Beloveds, celebrity is an institution (of power). Even if optics show an individual artist pulling looks, accepting awards, or inspiring your next think piece, there are 25-30 individuals (institutions) positioning this artist-institution through styling, managing, and booking. I experience micro-celebritism when folks stop me on the street to celebrate and thank me for my work, given opportunities because of my positionality, and receive funds directly to my Venmo to continue to do my work and pay my bills.
I am the sole proprietor of an LLC — this is power unknown to individual tax payers who do not own 100% of a business. Holding institutions accountable is not accessible — boycotting works though often harms the most vulnerable involved. It is not too much to ask non-Black artists who benefit from the cultural production of Black artists to move with responsibility in regards to how their interactions with Black cultural and social aesthetics perpetuate the marginalization of Black artists. As a Black Muslim disabled neurodivergent chronically ill transgender educated financially-able popular artist, I have primarily been influenced by white culture (financial and material success, branding/commercialization, ownership, modern aesthetics, and neoliberalism), Black culture (accountability, quotidian textures, disability justice, design aesthetics, language (AAVE), and love paradigms), queer culture (gender security, query, and information as a mode of transportation), and Muslim culture (ritual, devotion, peace, family, and patriarchy/misogynoir).
If I continue to remain alive for it, I know I will experience some level of heightened celebrity because of the work I do, and the authenticity of magical occurrences in my work and expression — and because God loves me, I have people in my life who consistently check me [with love], and it is these early teachings that will ground me in pro-Black, pro-disability, pro-fat, pro-Palestinian, pro-Asian, pro-Muslim, pro-Queer-and-Trans, pro-poor nuanced cultural responsibility rooted in the knowledge that we are all here because of Black [with a capital B] liberation movement work. I plan to fuck up industries and peer pressure celebrities [as institutions] into accountability, transparency, and social responsibility.
Now, for the creative — I was looking at the book Care Work when I started writing ‘Can’t Love You’ — I had already chosen ‘good night’ as my first phrase and originally wrote “good night, care work” — then quickly realized I would like care work to stay awake so chose a word that adjacently rhymes with ‘work’ — ‘lurk’, and decided it felt right to say good night to whats lurks because I got it from here. The afrosurrealist magic of doors appearing in juxtaposition to what lurks arrived with ease.
This is all I feel like sharing of my creative spirit today because I am absolutely pressed by the violences of the Israeli state and celebrity.
Good day, care ecologist