Dynamics of Celebrity Activism
how idolizing our movement leaders exacerbates systemic burn out and defers the work towards collective liberation
“We really need to stop putting people on pedestals. It is harmful and dehumanizes all involved. Putting someone on a pedestal is not caring for them. It is not love. You can love, admire, adore, learn from, or follow the leadership of someone without putting them on a pedestal. Putting people on pedestals is part of the binary of how we categorize people into “good” and “bad”. They are two sides of the same coin and they contribute to our collective inability to understand, identify and respond to harm. We demonize people or we put them on pedestals. As we work to be free of a culture of punishment/revenge, we also have to confront the other side. We have to acknowledge celebrity culture and how it stretches well beyond formal celebrities and into our movements, organizations, groups, relationships — just as punishment does. A punitive culture teaches us we have to be “good” or “bad”. It erases away our humanity: our human complexities and contradictions; our human capacity for growth, change and transformation, our human capacity for both harm and love.” — Mia Mingus (IG)
After a few years of working for non-profits that not only de-prioritized care or rest, but rewarded overwork and lack of boundaries, I crashed. At that point, responses to unaddressed trauma and burn out had expanded into frequent panic attacks and migraines, dangerous weight loss, and rashes developing under my eyes and on my chest among other symptoms. Looking back at that time now, almost two years later, I can see I was operating from a place of survival.
I’m writing this as someone who’s experience of burn out was severely exacerbated by a broader culture that centers individualist and competitive action, deeply rooted in capitalist value systems. As a result of participating in these systems, I had internalized the harmful idea that the large majority, if not entirety, of my worth was grounded in my ability to be both productive and available. Moving beyond my own individual experience of burn out, after conversations with close friends and comrades who shared similar experiences, it is apparent that the values of celebrity culture (individualism, idolization, dehumanization) are also present in many current and recent social justice movements in the United States, and that this is exacerbating systemic issues of burn out and unaccountable leadership, and is ultimately deferring our efforts towards collective liberation. I hope people take away from this piece is a critique of cultures and practices around leadership that progressive and left-leaning movements are maintaining, not a cancelation of individual leaders themselves. I hope it will help us to reflect on our collective role in transforming harmful and outdated movement practices and cultures, which we are all responsible for.
To first lay some groundwork, mainstream celebrity culture is rooted in violent and oppressive systems, and perpetuates falsehoods that argue human connection and value is most efficiently achieved and effectively experienced through commodified goods, individual success, and popularity. While this line of thinking clearly goes against the values within social justice movements, they are still present in many of our spaces. In this piece, I’m specifically referring to dynamics within social justice movements in the United States. It is not meant to focus on mainstream celebrities. Rather, it explores how we, as social justice movements, recreate value systems and dynamics of celebrity culture in the ways we idolize leaders in our movements.
I see the dynamics between large social movements and their leaders manifesting a certain category of leadership I’ve recently been referring to as the ‘celebrity activist’; a leader who is idolized, placed on a pedestal, and generally engaged with through an ideology of individualism. This is not to be confused or conflated with ‘activist celebrities’, or mainstream celebrities (pop stars, actors, etc.) who act philanthropically or use their social media audiences as a platform to speak to social issues. Before and while I was burning out, whether or not I was willing to admit it, I frequently perceived the accomplishments of certain individual leaders as purely individual efforts and achievement. I admired their ability to financially sustain themselves from their work before celebrating their contributions to principled struggle, and I was often more focused on their personal lifestyle choices rather than their commitment to liberation. Often unknowingly, I was contributing to this larger dynamic propped up by this ‘celebrity culture’ mentality. In doing so, I was simultaneously detaching myself and the leaders I idolized from our respective humanity, which I will speak to more directly later on.
Social media has severely exacerbated blurred these lines of relation, easily dissolving the separation between people’s actions and analysis, and their personalities and style, and in this way, we can easily lose our sense of clarity around what we are valuing in someone’s work. When the main outcome we are looking for in our leaders a social justice version of the same entertainment, inspiration, and endorphin rush we find by following mainstream celebrities and their lives, we are limiting everyone involved while increasing avenues for potential harm. And while I support leadership that is accountable and structured according to collective need, I question if and how successfully our current leadership culture fosters this, when we are more readily willing to follow someone based on their charisma, rather than their relationship to the movement and critical analysis.
Social media has served as a vehicle for our movements to connect, build, communicate, and show up for one another. It has also served as a place to present leaders and their impacts (current and historic) through a lens of individualism. After all, social media is programmed to de-center collective efforts, and hyper-fixate on individual achievements. We’re all aware that when we view someone’s accomplishments on social media, we don’t see the years of trying, failing, struggling, and compiling small scale victories to get to the flashier results social media is made to uplift. We don’t see the communities that came together to move something forward, the organizations that trained people, offering them initial frameworks to understand the context of their work.
