CELEBRITY WORSHIP: Symbolic Inclusion and the Illusion of Progress
- John Hawke
- Feb 26
- 12 min read
Updated: 1 hour ago
By Johnny Hawke:
Settler societies have long perfected the tactic of elevating select individuals from marginalized communities into highly visible positions. These figures become symbols of inclusion while the underlying power structure remains unchanged — a classic combination of tokenism, co-optation, controlled opposition through selective elevation.
Celebrity Worship functions similarly to what Indigenous scholars identify as performative reconciliation. The dominant culture celebrates symbolic diversity, equality and inclusion, while treaties are violated, pipelines approved, treaties and Indigenous women continue to disappear. In this way, celebrity culture becomes a soft-power arm of colonialism: it absorbs dissent, markets rebellion, and sells the feeling of change without delivering it.
These gestures often remain safely within capitalist spectacle. Their resistance is aesthetic, and becomes a brand and a trend. Indigenous liberation has never been about visibility alone; it has always been about land, jurisdiction, and survival against a system designed to erase us.
Indigenous theory also rejects hero worship outright. Our political traditions emphasize collectivity over saviours, responsibility over spectacle. Elevating any single figure—politician or pop star—risks reproducing the colonial logic that liberation arrives through exceptional individuals rather than collective struggle. Real resurgence does not come from representation within colonial systems, but from rebuilding Indigenous life outside them.
We remember how quickly “hope” is mobilized to silence dissent. How easily success stories are used to shame those still resisting.
In this light, celebrity worship—no matter how progressive it appears—becomes another distraction from uncomfortable truths. A world that can celebrate radical aesthetics while maintaining colonial foundations is not changing; it is adapting.
From this perspective, the warning is clear: Representation without land back, without sovereignty, without dismantling colonial power, is not liberation. It is spectacle and spectacle has always been one of colonialism’s most effective tools.
The fixation on pop-culture icons, celebrities or singular leaders reproduces a colonial fantasy: that liberation arrives through representation rather than the dismantling of colonial power. Celebrity worship thus becomes a form of ideological containment. Pride is commodified; resistance is branded; history is sanitized. As critics of neoliberal multiculturalism have observed, symbolic victories are economically profitable precisely because they leave structural inequalities untouched. The celebration of racial or cultural “firsts” becomes a substitute for confronting land restitution, sovereignty, and systemic violence.
This doesn’t mean our people never honoured excellence. We absolutely did. But it was not this colonial tool of religious indoctrination of worship used to program and control the masses.
IDOLS NO MORE - HYPOCRISY WITHIN DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION
While individuals have every right to pursue their own professional paths, we must ensure that the principles underpinning our resistance to colonialism do not become symbolic gestures — Principles set aside when celebrating the diversity, equity and inclusion within colonial institutions.
For many Indigenous societies across Turtle Island, leadership was often situational, earned, and accountable — not permanent fame status. When Christianity and European political systems arrived, they brought different cultural frameworks:
Monarch worship
Hero-centered religious narrative (singular savior theology)
Individualistic liberal political identity (the “great man” theory of history)
Later, capitalist media culture — mass printing, photography, newspapers, film
The following critique is not directed at the individual or their accomplishments but is an analysis of the phenomenon of celebrity worship in our communities; idolizing those in the very colonial institutions we claim we are against and or dismantling.
IN POLITICS
In the past decade, we have seen historic “firsts”: Indigenous women at the helm of Canada’s justice system and at Rideau Hall; the first female National Chief and female Grand Chiefs; and the first Status Indian elected Premier of a province.
Despite such Individuals sitting at the helm of power, charter protected Indigenous rights were violated on numerous occasions in the legal system as seen in SCC's decisions in Chippewas of the Thames First Nation v. Enbridge Pipelines Inc in 2017.
The old adage of “We must make change within the system” has now only become a lie and fable. The interconnected political, legal and economic “system” has been created over millennia where royal bloodlines, fraternal orders, oaths, rites, rituals and blackmail ensure that the “system” can not be changed from within. Our People within "the system" only become part of this system of war, profit, patriarchy, misogyny and enslavement and only function as lower level servants and or puppets for those "behind the curtain."
