Those wishing to discredit these causes point to wealth and success as incongruent with suffering
Naomi Osaka’s withdrawal from the French Open, after the tennis player was threatened with suspension for refusing to attend press conferences for the sake of her mental health, is the most recent example of the war playing out between celebrities and the establishment, through which the public justify their own grievances.
These incidents may seem like confected media culture war events – flaring up just as quickly as they die down, and fuelled by the cheap kindling of social media, then doused by our low attention spans. But there is something more substantive about them in that they define, or give shape to, a much more significant clash between two value systems.
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Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist