Celebrities Learn the Hard Way that Performative Allyship Isn’t Enough

From Town & Country

Over the past month, since the killing of George Floyd led to widespread demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism, celebrities and brands of every stripe eagerly aligned themselves with Black Lives Matters and other anti-racism movements on their social media platforms.

Something happened along the way, though: critics noticed the chasm between what these suddenly engaged, self-proclaimed allies preached, and what they practiced. And they had a word for it: hypocrisy. When the actress Lea Michele posted a tweet of support for #BlackLivesMatter, a former castmate, Samantha Ware, immediately called her out publicly: “Remember when you made my first television gig a living hell?”

When Karlie Kloss urged her followers to “end racism,” the writer and actor Tavi Gevinson excoriated the model with a widely-liked comment that began, “Karlie, give it a rest.”

After earlier moments of national reckoning, celebrities and influencers might have gotten a pass for making a well-intentioned statement, or posting a sincere Instagram post. But the calls for accountability are now coming from inside the house, and the watchdogs aren’t just comment trolls but have megaphones just as far-reaching as their targets. More often than not, the famous are getting served long overdue reality checks by a jury of their peers.

“Samantha’s tweet was a Pandora’s box,” says journalist Shar Jossell. In going public with her testimonial, Ware had declared open season on the hottest trend of the summer: performative allyship, the impulse to telegraph wokeness in order to appear to be on the right side of history. “A former colleague who displayed anti-Blackness and racism is now posting things in the name of activism and I’m like, ‘Well, where the hell did this energy come from?’”

Suddenly, celebrity culture is grappling with the same question convulsing the rest of the country, from small towns to newsrooms to Congress: Are you a true ally or a Lea Michele?

The Patron Saint of Performative Allyship

A young actress of stage and screen, most notably the Ryan Murphy high school musical series Glee, Michele was following the normal rulebook for famous do-gooders when she Tweeted on May 29: acknowledge the news, share some sympathetic conventional wisdom, and watch the goodwill roll in. Call it the Valerie Cherish model.

Except empty gestures like that are no longer enough. Ware, who appeared on Glee as a recurring character in the show’s sixth and final season in 2015, took umbrage on her own account and called out Michele for “traumatic microaggressions” that made her question a career in Hollywood.

Less than two hours after Ware’s tweet began circulating wide, former Glee original cast member Amber Riley posted a GIF of herself raising her hand emphatically followed by a GIF of her sipping tea while darting her eyes back and forth. Another former Gleek, Alex Newell, who joined the cast in the show’s third season, quote tweeted Ware with a popular GIF of Coco Montrese from RuPaul’s Drag Race saying “Get her, Jade.” Then, Dabier Snell, a guest star on a Season 5 episode of the series, was even more direct.

Others began weighing in about their own turbulent encounters with Michele as far back as her Broadway debut in Ragtime as a teenager. Elizabeth Aldrich, Michele’s former understudy in that production, offered her own anecdote. “She was absolutely awful to me and the ensemble,” Aldrich said. “She demeaned the crew and threatened to have people fired if she was in any way displeased. I used to cry every night from the mean and manipulative things she would do.

Michele’s Notes app apology citing the way her behavior was “perceived” by former colleagues only served to flame the backlash.

"I’m not going to say that Lea Michele is racist," Riley later said during an Instagram Live. "But at the same time, in my inbox there are a lot of black actors and actresses telling me their stories and were letting me know they have dealt with the same things being on set, being terrorized by the white girls who are the leads of their show.”

Fashion's Turn in the Hot Seat

The fashion world is also experiencing its own comeuppance for virtue signaling on social media.

A few days after Floyd was killed, and demonstrations on his behalf erupted around the country, Kloss, one of the world’s highest-paid models and the host of Project Runway, took to Instagram to share her thoughts with her more than 8 million followers. She chose to do so with a Cleo Wade poem: “How do we speak to bias and bigotry? Start by having the first conversation at your own kitchen table?” Gevinson chimed in with a scathing eye-roll.

Referring to Kloss’s marriage to Josh Kusner—brother to Jared Kushner, the senior advisor to President Donald Trump—Gevinson excoriated the model: “I can’t believe you’re not more embarrassed not just by them but YOUR decision to only publicly disown their politics in polite ways.”

Kloss never replied to Gevinson’s mic drop, though she did rather unironically regram a post by a London “integrative psychotherapist” titled “Performative Allyship.”

Gevinson’s knives stayed out—and sharpened—when she turned her gaze toward Kloss’s friend and YouTube head of fashion and beauty partnerships, Derek Blasberg. After Blasberg posted a video attending a protest shouting “matter” (Black Lives, one is left to assume) and a Martin Luther King Jr. quote for the caption, Gevinson dryly noted: “Talk to your neo fascist friends ❤️.” (Blasberg, calling Gevinson a troll, defended himself by saying he’d “like to think” he has no such friends.)

Later, influencer Chiara Ferragni was called out for her own brand of armchair activism and former Vogue Paris editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld and “digital marketing expert” Jenna Kutcher were issuing apologies for their heavy-handed attempts to join the conversation. A number of Indian actresses, including Priyanka Chopra and Sonam Kapoor were criticized for speaking about Black Lives Matter when they have in the past hocked skin-lightening creams. Lance Bass was put on blast by comedian Guy Branum for his #BLM posts while allowing police to use the roof of the bar he co-owns, Rocco’s WeHo, as a look-out during peaceful protests.

Social media is an essential tool of the modern celebrity industrial complex, but it’s a double-edge sword. Today’s lonely black square for #BlackOutTuesday is a reminder of yesterday's apathy, or worse.

"The thing with social media is that you leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind you over the years,” says the fashion pundit Louis Pisano. “Nothing really ever goes away. The celebrity mystique vanished with the dawn of Twitter and with that the belief they were untouchable. While some have maintained their veneer of perfection it was only a matter of time before who they were underneath was unearthed."

What's Next?

Some A-list white actors and influencers are starting to pay attention and do better, like giving up their platforms in the service of amplifying black voices. On Tuesday, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts, Kourtney Kardashian and Diane von Furstenberg joined the #sharethemicnow campaign to hand over their Instagram accounts to prominent black creatives, like Bozoma Saint John, the chief marketing officer of the talent agency William Morris Endeavor, and Lindsay Peoples Wagner, the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue. Similar efforts—like the #UnMuteny campaign spearheaded by Riley, and #Everyday by the journalist Jarrett Hill—use social media to create a space for black artists to tell their stories.

For those other celebrities considering their next steps, the public relations guru Chris Chambers, who counts Drake, Ciara and Naomi Campbell as clients, has one question: Have you done your homework? If you haven’t, then perhaps it’s best to stand back, listen, learn, and speak with your wallet. Above all, he suggests, wrestle with the complex gift that is having a public platform and millions of followers looking for role models and moral guidance.

“People don’t want to hear talk anymore,” says Chambers. “They want to see those people that are doing the work.

“This,” he adds, “is not a trend.”

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