How we remember Houston is a product of our own shame and guilt, Gerrick Kennedy says.
” , Kennedy reframed Houston’s legacy. She should not be solely defined by tragedy, and her memory should not be limited to a cautionary tale, he says.drowning and the effects of heart disease and cocaine use
We’ll never really know who Whitney truly was, Kennedy says. But reexamining the conversation around Houston is essential, especially as we conduct postmortems of how media handled celebrities in years past. You make this argument that we need to step back and say she deserves better than this, she doesn’t need to be just the tragedy, the cautionary tale.
So there was this tone that was taken with Whitney for pretty much the entirety of her career that is awful. And that can’t be changed. I also think it’s important for us to acknowledge that we have come to a different place in terms of how we treat celebrities, but she was not a benefit of that.What were some of the challenges or obstacles to writing a book like this? I know you weren’t looking for the gotcha moments, for tabloid-style revelations here, that it was more subtle.
That’s unfortunate because an artist of this magnitude, with this level of influence that we like to say is the most influential artist of all time, we also don’t want to acknowledge the fact that there was nobody studying her work. There’s nobody studying her career. There’s nobody studying the barriers that she broke for women, Black and otherwise.