Why Do You Care If Chappell Roan Endorses Kamala?

Chappell Roan is far from being neutral or "both sides"-ing — she's criticizing both parties because they both have failings.

Teen Vogue

Like many people in her age group, Roan has specifically taken issue with U.S. involvement in Israel’s assault on Palestine, a subject she discussed in the Guardian interview as well as others (Roan’s politics don’t exist in a single-interview vacuum). In a late August interview with CNN, VP Harris stated, “Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed,” then reiterated her support for Biden’s existing proposal for a ceasefire and two-state solution, declining to differentiate herself. In her Rolling Stone cover story, Roan described debating whether to take an invite from the White House to perform at a Pride celebration. While she considered doing so specifically to protest the administration’s conduct in Gaza, she ultimately passed after saying she’d been warned by her management that the move might impact her safety.

“I think chappell being told by her team her safety would be at risk if she read a poem for palestine at the white house under a democratic term is a valid reason for her to feel like there's problems on both sides, no? [sic]” tweeted TikToker Blizzy McGuire in response to the viral Pop Flop tweet.

Much of this discourse has surrounded Roan being a publicly proud queer artist, the implication being that this election is a choice between voting for protections for LBGTQ+ rights or opting out of voting over Palestine. Not only is this a false dichotomy, it also misses Chappell’s correct point, which is that these struggles will continue to be just that — struggles — under Trump or Harris. It is certainly true that Republicans have championed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation; it is also true that, as organizer and journalist Raquel Willis recently told Teen Vogue at the Gender Liberation March: “We [LGBTQ+ people] are being failed across the political spectrum. We just saw at the Democratic National Convention very minimal mention of transgender people, and definitely no direct mentions of the attacks happening across the country.”

Roan is very aware of this. In that Rolling Stone interview, she mentioned the Biden administration’s June statement against youth gender-affirming care, a statement they walked back the next month after massive blowback. Part of what Chappell, Willis, and others are criticizing is the expectation that, as Judith Butler put it to me earlier this year, the Democrats “think we're in [their] pocket” — the “we” being LGBTQ+ people.

What Roan is seemingly trying to say, looking at the context of the interviews she’s given and the ways she has conducted herself over the past couple years of burgeoning fame, is that she is not a single-issue voter, unless that issue is, as she said on stage at Governor’s Ball as her ascent really took off, “liberty, justice, and freedom for all.” For all — not just LGBTQ+ people, or just Palestinians, or on and on. Everyone’s freedom intersects and intertwines, and Roan is unwilling to use her platform to sell out any one marginalized identity just to throw her name in for a presidential candidate.

The reaction to Roan’s commitment to protecting herself, learned after getting dropped from her label during the pandemic, says more about fandom culture than it does her, as Vox’s Aja Romano argued. This conversation keeps the fixation on celebrity political endorsements instead of the progressive policy commitments many young people would like to see from the Harris campaign. On climate change, Harris has doubled down on her support for fracking; on immigration, Harris proposed harsher border policy; on, again, LGBTQ+ rights, Harris has largely dodged the subject on the national stage — instead proffering TikToks, “brat” memes, and a ripoff of Chappell’s merch.

Cyberbullying Chappell Roan for genuinely caring about the issues is not the political activism you think it is, especially when you’re doing so in defense of a candidate who is still actively in the process of fighting for your vote. You all sound absurd. Wake up and pay attention to the actual political process; you might learn something.

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