The Cost of Celebrity Indifference

Unpacking Black dissatisfaction with our political system and the way we are targeted by political leaders.

From right to left: Cardi B and Charlemagne. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This election year, the future of American democracy is in peril. Sadly, some celebrities in the African American community are incentivizing people not to participate and exercise a right that many of our ancestors died to pass on to successor generations. The choice is between a person who a bipartisan Congressional committee investigated regarding their attempt to legally and violently overturn an election and someone who has been moderately progressive but respects losing elections sometimes. Right now, we have a major political party signaling its refusal to accept the election results in November if Donald Trump doesn’t win. Also, the GOP presidential nominee is promising to deport more than 14 million undocumented Americans, which is logistically challenging. Most notably, the conservative think tank apparatus in America has developed a plan to hollow out the civil service and replace it with loyalists who will dismantle our fledgling human rights infrastructure:

Despite these warnings, we have celebrities like “Cardi B” and “Charlemagne Tha God” calling “both candidates trash” or stating they will not vote in November. Folks, if you have a platform as big as these celebrities and you are intelligent enough to read the antidemocratic tea leaves (as these two are), then getting people to use their right to vote is essential. It is possible that these voices are worried about alienating a swath of people they need for marketing and fundraising. Being a public figure is a business, and one’s celebrity persona is the main product sold. However, American democracy can not survive in an environment of excessive self-interest. 

If prominent voices within our society prioritize personal gain over the health of our polity, then the groundwork for democracy’s unraveling has been laid. Both Charlemagne and Cardi B are stellar talents and insightful figures. They deserve immense respect for becoming masters of their craft. That is why seeing them use their platforms this way is difficult. 

African Americans are rightfully challenging their long-term loyalty to the Democratic Party as the institution has made too many compromises and allowances that have left this community with fewer voting rights, fewer labor protections, and, sometimes, more dangerous communities. At the same time, the Democratic Party has cultivated a coalition that gives Black leaders a seat at the larger party table and does it in a way where these issues mentioned above are taken seriously (even if the outcomes reflect a deprioritization of the Black wing of the party when all is said and done). President Biden has recently nominated his 200th judge to the federal judiciary, and his nominees are mainly women and people of color. Contrary to Tim Scott’s claims, Biden has also given more funding to historically Black colleges and universities than the Trump administration.

That is vastly different than the Republican Party, where there is a long-term tension with opening the Goldwater/Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Trump coalition in a way that may reveal some of the contradictions within the party’s ideology regarding race and public spending. Trump’s appeal to Black voters is superficial and reflects a deep unseriousness his team seems to harbor towards the lives of Black Americans. Trump’s gold tennis shoes, his strange visit to Chik-Fil-A, and his parading of Tim Scott suggest the campaign sees this part of the electorate as a collective rap video rather than an American minority with a long history of activism that hinges on the proliferation of democracy and society-wide respect for our collective public square. 

Still, and within our community, we must continue our internal dialogue regarding the excesses of a cultural consensus that glorifies living outside the law and normalizes the degradation of our interactions with one another or the public square. Too often, misogynistic and homophobic assertions (and framing) torture this conversation. However, the over-glorification of violence towards women, cheap thrills, negative stigmas towards LGTBQIA+ people, and a lifestyle attached to crime syndicates have made young people glorify an actual criminal who seeks to undermine our democratic progress. Also, this dialogue shouldn’t miss the beauty of our cultural contributions, which is how they can reflect reality and tell a darker story that may be difficult to digest in a different channel.

For example, hip-hop is arguably the last unique American art form to reach global preeminence, and its roots lay in African Americans mixing poetry and political consciousness to describe the hardships of living as a racial minority in late-twentieth-century America. Like most other art forms and genres, the style went through an elaborate phase that saw patrons and financial interests demand more excessive behavior, stereotypical character portraits, and extreme marketing maneuvers.

Tayo Bero writes about hip-hop artists embracing the American right wing in The Guardian:

And when it comes down to the raw cents and dollars, modern-day wealth solidarity between mainly Black rappers and powerful conservatives isn’t entirely surprising. Ownership in hip-hop is whiter than ever and the nature of the music itself has become increasingly capitalistic. Rap is no longer the embodiment of African American resistance it once was. Now, it’s a hyper-commercialized cultural assembly line that’s somehow been re-designed to glorify the very issues it once pushed so hard against.

That’s why society’s current obsession with Black billionaires and one-percenters as “success stories” constantly falls so flat. The notion of building individual wealth as a means of collective liberation is as sinister as it is stupid. We know that Black wealth hoarding can’t save us and that recreating the violent architecture of capitalism – but with Black people in the positions of power, of course – does nothing for the plight of everyday African Americans. Still, hip-hop legends like Jay-Z continue to peddle this demented lie because that is the very function of capitalism: keep the poorest in society busy providing cheap labor while they chase an impossible dream.

Then there’s the pseudo-intellectual bunch, who mask their self-serving motivations as elevated political awareness. Say what you want about Democrats and what they have or haven’t done for Black people in America, but Kanye West campaigning for Trump wasn’t some stroke of genius – it was one of the most self-hating and objectively stupid moves that a person in his position could have made back in 2016. But Kanye’s thirst for relevance, combined with a pathological desire to be contrarian and his new hyper-religious bent, made him the perfect kind of Trump-loving troll.

For all of the positive things capitalism can offer, there is truth in Bero’s analysis of one of its weaknesses and how it manipulates Black leaders to cannibalize their own. Still, there is hope. Today, the art form is increasingly balkanized and features a market of different versions and stylings, from conscientious and political rap to trap and gangster rap. This is not dissimilar to the evolution of other music genres in contemporary times. Unfortunately, the most commonly marketed version of hip-hop (and the portrayal of African Americans exported around the world) is still an extreme version of our culture and lifestyles. We are still waiting for market forces to evolve to a point that reflects a more modern, multicultural understanding of race. That may come with generational change.

Evidence of this is in the creative contributions that consistently challenge mainstream depictions and portrayals of African Americans in visual and auditory media.

As a middle school history teacher, I witnessed young minorities sometimes celebrate Trump more than their white counterparts because they perceive him as a gold-plated winner in the same vein that many of their influencers aspire to be. His adultery, gaudy lifestyle, and trashing of established systems parallel the celebrity voices they follow. That reality should not provide a permission structure to bad-faith conservatives to water down the experiences of Black America into that of a demeaning rap video. Instead, it is a challenging and complex reality that our community leaders need to consider and reckon with.

As we traverse this turbulent year for public life, America must reflect on our absurd celebrity obsession and our pretension for superficiality. Trump’s appeal to all American groups depends on a population harboring an unserious civic life and being comfortable with being willfully underinformed regarding the stakes of our elections and the intricacies of our political history.

Let’s prove the Trump campaign wrong.