Just when you were wondering, "How can anything possibly matter less?" The Seattle Times is on the case with the news that local rapper Macklemore has "endorsed" Nikkita Oliver for the upcoming mayor's race, via a Facebook post:
“We need more people like Nikkita Oliver to run for office. She is a brilliant, creative, compassionate, principled and fierce leader who lives and breathes the values of justice and equity. I’ve known Nikkita for three years, and I’ve been impressed with how she consistently inspires those around her to be engaged in making the world a better place. Personally, she challenges me to be a better, more complete artist and person.”
Among those who base their voting decisions on the recommendations of musical performers, this will definitely tip the coveted 13-year-old-white-kid-from-Shelton-who-has-never-met-a-Black-person-IRL demographic in Oliver's favor. Meanwhile, in the world where things still have meaning, it's still anybody's race.
And speaking of race...
Nikkita Oliver was a collaborator on Macklemore's single "White Privilege II," which was one of the strangest pieces of music ever released by a mainstream performer: part hairshirt, part hagiography. It's simultaneously ambitious and indulgent, experimental and pandering, morally curious and self-obsessed. And now that I just had to listen to it again because of this inane story, I can say that it sounds no more cogent than it did in January of 2016 when it came out. That's also when Nikkita Oliver wrote these words in a guest editorial for this blog:
This song is a product of the System; which means it is neither a solution nor comprehensive. It is undeniably emblematic of the problem it purports to articulate.
That said, I can tell most white people about white supremacy till I am blue in the face and they won't hear me. Conversation is not enough. Yet every white person I know who is now a part of undoing white supremacy was first moved to do so by dialogue and study...
I do not defend this project. It is not supposed to go down easy because it cannot. It is a harsh and incomplete attempt at dialogue with a mostly white fan base from a high-level white and privileged platform. So critique it and talk about it while holding in tandem the humanity and honest attempt at participating in an accountable process and dialogue with multiple communities, the collaborators, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, and now, more importantly, you.
The above editorial probably strengthens the apparent sincerity of Macklemore's endorsement of Oliver. The fact that she explicitly anti-endorsed him and his work didn't stop him from getting behind her, which is more than you can say for most people in show business. And because the whole premise of the song was self-aggrandizement via self-excoriation, you might speculate that this kind of "I don't like or accept it, but some ignorant trailer trash might" critique is all he had hoped for.
But it also demonstrates that a performer in his position—clearly obsessed with what other people think of him, and legitimately on the hook for being a white dude who has disproportionately succeeded by using the aesthetic tools of black culture, and, further, by all accounts, being a reasonably "good guy"—had no choice but to endorse Oliver. None of which is to invalidate the sincerity of his belief in her, or in any way to disparage her worthiness as a candidate.
It's only to say that the dumb and damaging tradition of reporting celebrity endorsements is a distraction at best, and we need fewer of those. We in the media, and the larger we, would benefit from what Oliver's own editorial called "an accountable process and dialogue with multiple communities" to help determine whom to vote for.
(Apologies to Mr. Cohen.)