Wabanakwut "Wab" Kinew assumed office as NDP Premier of Manitoba on October 18, 2023.
Before entering politics, Kinew was an author, hiphop artist, broadcaster and university administrator, best known as a host of programming on CBC Radio and CBC Television.
For many in the larger Indigenous Community, Wab Kinew has definitely become a "Hero" and Celebrity.
Premier Wab Kinew lives a sober life and is strongly immersed in his Anishinabe Spirituality and Culture despite this Wab is doing what premiers do: protecting jobs. His support for keeping Crown Royal on shelves in Ontario safeguards employment for dozens of workers in Gimli and strengthens Manitoba’s economic position.
For many Indigenous people, alcohol is intertwined with intergenerational struggle and where Indigenous spirituality and decolonization movements emphasize sobriety, healing, and resistance to alcohol including the financial profits of it. These factors raise some inconsistencies within our decolonization principles. Why do we apply different moral standards depending on who holds power? If we celebrate leaders navigating contradiction, then we must also extend compassion to those fighting both colonial systems and personal battles at the same time.
A grassroots land defender who slips is told to step down. A community organizer battling alcohol is told they represent the movement poorly while the collective will give a pass to power where there is always a double standard for those put on a pedestal.
Decolonization movements fail when they reproduce the same stratifications they claim to dismantle. If we are serious about decolonization, then we must interrogate not just the state — but ourselves. Otherwise, our movement is not revolutionary just a hierarchy.
IN ENTERTAINMENT
Entertainment have long be used by the ruling class to distract and influence the masses and for propaganda efforts. Today’s Sports, Music, Film, Media are all part of the Entertainment Industry which are all used to control the population. Entertainment has been a very powerful effective tool to neutralize liberation and decolonization movements around the world.
In the 1970’s Hip-hop was born in the Bronx as resistance — a cultural response to poverty, state violence, and abandonment. But when N.W.A rose to prominence, gangsta rap became the industry’s preferred export. Driven by Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren, and DJ Yella, their music exposed police brutality and life in South Central Los Angeles — but it also mainstreamed hyper violence, misogyny, selling drugs and drug use as cultural identity.
The industry learned: trauma sells better than liberation.
Tupac Shakur spoke truth about systemic injustice, yet some of his lyrics still framed women as disposable, sex objects and encouraged the silencing of victims of rape in one of his top of the chart songs. "I get Around." The feud with The Notorious B.I.G. became spectacle, fuelling real-world black on black violence while corporations profited.
Snoop Dogg — another global icon widely idolized — built much of his early career on a “pimp” persona and lyrics saturated with derogatory language that reduced women to objects or targets of violence. While he has spoken about personal growth and evolving views toward women, those early messages remain embedded in popular culture.
For Indigenous peoples, the issue extends beyond misogyny. Snoop Dogg has publicly worn Plains-style headdresses — sacred ceremonial items — as costume, and jokingly claimed affiliation with a fictional “knock-a-hoe tribe.” Such actions reduce Indigenous identity to stereotype and spectacle, turning sacred culture into entertainment while real Indigenous communities face violence, poverty, and erasure.
Powerful industry architects — including Russell Simmons, Sean 'Diddy' Combs, and R. Kelly — have faced serious allegations and, in some cases, convictions related to sexual abuse. The pattern crosses genres, decades, and generations.
This is not about individual villains. It is about systems that reward harm. From the 1990s to today, mainstream hip-hop has too often normalized: Misogyny, Exploitation, Substance, Violence, Homophobia.
For Indigenous communities facing addiction crises and the ongoing epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people, these messages are not abstract. Culture shapes behaviour. What we celebrate becomes what we tolerate.
Decolonization cannot coexist with idol worship of men who embody patriarchy. Resistance cannot thrive while misogyny is our soundtrack.
IN HOLLYWOOD
The film industry has long operated as a machinery of myth — manufacturing heroes on screen while protecting predators behind it. For decades, powerful men controlled access to careers, funding, publicity, and survival itself. Silence was not consent — it was the price of working.
