TW for rape, victim blamingChimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Feminism, Beyoncé, and the Selma Oscars Snub“
TW for rape, victim blamingChimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Feminism, Beyoncé, and the Selma Oscars Snub“Bey caused Adichie’s TED talk on feminism to go viral when she sampled it on “Flawless,” and Adichie has some rare words of celebrity praise for her most famous fan:“I am a person who writes and tells stories. That’s what I want to talk about. There’s an obsession with celebrity that I have never had. But the one thing I will say is that I really do think Beyoncé is a force for good, as much as celebrity things go. I know there has been lot of talk in the past year about how feminism is ‘cool’ now, but I think if we are honest, it’s not a subject that’s easy. She didn’t have to do this, she could have taken on, I don’t know, world peace. Or nothing at all. And I realize that so many young people in our celebrity-obsessed world, well, suddenly they are thinking about this. And that’s a wonderful thing.”She also discusses being “personally furious” about Selma being almost entirely overlooked at the Oscars:“I took that very personally. It’s almost a slap in the face for a person who wants to believe in some kind of progress; 2014 was such a difficult year for America and race……Even when I’m not in the US, I follow what’s going on, I’m very emotionally invested. And I find myself thinking that maybe I’ll write an essay about it: looking at the idea that there’s something similar in the way that American society looks at black men who commit crime and women of any colour who report a rape. And I think the similarity is that you are expected to be perfect and pure before you can get any sympathy, any human empathy. ‘Well, the kid stole cigarettes, so he asked for it, right?’” Brown was alleged to have stolen a box of cigarettes. “Like, ‘Well, she wore a short skirt.’ It’s so ugly. And with the film of Half of a Yellow Sun – I remember Thandie Newton saying to me that it was important to her because you don’t usually get to see black love on the screen this way.”Read the full piece here -- source link
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