Some of My Best Friends by Tajja Isen

Author:Tajja Isen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
Published: 2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

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WITH GREATER VISIBILITY comes increased scrutiny. If you want to prove your pure intentions, the bar is higher than it used to be. “My entire moral code, as a kid and now, is a need to be thought of as good.” That’s Taylor Swift tipping her hand in Miss Americana, the Netflix documentary about her life and career. The line isn’t specifically about Swift’s politics; it’s more a general principle of her self-esteem. Reflecting on the fallout when Kanye West grabbed the mic from her at the 2009 Video Music Awards, Swift admits that when she thought she heard the crowd booing at her, it was especially traumatic as “someone who’s built their whole belief system on getting people to clap for [her].” But elsewhere in the doc, when she breaks her years-long political silence to speak out against a Republican Tennessee senator, her reasoning sounds more or less the same. “I need to be on the right side of history,” she says, on the decision to finally get political. The choice is so agonized partly because we put pressure on celebrities to speak on political causes, and partly because their earning potential depends on their strategic advocacy or silence. Swift has probably been hearing “don’t be the Dixie Chicks” her whole career. But, as far as moral codes go, she plays it pretty safe. Wanting to be thought of as good, after all, is not the same as wanting to be good, full stop.

That doesn’t mean people can’t tell the difference. Look what happened to Ellen DeGeneres, queen of relatability, whose empire operated under the motto “Be Kind.” Despite this dedicated branding, BuzzFeed reported that many employees working on The Ellen Show had a different experience. Current and former staffers described incidents of workplace racism, harassment, and toxicity. None of the critiques were of DeGeneres herself (though there were other allegations about her temperament circulating on social media around the same time), but they were about the environment she’d let fester while selling merch that said “Be Kind to One Another.” A year later, when DeGeneres announced that her beloved show would end after its nineteenth season, she addressed the criticisms. She called them “misogynistic” and compared them to the backlash she faced when she first came out as a lesbian in the 1990s.

This was a deeply cynical response, and people saw it for what it was. DeGeneres’s reply framed the critiques of her workplace as a personal attack—one that invoked, at least tangentially, the way she’d been discriminated against in the past. While the allegations were about abuses of power, her response emphasized her powerlessness. All things considered, this was a fairly decent attempt to try to save a sinking ship. If you peek into the white-fragility tool kit, history suggests this sort of thing usually works. Except—and here’s where she went wrong—these moves don’t work the same way anymore. They’ve gotten too recognizable. The public has learned to call bullshit. Now, when white women try

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