Celebrities Should Be Checked for Their Hypocritical Activism

By Jahnavi Pradeep ’23

Staff Writer

Today, we live in a largely online society with most of our communications nurtured by the blue glares of our smartphone and tablet screens. In this ecosystem, the internet has influenced the way we interact with various forms of activism. A blue profile picture for Sudan, a red #StandwithKashmir Instagram story and a recent surge of black boxes and #BlackLivesMatter posts sum up our solidarities. 

We must pause to evaluate how this internet culture often echoes incomplete solidarity and hypocritical actions, and the first target of this scrutiny is celebrities. Many celebrities are performative in their activism, taking up topics as they are “trending” or selectively choosing topics that do not harm their privileged positions. They choose this over actually getting their feet wet and undertaking meaningful actions and dialogues. With the awareness of these public figures’ power and influence, we must call them out when they lack the responsibility to engage in certain discussions. 

Indian actress Priyanka Chopra is the embodiment of this selective and privileged activism. In June, Chopra expressed her solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, posting a “Please, I Can’t Breathe” image on Instagram. However, there is a dark side of her activism, or rather, her lack thereof. 

For starters, Chopra has been the brand ambassador of skin lightening creams and products that promote and reinforce colorism and its thriving industry in India. She endorsed Ponds lightening cream in 2008 and Garnier lightening cream in 2012. When influential figures like Chopra endorse such products, it sanctions discrimination and prejudice and is the opposite of the “responsibility to end hate” that she posts about. As Bhawna Jaimini noted in a LiveWire article, “Nothing like earning those big bucks from endorsements and still earning those brownie-woke points.”

Additionally, Chopra, who claims to be concerned about systemic oppression and police brutality, solely talks about occurrences in the U.S. What about incidents taking place in India? The anti-Citizenship Amendment Act student protests at the end of 2019 in India were met with state-sanctioned police brutality. During one such incident at Jawaharlal Nehru University, a masked mob entered and attacked, injured and arrested students. These government-backed atrocities have continued in communal riots leading to injuries, deaths and the arrest of activists with no word from Chopra, who was otherwise preoccupied with galas and events and, according to Jamini, “celebrating the amassing of 50 million followers.” 

Additionally, the Black Lives Matter movement also sparked a Dalit Lives Matter movement in India protesting the caste order and its systemic oppression against the Dalit community. Chopra was silent. 

Despite being an ambassador of UNICEF and a proclaimed feminist, Chopra’s activism remains narrow. An explanation of her performative action versus her actual activism is that Priyanka Chopra’s Black Lives Matter post is simply a move to establish herself as a part of the West, speaking up on social and political movements here, while neglecting those back home. This idea is supported by the fact that her solidarity for BLM was a mere performative post with no active involvement otherwise. 

Another reason for shying away from Indian matters could be Chopra’s allegiance with the Modi government. In her privileged position as Modi’s ally (he was even invited to her wedding), Chopra’s activism in India is absent, and she keeps quiet on the bigotry that his government carries out. While she implicitly endorses his atrocities as acceptable, she simultaneously speaks up about the dangers of bigotry, racism and hate in the West. Chopra’s selective activism comes from a privileged position of securing her Modi friendship while at the same time securing her place as an ally in the West. 

Chopra is not the only celebrity guilty of selective and hypocritical activism. Many other celebrities speak out about specific topics, but their actions say otherwise. One such example is Chrissy Teigen and husband John Legend. Both have repeatedly spoken about climate change, urging followers to support the environment. Recently, Teigen and Legend took a private jet to get dinner at an exclusive French restaurant 500 miles from their residence, a sign of their elitist actions not bearing congruence with their earlier tweets. 

Other celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio, have been called out for using private jets and yachts while campaigning for the environment. The Kardashians are notorious for their baseless solidarities. Kylie Jenner took to Instagram in January to talk about donating to wildlife rescues and helping animals, but she was also caught wearing animal fur coats this year. Where is the consistency?