The global rupture came with the exposure of Harvey Weinstein, whose decades of alleged sexual abuse were an open secret in Hollywood. When survivors finally spoke publicly in 2017, the #MeToo movement exploded, revealing that Weinstein was not an anomaly but a symptom. Actors, assistants, models, and crew described a system where coercion, assault, and retaliation were normalized tools of power.
Weinstein’s downfall triggered a cascade. Prominent figures across film, television, and music faced allegations ranging from sexual harassment and assault. Some careers collapsed. Others quietly recovered. The system endured.
Parallel to this reckoning was the unraveling of the network surrounding financier Jeffrey Epstein — a man whose wealth purchased proximity to presidents, royalty, billionaires, scientists, and celebrities. Epstein was convicted of sex crimes involving minors in 2008, yet continued to move freely among the global elite for years afterward.
The entertainment industry intersects with this world because it shares the same currency: access. Careers can be made or destroyed by gatekeepers. Young performers — especially girls — are often isolated from support systems, dependent on powerful adults for opportunity, and pressured to remain silent to avoid blacklisting.
While Hollywood publicly embraces empowerment narratives, its economic structure still concentrates decision-making power in the hands of a small elite — overwhelmingly male, wealthy, and protected by legal teams, non-disclosure agreements, and reputation management industries.
#MeToo exposed the violence. The Epstein case exposed the scale. Neither dismantled the system that enabled them.
For Indigenous communities, these revelations resonate painfully. Colonial violence has always been tied to control over Indigenous women’s bodies — from residential schools to forced sterilization to the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people. When global elites are exposed for exploiting vulnerable girls, it echoes patterns our communities know too well: power preying on those deemed disposable.
This is not about a few “bad men.” It is about structures that reward silence and punish truth.
Hollywood sells liberation stories while protecting hierarchies built on exploitation.
Fame becomes armor. Money becomes erasure. Public image becomes a shield against accountability. The lesson is not to abandon art — it is to stop confusing celebrity with moral authority.
Survivors spoke. Records surfaced. Names were known. Yet the machinery of power continues to function. True accountability would require more than public apologies and career pauses. It would require dismantling the systems that allow men with influence to operate above consequence. Until then, the myth persists: heroes on screen, impunity behind it.
IN MODELLING AND FASHION INDUSTRY
Women’s bodies have been policed, erased, exploited, trafficked, enslaved, and abused for centuries. As part of a broader decolonization movement, women have been reclaiming their sexuality and bodily autonomy on their own terms. In the past decade, Indigenous women have not simply entered mainstream beauty and fashion spaces — they have pushed their way in, busted down the doors, and demanded to stand front and centre.
Yet these industries are built upon the very misogyny and patriarchy they claim to escape.
If Indigenous women refuse mainstream platforms altogether, they risk remaining invisible within global narratives shaped by others. But liberation cannot be fully realized through institutions rooted in exploitation, misogyny and patriarchy. The contradiction is structural, not personal.
An Indigenous woman becomes a symbol of empowerment. The magazine gains cultural relevance. The brand profits. The system remains intact.
Mainstream beauty pageantry, modelling, swimsuit magazines and fashion are aesthetic arms of white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy. These industries were built to manufacture desirability around whiteness and to discipline everyone else into orbit around it.
Proximity to whiteness is the currency. Light skin is leverage. Thinness is compliance. Ambiguity is marketable. Authenticity is a threat.
Indigenous and Black women whose features cannot be softened, thinned, straightened, or lightened are not simply overlooked — they are structurally excluded. Real bodies disrupt the hierarchy, so the hierarchy erases them. And when erasure fails, fetishization begins.
Indigenous women are cast through colonial fantasies: the “Pocahontas,” the squaw, the mystical guide, the sexually available native body existing outside modern time. Black women are cycled through parallel archetypes — hypersexual, maternal, aggressive, consumable.
From that lens, the Met Gala isn’t just a party — it’s a ritual of power. It’s the cultural wing of global capital. It’s sponsored by luxury conglomerates, attended by CEOs, financiers, politicians. So the critique says:
You don’t disrupt the palace by attending the ball.You validate the palace by showing up. Movements get absorbed all the time. Radical language becomes branding. “Decolonize” becomes a fashion theme. Indigenous beadwork becomes haute couture. Resistance aesthetics get stripped of their political teeth and re-sold as style.
