Grown-ish actress and one of Hollywood’s youngest and brightest stars Yara Shahidi stuns on the April 2018 cover of ESSENCE magazine. In this issue she spoke candidly about identity, race, handling fame, “wokeness,” and Twitter comments with writer Zeba Blay.
“When you are in the public eye as a person of color, you are given very little room to mess up. [It means] letting the culture down.”
But there isn’t always a constant pull between being a celebrity and being politically active. For the rising star, she’s balancing both beautifully. The actress recently shared an original poem on gun violence and race in support of March for Our Lives after speaking at the event.
“I feel comfortable putting my political stances out there without feeling as though I am filling some sort of quota,” she says about being a socially active teenager who still wants to have fun. “I don’t have a wokeness quota for the day.”
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