Celebrities, seemingly offering solidarity, need to be rechecked for underlying bigotry and the incomplete activism they endorse and profit from. No matter how much we love a celebrity, we must bring to light their hypocrisies and injustices to meaningful causes and not let their icon status obscure their discrimination and tone-deaf, selective solidarities.

Performative Activism: Social Media’s Newest Problematic Trend

Graphic by Trinity Kendrick ‘21

By Kaveri Pillai ’23

In a world where social constructs like gender, race and religion seem to divide the public, social media has provided a platform to bridge that gap. For the past decade, social media users have been using their platforms to express their opinions. With the work of social movements rising in 2020, critics must question if this expression is just a way of ranting, or if it actually is a revolutionary form of activism. 

According to Robert Putnam’s work in “Bowling Alone,” social capital is a network of relationships made within the society, enabling them to work efficiently within the system. He highlights how active civil engagement has been decreasing for the past 30 years, which gives critics a reason to analyze this new type of activism more carefully. This is where the question comes up: Do we post on social media to enhance our social capital? Or do we attempt to be “woke” and conform to the trend of speaking up out of fear of being left behind? 

 Performative activism is a superficial way of demanding or making change. New York Times writer Nikita Stewart’s article, “Black Activists Wonder: Is Protesting Just Trendy for White People?”  is about a new wave of protests that consisted of predominantly white people during the Black Lives Matter marches in 2020. She expressed her reservations regarding their involvement, fearful that it would only be temporary. Her piece communicates a common theme of frustration with the fact that “allyship,” especially that of white people, has only occurred in response to recent social media trends. The immediacy of social media makes it easy to engage with, but this version of activism does not go far enough. 

Often, the core motivations for activism are misconstrued on social media. The “Challenge Accepted” trend resulted in women across the globe posting black and white pictures of themselves to show the idea that women stick together. Not only was the origin of this online trend eliminated from the posts, but it also merely scratched the surface of the original feminist issues which started the trend. 

Gendered honor killings is an issue Turkish feminists are attempting to combat with. The recent brutal killing of a 27-year-old student Pınar Gültekin by her ex-boyfriend reiterated the importance of raising awareness of femicide. The trend of posting these monochrome pictures was initiated as a way of echoing the pictures of murdered Turkish women that end up in the newspapers on a daily basis. 

This strong wave against patriarchal and misogynistic oppression was unfortunately reduced to young women using photoshoots to showcase their superficial solidarity with other women instead of honoring the original purpose of the challenge. This not only cheapens the social capital produced by a generation working tirelessly to demand legitimate change, but it also damages the growth they have accomplished in the fight to achieve justice. 

 On any given day, social media is flooded with content regarding the Black Lives Matter movement. Posts and stories address a myriad of points from checking your privilege to signing petitions calling for real structural change. “People know that Black people are constantly being murdered at a disproportionate rate, and seeing a video on Instagram that ‘proves it’ isn’t going to make any real change — the fact is that they just don’t care,” Chia Webb-Cazáres ’24 said. 

An overt sense of hypocrisy is laced in these posts. Many of the same people who repost CBS footage or the unforgettable words of Martin Luther King Jr. are the ones who fail to turn up at the voting booths. While performative activism may turn out to be a shortcut to increasing one’s social capital, it is constant engagement with the system which fulfills democratic duties. 

Voting is one such democratic duty that is an integral element of activism. In 2016, only 13 percent of the youth voted in the presidential election. In that same election, 47 percent of white women and 62 percent of white men voted for President Donald Trump. These staggering numbers justify the apprehension people of color have regarding the idea of allyship.

If this new age of activists is all about the talk and not about performing one’s duty as a democratic citizen, there will be no change in the way we view BIPOC, rewrite legislation or implement a sense of human decency in everyday life. The youth, regardless of their #blacklivesmatter posts and signatures on “Justice for Breonna Taylor” petitions, will continue to casually use racist slurs and make racist jokes because they haven’t actually committed themselves to the eradication of systemic racism. 

 A #blackouttuesday post does nothing, and neither does sharing videos of violence toward marginalized groups — which, if anything, desensitizes others to human rights violations. Generation Z might have produced great activists like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai, but in the end, our fight to be trendy over our fight to make real change has made our social performance meaningless. We have become the epitome of performative activism and social media has unwittingly promoted that.

