Lifestyle
When celebrities show up to protest, the media follows — but so does the backlash
Alyssa Milano says that celebrity activism is at its best “when we are able to hand over the microphone” to the “incredible heroes” doing activism work day to day. She’s pictured above in July 2018 at a protest following President Trump’s meetings with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. A longtime activist, Milano says it’s impossible to avoid “the vitriol,” especially when talking about the Middle East.
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Alyssa Milano first became an activist more than 30 years ago. But she tells the story of her eureka moment like it was yesterday.
In the late 1980s, when she starred in the sitcom Who’s the Boss?, one of her fans was a teenager named Ryan White who was HIV positive. The two became friends.
“He asked me if I would go on TV and give him a kiss to show that you couldn’t get AIDS from casual contact,” Milano recalls. She agreed and kissed White on Phil Donahue’s national talk show.
“It was the first time I felt that my being an actor, being on TV, had a purpose that was bigger than I was,” she says.
Since then she’s championed a number of causes including reproductive rights, gun reform and the #MeToo movement. Over time, she learned the good and bad of having both a high profile and a sense of purpose.
After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Milano, a UNICEF National Ambassador, used her social media platform to share the NGO’s messages.
She says the backlash was swift. “I felt like every time I posted from this place of peace, I was either a terrorist sympathizer or I did not fight strong enough for the oppression of the Palestinian people,” Milano explains. She says, while social media is a powerful tool for activism, “There’s no way to not be exposed to the vitriol” you get in return.
Celebrities are amplifiers
Oscar winning actor and Thelma & Louise star Susan Sarandon describes her lifelong activism as something that’s ingrained in her being.
“It’s a personality flaw,” she laughs, “I mean, when I was little, I thought that my dolls all came alive at midnight and I rotated their dresses so one doll didn’t have all the nice dresses all the time. Anything that’s unfair always really hurt me.”
Sarandon has been voicing her support for Palestinians for many years, so she says she was “shocked” when she was dropped by United Talent Agency (UTA) for a speech she gave at a rally calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
She says her words were taken out of context. Nonetheless she issued a statement on social media apologizing if she offended anyone. UTA declined NPR’s request for comment.
Sarandon says, while the “isolation from my tribe” has been “painful,” she will continue lending her voice to calls for a ceasefire.
“I’m in a business that’s about imagining,” says actor Susan Sarandon. “And if you imagine and then you empathize, how can you not identify with mothers whose children are being blown up and dismembered?” Sarandon, who said she’s also a mother and grandmother, joined CODEPINK on Capitol Hill on Feb. 15, 2024 to protest U.S. support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
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CODEPINK
Sarandon recently attended a protest calling for a ceasefire on Capitol Hill organized by CODEPINK. The feminist group alerted the press she was coming. NBC, Al Jazeera and other outlets showed up. CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin says Sarandon’s presence was a game changer.
“We’ve been walking these halls for three months and nobody pays attention to us, especially the Congress people. But having her with us brings out the media and we get the Congress people themselves,” she gushes.
Not all of the Congress people. Sarandon met with Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush. But Ritchie Torres refused to see her. Sarandon told reporters she suspected that’s because he receives money from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. On social media, Torres said Sarandon trafficked in “anti-Semitic victim blaming.”
Despite the harsh repercussions that can result, some artists are still using their star power to call for a ceasefire. Fans of Euphoria actor Hunter Schafer learned that she and dozens of anti-war protestors were arrested earlier this week in the lobby of NBC’s headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, timed to President Biden’s interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
Schafer’s arrest was covered by numerous media outlets including Associated Press, USA Today and The Los Angeles Times, amplifying the ceasefire message.
But backlash can be swift
Will and Grace star Debra Messing is one of a number of celebrities who’ve been outspoken in their support of Israel. Others include actors Michael Rapaport and Amy Schumer.
At the March for Israel rally in Washington, D.C., last November, Messing told the crowd of some 300,000 people, “We will pray for the success of the IDF in a war Israel did not start and did not want but a war Israel will win.”
Debra Messing spoke at the March for Israel in Washington, D.C. on November 14th, 2023.