When we don’t see the principled and discipled collective actions many of our leaders engaged in prior to becoming well-known, which significantly contributed to the sharpness of their analysis, the impact of their actions, and the consistency and longevity of their participation in anti-oppressive struggles, we paint a picture that our leader somehow became this way on their own, overnight. This often leaves us as followers believing that we somehow have to find a way to become, reinvent, or evolve ourselves into the movement leaders we admire all on our own; No frameworks, no guidance, no rest, and no mistakes.
What does this look like?
We can begin to see clearly the ways that celebrity culture, idolization and individualism impact how we value ourselves, our comrades, and less visible leaders when we reflect on how we discuss and relate to many of our most visible movement leaders. One way I see us doing this is by placing leaders and individuals in our movements on pedestals, ascribing excessive weight and value to their opinions, disproportionately rewarding one person’s efforts in a collaborative project or process, and applying unobtainable expectations to them and their work. It leads to a shift from thinking of someone as a valuable part of a larger, collective movement, into idealizing their efforts, personal lives, personalities, and relationships, thinking of them as the individualized personification of an entire social movement. Additionally, when we consider how we relate to someone and their work we can ask ourselves whether we are seeking to replicate or replace the role someone holds, or motivated to expand, adopt, and build alongside an area of work, value, or practice.
Once we make this shift in thinking, our perception transitions from engaging with someone as a movement leader into viewing them as a ‘celebrity activist’. This shift can look like adopting someone’s specific style, brand of swagger, or personal interests without first reflecting on whether we personally identify with these things. This can also look like believing a celebrity activist’s analysis and beliefs to be irrefutable as well as universally applicable and relevant. We see these forms of engagement lead to fragmented relationships, uncoordinated movements, and the formation of social cliques. Not only this, but in these idealized perceptions of individuals, we often disconnect from the reality that even in their greatness, our leaders (now celebrities) still hold the potential to cause harm as we all do. And when we disconnect from this reality, we increasing the potential for future harm they are involved in to go unaccounted for, excused, or brushed aside.
Which leaders we do and do not select into celebrity status is connected also to visibility and absolutely intertwined with oppressive structures. The process by which our movements transition leaders into celebrity revolutionaries is heavily based on race, skin tone, ability status, immigration status, English-speaking capability, income and gender presentation, prioritizing cis-gendered people. Applying these same practices of adoration in celebrity culture to movement leaders, especially when this is how we determine who we place on top to receive the most resources and the attention, recreates the same value systems our movements resist.
Why is this Happening?
There are a lot of reasons why celebrity culture and individualism are so present in our movements. Three factors seem to be: 1) capitalist funding models, 2) uninspiring non-profits, and 3) experiencing personal, physical, emotional, or spiritual overwhelm. These three reasons often feed into and perpetuate one another.
The mainstream funding model in the U.S is steeped in capitalist notions, assigning those with resources the authority to define (in a social context) who is and is not important expressed by what work, people, and locations receives funding and other resource support. This model prioritizes the opinions of white folks, charity-based models, quantitative, “measurable” outcomes, and success framed through an individualistic narrative, while sewing distrust in grassroots efforts and devaluing Black and brown leadership, collective action, long-term investment, and relational, qualitative achievements. This issue is defined and analyzed thoroughly in the report, “12 Recommendations for Detroit Funders”, put together by Allied Media Projects and the current Design Team of the Transforming Power Fund, a community-led fund that, through practice, is creating a template to address some of the funding issues named above.
The United States mainstream funding model is inherently misaligned with the vision our movements are fighting for. It pushes non-profits to compromise on their goals and ability to remain genuinely accountable to the communities they are working with, and present themselves as “independent, innovative, and visionary” while also presenting as measurable and palatable. It tends to fracture our movements by creating a culture that rewards aggressive competition, under-recognizes collaboration, and glorifies suffering for the sake of productivity through lack of self-care and rest, neglecting personal boundaries, and undervaluing community care practices, facilitating burn out, often leading to further harm.
This pressure and relationship to funding often plays a significant factor in the development of an organization’s culture, heavily influencing who non-profits hold themselves accountable to. This frequently results in uninspired theories of change, and contributing to the rise of individualist “celebrity” narratives around leaders. I’ve lost count of friends and fellow movement collaborators who have abruptly left positions at social justice-oriented non-profits, exhausted from navigating harm, enduring violence, having their opinions, contributions, or ideas go unvalued, unacknowledged or claimed by bosses, or simply working hard and feeling no sense that they are making a difference. Many non-profits don’t elect leadership or have clear, effective structures to keep us aligned with community-defined vision and goals and remove or take other accountability measures when they fail or cause harm. Our lack in stronger organizations and structures to support organizing for collective vision leads to a tendency towards individualistic activism.