Letter to the Editor - Dismantling Racism: Our Collective Responsibility

Here’s what the Dance department is doing.

We’ve heard from Kijua Sanders-McMurtry and Sonya Stephens about the recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and so many others. We have also heard from our academic department — have you heard from yours? While the initial email that we received from our faculty fell short, it helped catalyze conversations among students in the dance department that have been long overdue.

At the Five College Dance town hall listening session, Kiara Badillo ’20 (Hampshire College) brought up the key point that this is not the start of the conversation — what’s changing now is who is in the room and who is listening. As protests began to gain more visibility on social media, Miranda Lawson ’22 messaged our dance group chat to stress the importance of continuing our outrage and action past this initial wave. The next day, we received an email from Five College Dance announcing an online dance festival. The email included no mention of the recent police murders and the protests. Soukeyna Abbott ’20 messaged the chat to urge us to write replies to FCD and its director, Alex Ripp, denouncing this insensitive and hurtful lack of recognition of current events and ongoing racism in the dance field. Lawson called our attention to the absence of teachers of color from the festival schedule. On Wednesday, June 3, we received an email from the Mount Holyoke dance department offering “support and solidarity” yet failing to back those sentiments with action. After Olivia Lowe ’21 replied all to denounce the hollow statement, many students sent emails to Chair of Dance Charles Flachs, cc’ing all dance faculty. After Sophie Clingan ’22 met with Ripp on the morning of June 4, they sent a summary of what they learned to the group chat and called for a meeting among the students in the dance department to discuss next steps.

In this two-hour-long meeting attended by many Mount Holyoke dance majors and minors, hard conversations were had. In our department, as well as across the Western world, focus is often laid heavily on the importance of modern and ballet, yet we fail to recognize the contributions of BIPOC to these forms. Meanwhile, dances of the African diaspora and other non-Western dances fall to the wayside. This is not surprising when our department does not have any full-time faculty of color. Discussing concrete examples of racism, as well as unveiling the trauma and hurt our Black friends and peers of color had experienced, brought us to a list of actionable demands for our department. 

These ideas are not perfect. Certainly, they need more funding than we have — and transparency about said funding is a crucial item on our list. How can we advocate for the hiring of faculty and staff of color, or bringing in a variety of dance companies to perform, when we don’t know where the money is coming from or going to? We want a dance history class that doesn’t focus on white narratives. We want more levels of hip-hop, house, West African and other non-Western dance forms. We want full-time professors of color in our department. We want a stronger connection to people outside our department, specifically with the dance organizations on campus that, it is worth noting, have more students of color than we do in our department. The racism in our department must be dismantled at the same speed at which we invite students of diverse racial and dance backgrounds to participate in our community. 

The intersection of racism and dance was acknowledged by the overarching body of FCD only after numerous frustrated emails were sent. As disheartening as that is, it makes it absolutely clear that the student communities at Mount Holyoke need to get in touch with their respective departments as well. Higher education is an institution built on racist ideologies and white supremacy. Each academic department must actively work to dismantle this foundation. While we are sharing what is happening in the dance department, that is not the only place these conversations are or should be occurring. Did your professors reach out to you when the protests began? Are they having conversations about the classes they teach and the resources they promote, as well as what they may be leaving out? Are you joining your academic community to make a push against the implicit racism that all white students on our campus engage in daily? As white people writing this op-ed, we are working to straddle the tension between not expecting BIPOC students to do the emotional labor of educating us about these issues, while also recognizing that we can’t know what changes to advocate for without listening to the lived experiences of our peers. When BIPOC share their experiences, we need to value the time and energy that takes by amplifying their voices and concerns and demanding action and accountability from those in power. 

On June 16, MHC dance faculty and students gathered for a smaller discussion. These exchanges are an encouraging sign of change to come, yet reveal how much work there is to be done. This is not the beginning of the conversation. Many of us are just showing up. What is your way in? 

- Sophie Clingan ’22 and Izzy Kalodner ’21