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Messing also traveled to Israel and met with family members of hostages held by Hamas and posted videos of those visits on social media. She visited a tunnel built by Hamas.
Her trip was coordinated by Creative Community for Peace (CCFP) an organization working to “promote the arts as a bridge to peace” and “educate about rising antisemitism within the entertainment industry.” The trips to Israel are intended to help artists “bear witness to what happened in the kibbutzim to meet people and survivors of the attack,” says CCFP’s executive director Ari Engel.
While many people on social media thanked Messing for sharing stories about the hostages and their families, she was also called out for only talking about one side of the conflict and not addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza or the tens of thousands of Palestinians who’ve been killed by Israeli forces.
On a recent trip to Israel, Will and Grace star Debra Messing toured sites of Hamas’ attack and met with survivors and family members of hostages.
Courtesy of Creative Community for Peace
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Courtesy of Creative Community for Peace
On a recent trip to Israel, Will and Grace star Debra Messing toured sites of Hamas’ attack and met with survivors and family members of hostages.
Courtesy of Creative Community for Peace
“Something about standing with a colonial force that is expelling people from their homes and killing thousands of civilians doesn’t exactly say ‘activist,’” reads one comment on Messing’s Instagram.
Engel says more than 2,000 artists and industry leaders signed CCFP’s open letter in support of Israel, including Gal Gadot, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jerry Seinfeld, Mayim Bialik, Chris Pine and Michael Douglas.
The letter calls for the “entertainment community to speak out forcefully against Hamas, to support Israel, to refrain from sharing misinformation about the war, and do whatever is in their power to urge the terrorist organization to return the innocent hostages to their families.”
Engel says celebrities who’ve spoken up in support of Israel have faced “condemnation.” He points to a protest outside a Syracuse theater where Seinfeld performed. Equally troubling, he says, was the “silence” from individuals and organizations after the Hamas attacks. He points to the Writers Guild of America waiting more than two weeks to comment on the atrocity.
“I think a lot of Jews in the entertainment community felt abandoned, not just by their silence, but by their condemnation,” says Engel.
‘Taking a stand’ vs. ‘Nag, Nag, Nag’
At the storied March on Washington in 1963, the late activist and entertainer Harry Belafonte told the crowd that he believed artists “revealed” society to itself. Sometimes that means revealing things that are hard to hear.
Jane Fonda has done that often throughout her life. In 1973, speaking to KQED about the Vietnam War she asked, “What business have we to try and exterminate a people?” Fonda was insistent, “My father fought against people in the second World War who were trying to exterminate a people. I don’t think today we should repudiate everything that our fathers fought against.”
“What business have we to exterminate a people,” Jane Fonda told KQED in 1973 in an interview about the Vietnam War.
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Fonda was widely criticized for things she said about U.S. troops in Vietnam. But her antiwar stance resonated with millions of people.
“We often see celebrities getting a lot of backlash for their activism when they speak out about foreign policy,” says Sarah King, an assistant professor of History at the University of South Carolina-Aiken who has studied celebrity activism during the Vietnam War.
The backlash appears to be especially degrading toward women, says King. She notes that Fonda’s activism was described more harshly than her fellow actor Donald Sutherland’s.
“He is discussed as taking a stand, whereas Jane Fonda is described in much more negative terms,” King notes. “Nag, Nag, Nag” read the headline of a 1971 Life magazine article.
Should artists speak out?
“We live in a time … where celebrity voices matter more than most,” says Rania Batrice who spearheaded the Artists4Ceasfire letter addressed to President Biden and signed by more than 300 people including Jon Stewart, Jordan Peele, Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa, Jennifer Lopez and Bradley Cooper.
Calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the letter cites the tens of thousands of dead and injured, “numbers that any person of conscience knows are catastrophic,” it says. “We believe all life is sacred, no matter faith or ethnicity and we condemn the killing of Palestinian and Israeli civilians.”
Batrice says many of the artists were discouraged from signing the letter by their agents or publicists, and those who did faced pushback from friends and others in the entertainment industry.
Still, Batrice believes if they have a platform, they should use it to help those who need it.
