Friendly reminder that not a single rich celebrity is going to save us, no matter how ‘inspirational’ they are, no matter how ‘powerful’ their speeches are or how good their hashtags and not even if they’re honestly a ‘good person’.
(Which doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy any of the things they do, just don’t put your hopes on them and don’t pretend that their spectacle is ‘activism’.)
Eh…i get the sentiment but something about it kind of rubs me the wrong way. It might be the whole “cult of personality” implications that seem to erase a lot of her story in favor of presenting her hard work and success as a “sinister trick”.
Why does this feel like the same type of thing like back when Bey was pregnant and articles came outta the woodwork saying “being pregnant isn’t special” and “it doesn’t make you some sorta goddess”????
Hmm, you may be right. I get that this is a thing and maybe I should have been more sensitive to that when I posted this article. Like, it’s perfectly fine if people want to celebrate a good speech Oprah did or appreciate her as a person.
The context from which I felt the need to share this article was one of people actually suggesting that Oprah was going to be the next president and implying that that would somehow fix an incredibly broken system and society. Which I see as a delusion in desperate times. And I don’t believe any individual is going to do that, not Bernie, not Oprah, not Karl Marx-reincarnated.
But it is true that there are many MANY celebrities that present philathropy and media appearances as ‘activism’ and it is the function of every single celebrity to uphold the myth of the American Dream and the system behind it. So 50% of this article is true for most celebrities, yet it will never be written about them.
Then again, there is the flipside of the neoliberal system deliberately using women and people of color to sell their propganda. Most ‘x celebrity for president!’ bullshit would never reach my dash, yet ‘Oprah for president’ bullshit reached me. This is because she is a black woman and some usually smart anti-capitalist people fall for these stories when they are presented as minority representation.
Oprah Winfrey: one of the world’s best neoliberal capitalist thinkers
QueerAnarchism 