It is a phrase that gets tossed around quite a bit these days, and I often hear it from celebrities in particular when they describe their charity and advocacy work. Now, certainly, celebrities have a long history of charitable involvement, and with their access to resources and press attention, they are certainly uniquely positioned to work actively with humanitarian causes. This post is not to critique celebrity interest in humanitarian work– rather to critically examine some celebrities’ motivations, as well as critique some of the ways in which these causes are publicized by famous people. In their article Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog, life narrative scholars Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd detail the  American obsession with celebrities and their lives that has snowballed in the past couple of decades. They observe a “significant cultural trend in the 1990’s, the weakening boundary between the public and the private and the expansion of celebrity culture to politics and beyond” (page 3).

Celebrities now, more than ever before, have been given and national (and sometimes global) platform on which to speak, and many of them are using this attention to highlight humanitarian causes of their choosing. This is the age of the celebrity charity– and often, the effectiveness of these charities goes unquestioned, ethics relegated to the shadows cast by hollywood fame and glitter. Take Bono’s charity, for instance. More accurately, “charity.” Some of you may remember the 2010 scandal surrounding Bono’s ONE foundation (he is not the majority fund supplier, but acts more as a figurehead for the organization.) In September of that year, it came to light that around 1% of the funds donated to the charity were being given to the people it was supposed to be benefitting. Yes, 1%. With donations upwards of 5 million pounds, only 118,000 ever found their way to those in need. (Source)

Corruption, however, is not the only questionable choice celebrities make in their pursuit of charitable giving. I would like now to return to that phrase so often thrown around by celebrity advocates, and the sentiment behind it: “giving a voice to the voiceless.”  (One example here). Our work in class with Whitlock’s and Shaffer and Smith’s explorations of human rights and life narratives have been particularly helpful in guiding my analysis of this phenomenon (and I am not the first to speak on this, by far.) Who exactly, counts as “voiceless” in our society or around the world? Certainly, there are plenty of stories and human rights abuses that never make it to  center stage– but does that mean the people involved cannot speak? Of course some are deliberately silenced, but isn’t it more a question of selectively unheard than unable to share? Human rights violations are ignored, not incognito: those whose rights are being violated are quite aware of what is happening, and often do try to speak out. Celebrities claiming to be the “voice” of these people and events is an incredibly arrogant move, and one that serves to further dismantle the agency of the individuals involved. When attempting to humanize a person or cause, Whitlock reminds us that it is important to ask: who needs to be humanized in the first place?