“I sort of have this expectation that people will step up and utilize their privilege,” Batrice says, “I also am incredibly grateful for those artists who stepped up despite having all of these voices in their ears telling them not to do it.”
In this screengrab from video, Actress Melissa Barrera (green sunglasses) attends a pro-Palestine march hosted by Let Gaza Live on January 21, 2024 in Park City, Utah. The protest took place during the Sundance Film Festival.
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Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
Actor Melissa Barrera has vowed to continue her activism. She was fired from the cast of the next Scream movie when she posted pro-Palestinian messages on social media. But instead of retreating, she doubled-down. She issued a statement that said she condemned “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia” and that she would, quote, “continue to speak out for those that need it most.” She joined a protest calling for a ceasefire at the Sundance Film Festival and expressed no regrets.
“Honestly I feel like I finally am becoming who I’m supposed to be in life and the last few months have been awakening of that,” she told the Associated Press.
Artists, a publicist told me, are “supposed to show emotion … That’s the whole point of art.” He preferred not to be identified.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
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Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
I took a kid’s camera to Paris Fashion Week, because was it ever really that serious? Yes and no. This men’s season happened during one of the hottest weeks in France’s recorded history, which inspired that specific brand of collective hysteria brought on by living through yet another unprecedented moment together — taking over our brains and ruining our plans to wear boots — and a grander reflection on what we were doing there and why. The throngs of teenagers doing back flips into the Canal Saint-Martin and playing soccer in the street set the mood for the week. If the world is ending, you might as well swim in dirty water and have fun doing it, no?
As far as the shows went, there was the coastal stoner energy of Tokyo-based Auralee — brightly colored leathers and furry flip-flops — that reminded me of the low-key elegance of hanging out in Southern California. At the Rick Owens show, Rick-heads made minimal weather-restrictive tweaks to their usual uniforms — platforms, leather, ground-grazing garments — making you appreciate the beauty in that level of ascetic dedication. Louis Vuitton built a literal beach as its runway, complete with sand and a giant wave that felt like a mirage: Is this a heat-induced hallucination or yet another buzzed-about set design under men’s creative director Pharrell Williams? At the Dries Van Noten show, there was an ice-cold beer fridge and popsicles, a chic and inspired detail only rivaled by a collection that was a breath of fresh air during a week where I Googled the symptoms of heat stroke more than once. The Willy Chavarria show was air-conditioned, pumped with Xinú perfume and felt expensive. Sven Marquardt, a Berlin photographer and Berghain’s most famous bouncer, was sitting in front of me, which I took as an incredibly good omen. The painted blue feet and Oakley collab sunglasses at the Kiko Kostadinov show felt auspicious as well.
A look from the Auralee show.
There were conversations floating around about how apocalyptic it felt sitting at a fashion show in over 100-degree Fahrenheit weather, our backs soaked, our minds dizzied, when the industry is responsible for something like 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The cognitive dissonance contributed to the thickness in the air that week.
At the Comme des Garçons show, called “If the War Were to End..,” models danced and ran and skipped out onto the runway for the finale, soundtracked by the joyous sound of children singing “You’re So Good to Me” by the Langley Schools Music Project. In that moment, we were happy, we were clapping, we might have even been hopeful. Humans have the capacity to hold a lot — a fan in one hand while attempting not to completely melt in the front row, and a fantasy that there might still be a future where we get to wear those leopard-print Dries shoes we fell in love with on the runway.
The moments before the Comme des Garçons show.
Comme des Garçons show attendees.
Comme des Garçons, head-to-toe.
The Comme des Garçons show.
The Dries Van Noten show.
A chic and inspired detail at the Dries Van Noten show: ice-cold beer.
Scenes from the ERL presentation.
The Kiko Kostadinov show.
Tapping in from Louis Vuitton beach.
Quavo at the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from after the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from the Nahmias x Puma dinner at Gigi Paris.
Scenes from the On X Online Ceramics rave.
At Silencio to see Venezuelan DJ and producer Safety Trance.
The Willy Chavarria show.
Scenes from Willy Chavarria.
The throngs of teenagers doing back flips into the Canal Saint-Martin and playing soccer in the street set the mood for the week.
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