Many organizations are gradually degrading, their initial visions and goals diluted and redirected under the weight of funder demands while their detachment from communities they claim to invest in expands. Many organizations are also functioning under leadership structures that are not elected or clear, and do not offer safe ways to challenge decisions made by directors and other organizational leads whose main work relationships are usually with funders and other organizational leads. It requires continuous and committed effort to maintain collective decision-making and accountability systems, and existing in a social and economic structures that work against this generally leaves these efforts un or under-funded. This puts them in a precarious position where they’re generally the first items to be deprioritized when organizations find themselves lacking in resources (time, funding, capacity), which is frequent and common. And when we don’t or can’t prioritize maintaining collective structures, it becomes all but impossible to not focus on individuals. Rather than confronting the structural issues our work faces, we offload those contradictions onto specific organizations. When those organizations inevitably fail to live up to our expectations, we revert to celebrating specific individuals who we see embodying our values. This tends to fracture our movements, creating a culture that rewards individualism and aggressive competition and under-recognizes collaboration. This structure glorifies the productivity of individual organizers, pushing them to neglect self-care, rest, reflection, personal boundaries, and to undervalue community care practices, ultimately facilitating burn out and often leading to further harm.
These conditions exacerbate systemic and wide-spread experiences of overwhelm. Speaking from personal experience and drawing from conversations I’ve had with a few trusted comrades, when organizers are working with less than we need, running on fumes while facing problems bigger than all of us, it is often difficult to accept our own limitations. This pushes us further into individualist thought. We want to believe we can accomplish more than we can, because we feel a sense of urgency that we need to accomplish more than we can in order for any of our efforts to have value. Worse yet, we may even start to feel as though proving our commitment to a social issue, or to our community’s wellness requires us to suffer for our work, that celebrating or experiencing joy or fun is somehow a betrayal to our community, an idea articulated by Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky and Connie Burk in their book, Trauma Stewardship. In my case, this urgent feeling that I needed to always to do more for anything else I did to matter, of refusing experiences of joy, was how I was operating for a long time before I was more or less forced to slow down, ask a few people for help, and clarify, first for myself then for everyone else, what I did, and mostly what I did not have to offer at that moment.
In order for me to accommodate this sense of urgency, I often ended up cutting out parts of my life my well-being really needed me to prioritize. From conversation with friends, and what I’ve experienced and witnessed, what we cut out often includes investing in personal relationships, acting in solidarity with movements that our work does not center, and contributing to community care in spaces we inhabit. It can also look like de-prioritizing building our own analysis of the issues and vision towards liberation, an exciting, gratifying part of social justice movements. It can feel like just another huge, never-ending task on a long continually growing to-do list.
When we’re in this mental place, it can feel easier to align ourselves with someone else’s vision and framework that feels similar to our own. It can feel comforting to believe that even if we cannot be the super human we think we need to be in order to contribute valuably, at least someone else out there can; that one person’s vision is the only one we need in order to achieve collective liberation.
Engaging in another person’s work in this way can impact us in a few key ways. One way is a disinvestment in one’s own capabilities and potential. When we mainly value our work by how visible it is to another person, or how others’ view our work in relation to someone else’s, it becomes easy to lose touch with ourselves, making it difficult for us to identify and trust our own experiences, and capabilities. We will try to apply solutions that may have worked in well in their specific situational, geographic, or cultural context without considering why applying it to our situation may lead to a different outcome or require some adjusting and rebuilding in order to succeed. It also distracts us from our focus on collective goals and needs, deceiving us into thinking we are focusing on collective needs in moments when we’re really focusing on receiving approval.
On the flip side, this way of engaging in someone’s work or analysis also places far too much weight and expectation on what any one person or one groups’ framework can reasonably accomplish. As Mingus states in her quote found above, this pushes us back into binary thinking. Either a person or their analysis is absolutely flawless and applicable in every situation, leaving no reason to question or challenge, explore otherwise, or develop our own thought, or it is flawed and therefore not worth engaging in. Binary thinking makes it even easier for us to perpetuate idealizing and idolizing our certain leaders while we discard and disavow others, leaving little wiggle room between the two. And while I think it makes sense to listen and learn from clear, accountable leadership, I think this also means learning with leadership, actively engaging by questioning, challenging, contributing, and building.
