By Alice Martin
By participating in celebrity culture, we give enormous platforms to people in the entertainment business. These artists reach millions of people every day through their notoriety, and therefore, it is often expected of them to use their platform to spread messages concerning societal issues to their followers. It seems like a great idea, but when celebrities, artists, musicians, and actors engage in activism, what really happens?
It's all too common to see celebrities participate in what is commonly known as “slacktivism” currently, so much so that Oxford Languages added the word to its English dictionary. The term is defined as participating in activism, but in a very low-effort, low-commitment, and performative manner and mainly through social media and online petitions like change.org.
Although social media campaigns and online petitions have had their victories like with #FreeCyntoiaBrown, which was backed by Rihanna and Kim Kardashian, they can also be deeply flawed and problematic. The best example out there is the Blackout Tuesday that happened on June 2nd, 2020. The movement originally intended to protest police brutality and racism in response to the murder of George Floyd by not posting on Instagram or other social media for the whole day and instead just posting a black square on your feed with many hashtags regarding the issue of police brutality and racism, like #BLM or #blacklivesmatter.
The movement amassed momentum quickly and the hashtag is currently at 18.9M posts on Instagram. Artists, actors and entertainers like Katy Perry, Kylie Jenner, Blake Lively, Rihanna, Idris Elba, Lebron James, Cardi B, Justin Bieber are just some of the hundreds of celebrities that participated in the movement that consequentially got a lot of criticism for the lack of actual change it brought to the table.
Jolynna Sinanan wrote in an article for The Conversation, “Blackout Tuesday was in some ways an ideal form of activism for non-activists, which may explain some of its enormous international popularity”. She’s right, it’s easy to post and for non-activist, it still isn’t too politically-charged for them.
However, like it was brought up by artists like Lil Nas X and Kehlani, the movement did more harm than good and eventually, didn’t change anything expect crowd useful hashtags with rows and rows of black squares. That means, hashtags like #BLM and #blacklivesmatter which, before Blackout Tuesday, were filled with information, resources, and funding campaigns, were now overflowed by simple black squares that hid the precious information.
Furthermore, there was no donation campaign or direct help to black people associated with Blackout Tuesday, just a promise of silence in a time where black people were trying to be as loud as possible in voicing the issues they are still facing today. It wouldn’t be a stretch either to assume that the reason why #blackouttuesday became so popular is because so many celebrities promoted it.
Most of the criticism towards celebrity activism is directed towards those who keep their activism on social media, tweeting hashtags and posting squares, without donating a penny of their fortune to help with the social issues of the world. In those cases, celebrity activism is critiques for being “largely conceited and self-focused, with celebrities seeking to advance their own personal agenda”, according to Emma Dwight in her article “Celebrity Activism: Bridging the Gap” for the Harvard International Review.
In the same article, she also mentions the criticism that Bono has been under with the finances of his ONE campaign. Tax records the campaign provided in 2008 “suggested”, according to Dwight, that out of all the revenue that the non-profit organisation made, only 1% actually went to charity.
The ONE campaign was also under fire for providing overly simple solutions to extremely complex problems, diminishing how much it efforts it actually requires to solve the actual problems these campaigns claim to be fighting for.
The #HeForShe campaign that Emma Watson created with the United Nations was also criticized for the same reasons. The social media campaign aimed at including men in the fight for gender equality based on the argument that it is impossible to “affect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation”, according to Watson during her speech at the UN.
Although it seems like a reasonable argument, it still provides a really simple solution to “deeply engrained normative gender discourses”, according to Julia Zulver in an article in Al Jazeera. The campaign also failed to acknowledge the deeper problems that comes with gender inequality due to Watson’s first-world privilege point-of-view. Fortunately, though, she does acknowledge this in her speech.
Students seem to not fall for the slacktivism celebrities play into sometimes and can discern when something is just done for public image. Marsia Da Chao, student in General Social Sciences points out: “I think that a good majority of the time celebrities will pretend that they are interested in a cause or try to spread awareness because they fear being cancelled, for publicity or a check. Unless the cause directly impacts them so often find it disingenuous”.
However, even if some celebrities fail in their display of political and social involvement, it can’t be overlooked that others have been successful.
Jane Fonda still features amongst the celebrities that have best used their influence to fight for social and environmental issues. In the seventies, Fonda protested, held fundraisers, and donated to civil rights movements and fought to end police brutality. She participated in protests against the Vietnam war, stood with the indigenous community and most recently fights against climate change. Although she was arrested multiple times over her lifetime, it never stopped her. For that matter, she spoke out about how she was well treated in jail because she was white and famous.
Because of her work for the conservation of Cambodia’s environment and endangered wildlife, with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and her efforts to save bees through programs to promote women beekeepers, Angelina Jolie always figures as one of the best examples of celebrity humanitarianism currently. She obviously uses her platform and her visibility to inspire and solves the problems that matter.
There are advantages to celebrities using their platform for activist work, even if it stays online. As Emma Dwight points out, younger generations are less and less drawn to watching cable news where most social issues are portrayed. Therefore, when public figures share those issues, these younger generations might be hearing about them for the first time. People like Emma Watson are well known in the demographics that most uses social media so when she speaks, young people tend to listen.
It takes more than posting a black square or tweeting a hashtag along with prayer hand emojis to be considered an activist. Some celebrities succeed in making change that matters, but unfortunately, the quantity of “slacktivism” in the world of celebrity is at an all-time high.
So, before posting a black square to Instagram because four-times Grammy Award winner Drake did, watch what the movement really is doing.
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