Actress Amandla Stenberg is calling out some of the biggest names in pop music for borrowing black culture to make money.
The 16-year-old actress, who played Rue in the first installment of the The Hunger Games, recorded a video for her high school history class in which she criticizes white celebritiesm including Madonna, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus, for the “rampant” appropriation of black culture.
“[In the 2010s], pop stars and icons adopted black culture as a way of being edgy and gaining attention,” she says. “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’ve been seeing this question a lot on social media, and I think it’s really relevant: ‘What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?'” Stenberg adds at the end of the video.
The video, which made its way onto the internet 3 months ago, features clips of Kesha and Kim Kardashian wearing cornrows and Madonna with a grill over her teeth. Footage from Taylor Swift’s chart-topping “Shake It Off” video is also shown.
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