From that vantage point, something like Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue isn’t just a magazine spread — it’s an institution built on commodifying bodies for profit. It exists inside a media economy that monetizes patriarchy. Even when branding shifts toward “empowerment,” this medium emerged from a system that objectifies women. Representation doesn’t erase that origin story.
If we are against patriarchy, commodification of bodies, and Eurocentric standards — then participating in the dominant eurocentric male corporate sexualized media platforms risks legitimizing the very systems we claim to resist.
ACTIVISM FOR SALE AND THE CELEBRITY ACTIVIST PROBLEM:
The Non-Profit Industrial Complex is a system where activism becomes professionalized, funded, branded, and sometimes detached from grassroots realities. The modern colonial state no longer needs only police and prisons; It has foundations, NGOs, advisory councils, diversity panels, and funded advocacy.
Welcome to the Non-Profit Industrial Complex — the sanitized, well-funded, media-friendly arm of colonial control. A system that packages our suffering, markets it, and sells it back to us in glossy reports while the rivers stay poisoned, women and children go missing, and our lands are still stolen and the system creates individuals that become a Celebrity Figure for Activism and idolized.
In this industry, activism is no longer a responsibility. It’s a product. Youth are branded, coached, groomed, and paraded on global stages. Anything too disruptive, too radical is filtered out.
Look at our “stars” — elevated, idolized, celebrated. Their faces are on banners. Their names are hashtags. They speak at the World Economic Forum, United Nations, They are feted by ministers and sponsored by foundations. The system brands them; Media narratives transform the activist into symbols. Communities worship them. Critique becomes taboo and leadership becomes personality-driven and Grassroots voices are sidelined.
This Non Profit Industry also operates as an Internalized Oppression where there exists an in-crowd of gatekeepers, darlings of the foundations and NGO’s. Inside activist spaces, the hierarchy persists. Communities internalize this: If the world applauds them, they must be right. And so we worship these Idols. Applause replaces accountability. Fame replaces collective struggle. This is not liberation and in well played game of chess this is internalized colonialism.
The Entertainment Industry and this Non-Profit industrial Complex world share a blueprint:
Exploit youth for visibility
Brand individuals as heroes
Generate revenue from attention
Reward compliance, silence dissent
Protect elite perpetrators while the public consumes the spectacle
The same system that produces millionaire rappers glorifying criminality also produces foundation-funded youth activists, media-friendly speakers, and celebrity type activists.
The product is the same: spectacle, not justice. Power, not liberation. Fame, not accountability.
The Youth of my Community were organizing a Youth Gathering and action to protect the Water. We reached out to Autumn Peltier, a prominant Anishinabe Water Advocate/Activist and her manager informed us she costs $10,000 to come "In Person" and not including accommodations.
Charging high speaking fees to our youth and people by individuals who hold prominent public advocacy is unacceptable. While we respect their accomplishments and influence, many of our communities face chronic poverty and making such fees financially inaccessible to the very communities these advocates represent is atrocious. When grassroots Nations must divert scarce resources from essential needs to host speakers, it raises questions about equity, accessibility, and the ethical responsibilities of leadership. While fair compensation from universities, corporations, and governments is reasonable, we believe impoverished Nations should not bear this burden. These celebrities need to provide a sliding-scale fee structure to ensure grassroots and low-income First Nations can participate in vital conversations without financial hardship.
IN SPIRITUALITY, POWWOW AND MEDICINE SOCIETIES
In Powwow, Drum Groups, Dancers and Emcee's are commodified where ego, elitism and competition exists within Powwow Culture and where celebrity figures are definitely created. Idol Worship doesn't stop there, this phenomenon is seen in our Spirituality, Healing Movement, Ceremonies and Medicine Societies. Our Teachings, Ceremony, Knowledge keepers also have become a commodity within our communities where those who carry such things are sought after, put on a pedestal and become a type of celebrity figure in our communities.
CONCLUSION
In the end, the danger of celebrity worship lies not in admiration itself, but in its political function. It trains audiences to mistake visibility for power, symbolism for change, and inclusion for justice. Indigenous refusal names this illusion directly: a system that remains structurally intact does not become emancipatory simply because it has learned to market hope.
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