CELEBRITY WORSHIP: Symbolic Inclusion and the Illusion of Progress

By Johnny Hawke

Settler societies have long perfected the art of elevating select figures—often from

marginalized communities—while leaving intact the systems that dispossess, erase, and extract from Indigenous peoples.

Celebrity worship—whether of Obama, Bad Bunny, or Billie Eilish—functions similarly to what Indigenous scholars identify as performative reconciliation. The dominant culture celebrates symbolic diversity, radical aesthetics, or “woke” branding, while pipelines are approved, treaties violated, 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, not territorial. Indigenous liberation has never been about visibility alone; it has always been about land, jurisdiction, and survival against a system designed to erase us.

This mirrors the critique embedded in The Boondocks. Huey’s cynicism toward Obama is not nihilism—it is recognition. Indigenous communities know this recognition well. We have seen Indigenous leaders invited to Parliament, ceremonies opened with land acknowledgements, and Native art showcased in museums—all while state violence continues uninterrupted. The message is clear: symbolism is cheap; justice is not.

Indigenous theory also rejects hero worship outright. Our political traditions emphasize collectivity over saviors, 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 lifeways outside them.

We remember how quickly “hope” is mobilized to silence dissent. How easily success stories are used to shame those still resisting.

How often pride is commodified while pain is ignored.

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. As Indigenous peoples have long understood, the system does not need to hate you to neutralize you—it only needs to turn you into a symbol.

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.

Celebrity culture functions as a contemporary mechanism of colonial management. Figures such as Bad Bunny and Billie Eilish are marketed as anti-establishment, transgressive, or politically aware, yet their dissent remains aesthetic rather than structural. 

Hero worship plays a central role in this process. Settler societies repeatedly elevate exceptional individuals from marginalized communities while denying collective liberation. Indigenous political traditions, by contrast, emphasize relationality, responsibility, and collective survival over messianic figures. The fixation on 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.

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.