CELEBRITY CULTURE

Ohhhh my goodness.

Hello.

So I’m going away with my MOM on Friday and I was hoping that sending you a newsletter on Monday or Tuesday of this week would mean that I could just sort of, you know, kill two birds with one newsletter. But looks like the Culture Gods had other plans for me.

Do you really want to know what I think? I think we, as a society, are getting tired of celebrities. I think we’re exhausted by the showboating. I think we’re over their pontifications while they sit on their millions and we’re in tiny apartments. I think we’re tired of the controversy. I think we’re tired of the “discourse.” And I think, genuinely, truly, from the bottom of my heart, that we’re all so wrapped up in what THEY’RE doing, it’s making it really easy to not focus on what WE’RE doing.

Okay, so, there are roughly a thousand ways to talk about what happened on Sunday night. The biggest problem with the discourse around this topic is that it’s wrapped up in a lot of narratives in which white people should not be providing personal opinions around. Lest we forget - I am white. I’ll do the best I can to shed light on the conversations being had around this event but please know the most efficient and impactful way to educate yourself on these types of topics is to read social content and articles by Black women. Listen to podcasts by Black women. Do what you can to hear from and learn directly from those experiencing these issues and not white people sharing their ~hot takes~ on Twitter (or in a newsletter they send to their agency and clients).

But, as we’ve learned,

none of it is that simple. There was a ton of conversation the second this incident happened that suggested the online community already had “Viral Pre-Exhaustion” as soon as they saw it. The fact that we see something and we OBJECTIVELY KNOW “that is wrong, that person should not have done that,” and still, we are subjected to take-after-take-after-take online and in the news.

So yah, it’s not that simple. The conversation deserves to be had. But I wish we were having it about the Black women being wronged in our own communities and not only when they’re wearing a multi-thousand dollar gown to one of the most exclusive events in the world. I wish we were having the conversation but I wish we’d stop using celebrities as a scapegoat to forego our own biases and responsibilities that surround racially charged conversations about something like hairstyle. I wish we were having the conversation but that we could recognize the violence we notice in each other is often a reflection of what we see playing out on TV.

And I really wish that those empty social media apologies that we read at least a couple times a month were more like the difficult, embarrassing, gut-wrenching apologies that we have to have as HUMANS in the real world. Life would be a lot easier if we could just post an Instagram and be absolved of our wrongs, huh? Because that’s the difference between ~us~ and celebrities. When WE do something wrong, we have to have that conversation. But when they do something wrong, even if on the world stage, all they have to do is work with a PR team and spout off a quick “my bad.” And if we’re all tracking along here - they’re teaching us that all we owe each other is a “my bad,” when in reality, we probably owe each other a lot more than that. We probably owe each other a conversation, an apology, and an understanding we’ll work harder and do better.