Why It’s Time to Abolish Celebrity
By: Ryan Douglass
Tags: Entertainment Industry, Socialism, Abolition, Celebrity, Capitalism

Why It’s Time to Abolish Celebrity

You don’t have to be a celebrity to act like one. Unfortunately, “celebrity” has transcended the elite class. Anyone who puts social climbing over community has internalized a celebrity mindset. These people rationalize that a certain fallback of money, or fame, would put them in a separate category from common peasants, so they wouldn’t be beholden to the accountability common peasants have to take to keep people around them.

America continues to grow in the direction of serfdom, leaving most of its wealth with an elite class that represents 1% of the population. It’s hard not to dream of becoming this one percent as celebrity affects all of us, even those victimized by the corruption coming from this very culture.

We’re trained to scale down our integrity to fit into hierarchal structures that only invite brutality to the table. In these hierarchies, victims of discriminatory violence become gatekeepers themselves as a means of self-preservation, and build cliques based on approximation to money and power.

Celebrities of color are at the forefront of efforts to bring realistic portrayals of marginalized people to the page and screen. Diverse representation, in theory, dismantles racism by appointing diverse creators to speak on behalf of their communities in the art they create.

Inclusion is a more strenuous endeavor that works toward access, opportunity, and community-wide empowerment. Inclusive efforts account for nuanced cultures and diverse outlooks that exist within a single marginalized group. Inclusion should leave marginalized people empowered to use their own voices, to speak on behalf of themselves. A framework of inclusion sees the most vulnerable as the worthiest of support.

Priority on celebrity, in turn, always glorifies those at the top. Celebrity stands in direct opposition to inclusion movements, but not to diversity. Diversity can still exist with a central focus on what is mainstream and popularized (see: whiteness), especially in a market that believes Black people to share a universal Black experience.

I cannot work from this limited frame of thinking. Nuanced realities from the outside world do not stop existing just because they don’t fit a white market of ideas. Not compromising inclusion for diversity is not cause for criminalization — it simply means I overstep white coddling in my efforts toward Black liberation. From here I make my case.

My case is that cruelty is inherent to the ranking system that makes some people “famous” and some people “regular.” In any effort toward equality and fair treatment, celebrity must be dismantled from our value systems, lest we continue to see the following scenario:

A referee (white supremacist) gives two people from a single community a gun and tells each to wear a sign on their chest that says “Diversity.” They must duel, and the winner wins a sum that would make them so rich they’d get into the top 1%, turn into a celebrity, and transcend criticism.

Competitor one values money and power at the expense of human life. Competitor two values empathy and compassion at the expense of money. Competitor one would fire their gun first as they want to win. Competitor two would refuse to fire, out of concern for the life of their opponent. Competitor two is dead. Competitor one walks away with a sign on their chest that reads “diversity.”

This is why celebrities can be in charge even in markets designed to spread empathy and understanding. Diversity becomes as much a compassionate framework as a money-making enterprise. Celebrities rising on our current grounds of brutality maintain power because they do whatever it takes to claim it — conquest, colonization, and exploitation is all fair game.

Celebrity combined with tokenism is an effort to diversify the oppressor base without dismantling hierarchies. When storytelling is driven by a desire to climb the social ladder, lived realities fall behind whatever portrayals are streamlined and profitable. Art with a stamp of approval from whiteness is the art that assimilates to the Western tradition of race-based hierarchy. That art is deemed superior, as it still centers whiteness.

Black people are so few in entertainment spaces that as a group, we end up striving for the same exclusivity that harms us, primarily as a means of self-preservation and survival. But when the end goal is to infiltrate, we fill the roles of the oppressors. When we shoot for celebrity, we become people who think ourselves above accountability.

This framework can’t go unchecked because celebrities have too much power. And to protect themselves, they steal concepts from activists while divorcing those words from their frameworks. Celebrities rely on carefully crafted brands, on their abilities to wax poetic about their own virtuosity to liken themselves to activists while co-opting activists’ work.

If we do prop up artists as “leaders” — if we must, we must hold them accountable. We must not place social circles above moral virtue. We cannot protect proximity to celebrity over integrity.

When you are only worth as much as the money near you, activists and critics (those who deal in humanistic thought), cease to matter. Art, then, is set on a steady decline. It can never be challenged to be better — only if the speaker is famous should their words be received. Celebrities and their feelings are most important, despite them having enough money to feed entire villages, and repeatedly choosing to spend it on ugly handbags.

There’s a mindset that says people with power deserve more power and people with less power deserve nothing. A mindset which is about as backwards as trickle down economics. Beneath this is an acceptance that vulnerable people can die simply because they lack the means to protect themselves. Everyone who is not already beyond the gate set up by the white supremacist state, will be shut out by the capitalist elite as opportunity creation becomes a thing of the past.

The industry of celebrity values money and fame over empathy and compassion. The status marker cannot exist in efforts toward inclusion. So long as we hold the belief that empathic values don’t matter in progressive movements, our artistic market will move toward stagnation at best, and total regression, at worst.