sustain your celebrity. The creative class needs to understand the difference between lip service and actual solidarity. Rhetoric and action. Or that just cause you can give a cool million$ to a cause of your liking doesn’t end our structural poverty and that your ability to accumulate wealth and privilege will always be intrinsically linked to our oppression, poverty, and DISability to do so.

Also it isn’t peculiar that when it comes to gender non conforming, trans womn/femmes, of color, particularly black and undocumented(or both) trans GNC folx who are attacked by these laws, legislative reforms, police, transphobia, and genocided daily for deviating from these cisgendered hetero norms that reify your oppressive positionalities, MANY. OF. YOU. STAY. SILENT. Have you clocked the last uprising that happened for #GoddessDiamond or #DeeniquaDodds or #DeeWhigham? Or the widespread mobilization for the onslaught of trans womn/femmes of color killed this year? There hasn’t EVER been one. This is a huge disappointment for my trans/ gender non conforming siblings and sisters alike who have always been riding and dying for so many of you.

Celebrities need to fund shit, but be about real shit that’s been going on. Some of ya’ll already do bail out those of us who put our bodies on the line and that’s appreciated, but there’s a multitude of projects from real down ass people who do this work with so much heart regardless of getting coin, regardless of even having an established org behind them. Many are working on our collective Autonomy (print these out, distribute freely!!).

These are the folx needing funding. People and families devastated by state sanctioned police violence. Often selflessly and communally organizing for our lives because our ongoing fight for liberation depends on it. But in the longest run, coin and success of an individual black, brown, API, queer, indigenous, trans, undocumented, poor, fat, femme, or disabled persyn won’t stop systemic domination, exploitation, and genocide of these political/descriptive identities. Let alone the very real urgency behind the destruction of the earth we live in. We all need to get freedom, including our EarthMother we walk on!

So when I see ya’ll being cute trying to be the leaders of revolution, I give ya the greatest of side eye. Cause honestly fuck a wannabe “leader of revolution”. Fuck the self importance. That’s some white man made old school political orthodoxy that bases its organizing strategies from colonialism and male supremacist representative logics. Those dynamics of hierarchy, I swear to yall, are the reasons we’ve gotten to this point.

In closing, celebrities or the creative class, would do potential liberatory work and ongoing revolution a favor if they could undo a bit of that entitlement to spacetime when it comes to centering yourselves, then read about some of the critical /revolutionary work and literature of many people who been on the ground fighting and serving their own people’s needs. GET MORE EXPOSURE TO RADICAL AND NUANCED IDEAS. THEN act. THEN speak up. You owe your popularity and accumulated wealth to the people you profit from, to the work of people you mirror your art about. You owe resistance culture that much and you know it. So instead of expecting us all to follow you, into a cop’s graduation ceremony or voting booth, read what we are doing and saying. Shit that guides you to not strengthen and invest in what we’re actively fighting against. If and when ready cause this aint a game. (-:

(Please read some damn anti-authoritarian, anarchist, autonomist, horizontal, Indigenous, non power grabbing, queer theory, afro pessimist, radical zines, black feminist, abolitionist, trans feminist literature, stew up on in it, take it all in with a grain of salt or at least click on the links shown)