What are some of the impacts?
So, what effect does this designation of ‘celebrity activist’ have on our ability to both hold leaders accountable and grasp their humanity? In the past, as I was beginning to notice my patterns of thought that viewed movement leaders through a binary lens, and relating to them through practices found in celebrity culture, I also noticed myself disengaging from uncomfortable, or unpredictable elements of their humanity. I saw them as unquestionable, unable to make mistakes or have short comings, and sometimes, I even started to see them as unable to cause harm or enact violence. Allowing space for the potential of certain leaders to cause harm left me feeling vulnerable, conflicted, and defensive. So, to protect myself, consciously or not, I left this space out.
I’m sharing this from my personal perspective, but this train of thought is something I see in many social and progressive movements today. It may be convenient for a while, giving us a fabricated sense of security, but I fear as we continue to collectively refuse to hold these uncomfortable truths, and include them in the image we build of our leaders ultimately, we are opening gaps for potential harm to go unacknowledged, and are creating opportunities for our communities to disempower, silence, and neglect those speaking out against harm caused by our leaders. As I’ve delved into these issues, I found a great resource in the book ‘Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement’ edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi-Piepzna-Samarasinha which shares occurrences of this harm as well as instances of transformative community response. In the same moment, we also expand the potential for our leaders to experience harm and isolation themselves.
Our movements have experienced this over and over. We avoid holding leadership accountable, or even acknowledge violence or abusive they’ve committed for fear it will destabilize our movements. It’s easy for us to support #metoo advocates and survivors of abuse until it interferes with our campaign plans, our community events, our organizational structure. This is the point at which most of us become silent or look in another direction. Our willingness as individuals, organizations, and entire movements to look past violence is often determined by the race, skin tone, ability status, income, immigration status, English-speaking ability, and gender presentation placing Black and brown, disabled, undocumented, non-english-speaking, low-income, trans women and femmes in our movements at the bottom. On the flip side, when we do choose to address harm, our response often results in simply banishing someone from movements and community spaces with no potential to transform and restore relationships or repair harm, which is rarely transformative or revolutionary.
Finally, losing sight of understanding our leaders as fellow human beings also means disconnection from their need for rest, joy, care, and community, their limits and their boundaries. It also isolates leaders from their communities and makes it difficult for us (their communities, neighbors, friends, and families) to see when they are struggling and offer care. This can look like expecting our leaders to always be available, always be working, to conflate our leaders with their work, to view them as incomplete without it. It can look like us applauding our leaders for not caring for themselves, for not taking breaks, for suffering, a capitalist, ableist perspective on productivity that reverberates out into our movements and communities.
We begin to equate having a lack of boundaries with proving our commitment to struggle. I have alluded to this throughout the piece, but when there is no space for care, there is no space for children, parents, illness, and disability. And I wonder, how revolutionary can our movements truly be if there is no space for those of us who are living in the context of these conditions and identities?
In addition to everything named here, applying celebrity culture to our movement spaces weighs heavily on how much and if we value care, healing, and other under-recognized and historically-feminized work including logistics planning, cleaning and space-creating, etc. When all of us are aspiring to be the most visible and charismatic leaders of a movement, we tend to see behind-the-scenes work, tedious, time and energy-consuming tasks like logistics planning as stepping stones on our ways to greatness, and not as independently valuable.
This shows up when we don’t give ourselves a reasonable timeline or enough resources to coordinate logistics for an event, expecting it to “just work itself out”, when we do not communicate effectively with those leading behind-the-scenes efforts, but give them a round of applause during the closing remarks of a conference. It also doesn’t allow movement members to play to their strong suits. Not everyone needs to have charisma, and not everyone wants to or can be at the front of a room. Let’s invest in people finding the work that feels good to them, rather than pushing them to fill a role that is convenient for us, but doesn’t work for them. Let’s invest in building movements that support the needs and value the participation of parents, low and minimum-wage workers, people who rely on public transportation, and people with disabilities.
I do not want to see us move into a way of relating which is defined by potential for harm. I want to see us hold ourselves and our leader in the full potential of each others’ humanity, something I do not see us doing when we place individuals on pedestals, refusing to hold space for potential mistakes, let-downs, and harm we all of the potential to cause. Disengaging from our leaders’ humanity also means disengaging from their ability to change, evolve, and transform. Once again pushing us into binary thought of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people, it creates an opening for mainstream narratives that attempt to justify violent institutions including militarized police forces, and prisons, arguing that there are people who belong there, when we know this isn’t the case.
