When Jamie Lee Curtis posted year-old pictures of Palestinian children holding each other after an air raid by Israeli bombs and falsely claimed the images were instead the aftermath of a recent Hamas attack on Israeli children, I was reminded of why I could never truly support a celebrity who tries to get involved in politics.
Popular culture prioritizes marketable identities over anything else. An average-looking person with openly controversial political opinions is much less brandable than a handsome face with virtually a blank slate for a personality. Economically, it makes sense why celebrities are so heavily advised not to comment on sociopolitical issues. But celebrities are unfit to get involved for a few other reasons: they often spread misinformation, they cannot help but come across disingenuous, and their involvement tends to turn social issues into prolonged discourses involving themselves rather than urgent problems.
Consider this: as head of both a makeup and clothing brand, long-time cast member of several reality shows and mother of four, corporate mogul Kim Kardashian lives her life on a tight clock. Realistically, celebrities simply do not have the time to be able to properly understand the issues they seem to care about. This leads to blatant misinformation being shared to millions of followers. The anecdote shared by American rapper Nicki Minaj during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 had people believing that taking the most popularly recommended vaccine in the US could result in harmful effects on male genitalia. Unsurprisingly, qualified health officials were able to confirm that her story had not been recorded in tandem with receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. In a country where getting many to believe in the disease was already a struggle, the debate Minaj sparked online was arguably unfavorable to the cause of fighting an ongoing pandemic.
Given the importance of marketability of famous personalities, I would argue that much of their expressed views are not even really theirs. Celebrity interactions with the general public are almost always scripted by unseen upper management, in order to appease advertisers or appease a target audience. As a real-life example, actor Leonardo DiCaprio became vocal about his concern for climate change and its impact on future generations when he began The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. However, dumping large sums of money towards climate action, his personal life remained lavish: personal yacht trips and flights on private jets and helicopters were not put on hold until he was publicly scrutinized by real climate activists for attaching his name to such a foundation while making no steps to cut back his own over-emission of CO2.
To this point, another problem with celebrity activists arises: weighing in on social issues often results in the narrative being morphed into a lengthy superficial discourse, losing its sense of urgency. Many of us remember the 2017 Pepsi advertisement starring Kendall Jenner, which attempted to “project a global message of unity, peace and understanding”. It included visuals of attractive actors younger than 30, cheerfully holding vague phrases such as ‘Join the conversation’, the Chinese character for love, 爱, and a plethora of 60s-esque peace symbols. Above all, Jenner’s delivering a police officer a can of Pepsi and thus somehow changing the mood of the advert from divided to together, was particularly tone-deaf given the context of ongoing Black Lives Matter protests in the US at the time, in response to an influx of police brutality against Black Americans.
But what did people remember most about this incident? Pepsi’s nonchalant misrepresentation of Black Americans protests at the very same time? The implicit message behind hiring actors to portray ‘camera-worthy’ protestors for a cause that they did not even bother to make up? No–instead, it was the fact that Jenner, budding model at the time, had been the face of this ad and that her involvement warranted months of discussion over how “cringe” her screen time had been.
I do acknowledge the idea that celebrity involvement in political issues should be empowering. Their ability to reach immense audiences seems like an optimal way to involve more people in the issues that might concern them, or others around the world. For this reason, they do sometimes receive criticism when they do not use their platform to comment on an issue that the public might feel could benefit from their input. However, I have to question why it must take a celebrity personality to be able to inspire these feelings of empathy within a population. Why does one’s favorite singer or model, as opposed to affected civilians, joining a protest inspire them to begin to see its importance?
Long story short: there are countless dedicated political activists–experts in their field who have the knowledge to share to those who will listen. Erasing them by filtering their messages through profitable personas has always just rubbed me the wrong way.
