“What would America be like if it loved black people as much as it loves black culture?”
Amandla Stenberg, the 16-year-old actress known for her part as Rue in The Hunger Games series, decided it was time to set the record straight about what "cultural appropriation" really means.
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In a video she filmed for her history class and posted on Tumblr titled "Don't Cash Crop My Cornrows: a crash discourse on black culture," Stenburg gets real on her thoughts on race.
Hype Hair Magazine / Via youtube.com
At first, Stenberg discusses black hair and its connection to black identity, and therefore, rap and hip hop.
"So you can see why hair is such a big part of hip hop and rap culture," Stenburg said. "These are styles of music which African American communities created in order to affirm our identities and our voices."
"[In the 2010s,] pop stars and icons adopted black culture as a way of being edgy and gaining attention," the actress said. "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."