Moving Forward
This piece isn’t about scolding ourselves for our flaws; it’s meant to help identify our shortcomings and adjusting to strengthen ourselves and our movements as we move forward. It is an offering to strengthen where we are unsteady, and build on where we are succeeding within many of our social justice movements and spaces. The goal of it is not to criticize our movement leaders or tear down our movements. Rather, it is to critique an aspect of our movement culture; how we treat our leaders, the pedestals we build to place them on, and the ways this impacts our relationships to ourselves, each other, and our movements. What I’m asking in this piece is for movement leaders, not movement celebrities. We do not need celebrities who we idolize or idealize, who we don’t feel comfortable questioning, who we don’t feel safe challenging. We need leaders who guide, facilitate, initiate, coordinate, listen, commit, clarify, and follow-through. We also cannot transform how our movements and the leaders within them relate to one another through individual response or action. Changing our movements will require collective investment and responses to build egalitarian, democratic structures.
Our movement leaders offer critical analysis, historic context, tools, and practices that strengthen our efforts. They also model tenderness, fierceness, and tenacity to achieve healing for their communities and realize solutions that will bring us to a liberatory future. They deserve our attention, respect, and engagement, but they deserve to experience this in a way that is not disengaged from their humanity, or the humanity of those supporting and engaging them.
As community members and the people who make up these movements, we deserve to be organizing in a culture that is prioritizing our well-being not just as long-term goal of “eventually”, or “maybe when this next event ends”, but as we are moving together now.
Through the current pandemic, many grassroots efforts are already redirecting their attention and actions, placing the focus on mutual aid and building spaces and practices that facilitate connection and trust; We are developing stronger clarity of collective values, and an unwillingness to bend in our practices or leave any of our comrades behind. We are weeding out unsustainable results disguised as solutions, and encouraging each other to envision futures that are breath-taking and irresistible before they are reasonable or palatable to discouraging perspectives or oppressive forces. I am excited for us to continue this work.
Though I’m sure there are many more, next steps I am envisioning right now begin with investing in relationships with our peers, in deepening our personal visions for what liberation might look like, in studying the organizational and collective contexts under which many of our most dynamic movement leaders developed their thought and action, in joining and actively participating in local organizations and community groups, and learning how to be in conflict with each other, to disagree with one another without expanding violence towards each other, to learn how to respond to harm with compassionate accountability.
I believe we are already more in sync than we think, and as we continue to build, this connection will only deepen as it already has been for decades. As I continue untangling these oppressive thought patterns in my own mind, I hope to be a part of future conversations where we are not tearing ourselves apart, but instead are challenging ourselves to further untangle our practices from the systems we’re fighting and weave a stronger cloth on our own. I want to see us reject individualist, celebrity culture, and lean into exploring what collectively-led and community-defined liberation might look like for all of us.
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The ideas I’m sharing here are grounded in stories, practices, and frameworks rooted in the transformative justice and disability justice frameworks, and from what I’ve learned following the work of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Transform Harm, Project NIA, API CHAYA, Emergent Strategy Ideation, Detroit Safety Team, Detroit Represent!, and so many others. They also come out of personal experience with social dynamics I’ve witnessed, been impacted by, and been a participant of that I believe would strengthen our social justice movements to change. Thank you to the Michigan Student Power Network for giving me a space to unfold and explore these thoughts. Thank you to the many friends and comrades who have engaged in vulnerable conversation with me around these ideas. In particular, I would like to acknowledge and express my appreciations for Sariah Metcalfe, Ian Matchett, Teiana McGahey and Owolabi Aboyade for your support, input, and collaboration, and for being continuous thought partners with me in a struggle towards liberation.
Additional Resources:
- Pod-mapping — Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective
- Beyond Survival — Edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- 12 Recommendations TPF — part of a process led by Allied Media Projects & Detroit People’s Platform
- Dreaming Accountability — Mia Mingus
- Hacking the Syllabus; critical solidarities — Scott Kurashige with adrienne maree brown
- How We Get Free Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective Edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
- Suicidal Ideation 2.0 — Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
- Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile is Done with Other People — Eve L. Ewing (interview with Mariame Kaba)
- Trauma Stewardship — Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky and Connie Burk
- Leaders Need to Build Peer Accountability — Cathy Dang-Santa Anna
Aiko Fukuchi is a queer, Japanese American writer and community organizer living in Detroit, Michigan. Their organizing efforts have focused on gender justice, labor, environmental justice. They are currently part of a collective living project, Brick & Mortar Collective, as well as a creative disability justice collective, Relentless Bodies. Their writing focuses on topics including gender-based violence, environmental justice, and connections between grief (personal and collective) and our ever-expanding experiences of intimacy.
