Hunger Games Star Amandla Stenberg Calls Out White Pop Stars for Appropriating Black Culture

Amandla Stenberg may already be well-known for roles like Rue in The Hunger Games and Macey Irving on Sleepy Hollow, but she’s still just a 16-year-old who sometimes has to do assignments for her history class. For a high school project earlier this year, Stenberg addressed the long history of white pop stars profiting off of black culture in her video entitled “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows:”

[In the 2010s,] pop stars and icons adopted black culture as a way of being edgy and gaining attention. In 2013, Miley Cyrus twerks and uses black women as props, and then in 2014, in one of her videos called ‘This Is How We Do,’ Katy Perry uses Ebonics and hand gestures and eats watermelons while wearing cornrows before cutting inexplicably to a picture of Aretha Franklin. So as you can see, cultural appropriation was rampant.

I definitely recommend watching the video the whole way through. Stenberg is one eloquent, intelligent 16-year-old.

(via The Hollywood Reporter)

–Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.–

Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?