Heroes, Their Humanity and Our Pedestals
You know how people always say you should never meet your heroes? I would like to expand on that – probably don't google them either. This somewhat cynical advice is usually given because it's not uncommon to discover that the people we've placed on a pedestal are incredibly flawed. I don't mean 'prefers M&Ms to smarties' flawed, I'm talking harassment or criminal offence kinda flawed.
I think user Andrew Karam on Quora said it best with the following statement, "We tend to conflate people with their work and we assume that, if the work is admirable, the person must be admirable as well. And when we meet them and find that they're not, it can affect not only our impressions of them, but it can also make it hard for us to recapture our admiration of their work - what drew us to them in the first place. And, thus, we can lose our appreciation of something that was important to us or that we found beautiful or moving." I could stop there. But I won't.
When Kanye West tweeted that being enslaved for 400 years 'sounds like a choice', black twitter was shook, but few people advocated for him to be cancelled. Many said this was an example of when you should separate an artist from their art. West has been given more chances than most people have, for reasons including his mental health struggles and the very public loss of his mother in 2007. Musically and artistically the man is a modern-day legend. The son of a celebrated English and African-American Studies professor and former Black Panther emerged as a socially conscious rapper, using his music to address racial inequality, oppression and the struggles of the black community. Not only has his career paved the way for the next generation of black rappers, his music positively changed how many people saw their own blackness. His personal history is a little harder to reconcile. As an outsider looking in, I've spent a lot of time trying to decipher his motives and intentions and understand exactly what he was going for when he was interrupting award speeches, publicly slandering his wife or even speaking out in support of Tr*mp. That being said, West's is a case many would argue isn't that problematic. I might be one of them. I vehemently disagree with many of his stances but I still have a few favourites from 'Jesus is King' and I will happily listen to the Sunday Service gospel choir's renditions of my favourites. I'm not quite sure how I've rationalised it but I have.
Where do we as a society draw the line regarding separating the artist from their work? Is it genuinely all about balance and seeing how their positive and negative contributions weigh against each other? Is it more nuanced than that?
I can no longer in good conscience support anything R. Kelly or Harvey Weinstein ever touched and I have to admit that I tend to look unfavourably on those who do. I don't care how much of a bop "I Believe I Can Fly", is because all I can think of when I hear it is the girls whose lives have been and are currently being ruined by Robert Sylvester Kelly. Yes, I had to use his government name. Both these men and West were and maybe still are celebrated by the public. Not only have they achieved fame, but they are or at least were successful. They may have recently fallen from grace but let's not forget that we were the ones who built the pedestals they've fallen from. Since the contributions of these men have been in the arts, you might be able to argue that separation isn't needed. We should throw out all their albums and songs and movies because that's not really a huge loss, is it?
Let's discuss Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – everyone's favourite super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis. You might know him better as 'Mahatma' Gandhi. 'Mahatma' is not his first name but instead a word of Sanskrit origin meaning, "a revered person regarded with love and respect; a holy person or sage." It's not a reach to say this man is essentially worshipped for all the good he did for the nation of India. I'm not here to discredit that - not entirely anyway. Instead, I'm going to use him as an example of why we need to learn to stop putting on pedestals simply because we appreciate their achievements. Gandhi's life and legacy have led to him becoming the barometer for greatness. He ushered in an era of nonviolent resistance in India, a country he [with the help of many others] helped escaped British imperial rule. He soldiered through countless hunger trials until he was shot by a Hindu nationalist and essentially martyred for his cause. In the decades following his assassination, this narrative that he single-handedly orchestrated India's independence movement started to prevail. Along with that, Gandhi's personal history was edited – essentially wiped clean of all its unsavoury details so all that was left was the perfect image we've all grown up with.
The obvious truth is that Gandhi was definitely not the only person fighting for India's freedom. That fight did not end with his death so there would have had to be other people involved. Yet none of them are celebrated or known by anyone outside their families because Gandhi was the one to whom the mantle of 'deliverer' was bestowed. The uncomfortable truth is that the man had a weird obsession with his own celibacy, was anti-black and was a little unlikeable in a lot of ways. A few years ago, a Gandhi statue was removed from a Ghanian university. Activists were using the hashtag #GhandiMustFall. Their very justified stance was because Gandhi was brazenly racist, especially to black people.
Whilst living in South Africa, Gandhi wrote that white people there should be "the predominating race." Not exactly a hot take to make during apartheid but not right either. He also added that black people ""are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals." Like many other young men, he went along with the ideas of his culture and time. Whiteness had become the standard for excellence everywhere England colonised so obviously he bought into the idea that white people should be the dominant race. He believed that South Asian and Indian peoples were worthy of the same prestige that white people had. I'm not sure who said it first but it proves the point that sometimes the oppressed don't want equality for all, they just want a piece of the privilege.
It gets worse, this man and this man alone is celebrated for being martyred in the fight for India's liberation but his fight for India purposefully excluded the Dalit caste. The group is still seen as the "untouchable" caste to this day. I will not continue the story-telling about the man that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was, you can do your own reading. I do want to pose the question, how do we sit with the truth that the man regarded as one of India's best didn't fight for all Indians. He viewed the emancipation of Dalits as not only unattainable but pointless. He insisted they remain complacent in their oppression and wait their turn – whatever that means. Dalits continue to suffer as a result of the prejudices that are ingrained into the cultural fabric of India. The fact of the matter is that history has been unfairly kind to Gandhi. That's what happens when you put the legacy of a country's emancipation on one man. 'Mahatma' Gandhi did not liberate India by himself. You can achieve great things without being a great person. Read that again. India's liberation has been credited to one man, but as his personal legacy starts to crumble, the country's history seems to crumble also.
Back to my original question - where do we as a society draw the line regarding separating the artist from their work? Kanye West, R. Kelly and Gandhi are just three examples in a sea of messy people who have done impressive things. Among them are Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Albert Einstein, Alexander Hamilton, honestly the list is never-ending. I don't know about you but it has been deeply uncomfortable to learn so much of the people society reveres. I might be wrong here, but that is part of the problem. We insist on awarding reverence to everyone who does something notable. Not only that, we attach our own character to that person and their work. Therefore, when we learn the truth, it feels like something has been taken from us. It feels like a betrayal. I am not suggesting we avoid having role models or heroes, but there has to be a better way to pick them or some way not to expect things from them they never exhibited or promised. One thing that is true in every one of these cases is that the subjects never signed up to be our heroes - they had one objective and they reached it. That doesn't mean they get off scot-free for their misdeeds, but I think looking at it like that takes some of the disappointment off.
Don't give up the chance to meet your hero, but only expect from them the things they promised to deliver. A LOT of these people didn’t sign up to be role models, good thing too because they would be terrible ones.
Read more at your own risk…
Using This Gospel: The Black Community's Skepticism of Kanye West's New Direction
MLK Affairs, Secret Life, The Reason He Was Killed?! | Makeup&History by Cydnee Black
Surving R. Kelly | Netflix
Thinking with Gandhi on racism and violence: A letter to a friend
Gandhi Was a Racist Who Forced Young Girls to Sleep in Bed with Him
Gandhi Is Deeply Revered, But His Attitudes On Race And Sex Are Under Scrutiny
Definitions from Oxford Languages
