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I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast.
I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time, taking time to be more fully present.
Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now.
Time magazine names are one of the most influential teenagers in America.
You first met her in the worldwide blockbuster film The Hunger Games.
Amanda Stenberg is just 17 years old and she already has a Super Soul frame of mind.
I love that about her. She's taken social media by storm with her fresh insights on living an awakened and authentic life.
Amanda calls her session My Authenticity is my Activism.
What is it to be a modern activist?
My name is Amanda Stenberg.
My mom named me after the Zulu word for power.
I'm an actress. I am an activist.
I'm a high schooler with plans to attend NYU in the fall.
Thank you. When I was little I used to wear my hair in this giant poo front top of my head.
And I'd be chilling on the playground and kids wouldn't up to me.
And they would take my hood and throw it over my hair and then nest on me like I was a giant pillow.
And I hated it. I remember going home and being like mom I'm a person not a pillow.
She was like okay what do you want to do?
I was like I want to change my hairstyle but I don't want to wear it out because it's too big and it's too embarrassing it's too frizzy.
So she was like all right I'll do whatever you need me to do.
So she started doing this thing where every two weeks she would get over my hair with a jar of pomade and a wide tooth comb and she would put all my hair into these little neat twists.
And as I grew up I found new hairstyles new ways to make my hair smaller and consequently myself smaller.
I um I straightened it. I put all kinds of chemicals in it.
And God forbid that there was moisture in the air or that a droplet fell from the sky because I would be gone.
I would vanish. Recently I've started wearing my hair natural.
And oftentimes I get the question why you wear your hair natural is it a part of your political agenda.
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I've recently been kind of pinned by media as a new progressive as a poster child for social activism.
But I have not led revolutions or led marches and resistances.
I've tweeted. And I've left controversial comments on Instagram and I've posted my writings and talked about things such as Black Lives Matter, the dehumanization of Black female bodies, and cultural appropriation.
I made a video for my history class which is called Don't Cash Crop My Corn Rose.
And I showed it to my history class.
It was about how Black hairstyles often times get appropriated by white people but then those Black people get to be little and discredited.
And I showed it to my history class and they didn't like it that much.
But then I posted it online and it went viral.
So I've grown up being a huge fan of Angela Davis.
When I had the opportunity to be on the cover of Dave's magazine, I asked if I could have this quote written across my face.
And we have to talk about liberating minds as well as liberating societies.
And I love Miss Davis and I believe firmly in that.
But it's been difficult for me to claim the space of an activist when the most revolutionary thing that I've done is is tied vigorously on a six by three inch touchscreen.
And it's interesting. It's like my array of weapons are these different colored squares on an iPhone.
It felt really silly to be called brave at first when I did most of my activism from the comfort of my bed with some popcorn and some old episodes of French Prince of Lair.
But I've realized that loving myself has been a gradual process coming into myself as a black person and as a woman has been a gradual process.
When we grow up as black girls, we are told that we should be ashamed of our hair.
We're told that we should be ashamed of our bodies and we should be ashamed of our voices because when we do speak out, oftentimes we're hit with that whole sassy, angry, black woman trope.
And we're fed these advertisements that tell us to straighten our hair.
As if we straighten it, we'll be more civil, which is another way of just saying more white.
And so I thought that I was kind of immune to these messages for a while.
I thought that because the way my mom had raised me, that I wasn't thinking about them in this way.
Until when I was about 16, I realized that it was actually combating a lot of self-hatred.
And what I did in order to deal with that self-hatred is I decided to start writing.
And I wrote and I wrote and I journaled and I wrote some more.
And in writing, I found my voice in writing I found my identity.
And I found self-love. And so I posted one of my writings to Instagram because you know I am a teenager.
And I received some negative feedback.
I received some positive feedback.
But the most important thing to me was that I received conversation.
And so I want to share one of those pieces with you.
And so it goes like this.
Black features are beautiful.
Black women are not. White women are paragons of virtue and desire.
Black women are objects of fetishism and brutality.
This at least seems to be the mentality surrounding black femininity and beauty in society built upon your eccentric beauty standards.
While white women are praised for altering their bodies, plumping their lips, intending their skin, black women are shamed, although the same features exist on them naturally.
That's just one component of this web that surrounds black female sexuality, a web that often times entrap black women when they attempt to claim sexual agency.
Ingrain into culture is a notion that black women at the intersection of oppression are less than human and therefore unattractive.
They become dissembles of pain and trauma and degradation.
And oftentimes when they are sexualized it's from a place of racial fetishism.
Indeed, black female sexuality is a tender spot.
Tender with deep rooted suppression and taboo, the effects of which are pervasive.
The stigma surrounding it are embedded in American infrastructure as evidenced by the ways that black women are sexually assaulted and treated by police.
An act that goes unreported by the media.
And so as culture shifts and racial tensions are tested, it's important to question, do female black lives matter too?
So I posted this piece and I posted it because I was exhausted.
I was exhausted of experiencing those things.
I was exhausted of seeing them around me and I realized that I just needed to speak out about it.
You know, these attitudes promote such a dehumanization against black women and we end up existing in this sort of black hole.
Black hole. Where we end up being like, okay, so I want to be a feminist, but where do black women exist in the feminist movement?
And I also want to speak out about racial inequality, but where do I exist in that space?
I don't know. And I struggled with that and I struggled with not having that visibility.
It's strange that, you know, celebrities can alter their bodies to resemble black ones.
And yet the natural black female body is still maligned, it's criticized, it's scrutinized.
But in response to all of these pressures, in response to all of these difficulties and these prejudices, black women have done something really incredible.
And I first discovered it through the internet.
And so I started going on Tumblr and seeing these black teenage girls using hashtags like Black Girl Magic and Black Out, posting selfies and fighting against these systems by celebrating themselves.
They were promoting their own growth, their own self-love, and they were using Tumblr to call out the media and call out the media for pigeonholing us and stereotyping us.
They were basically using the power of social media to fight mainstream media.
And when I was looking at these women who were posting all this incredible material, I realized that I had never celebrated myself.
And that was something that was so subconscious, but I had never celebrated who I am and become cerebral in my identity.
And I let go of this supposed modesty, which was actually just this kind of ingrained notion that had been instilled in me that it was not okay or acceptable for me to celebrate myself.
And I joined this movement.
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That's what cooked when you order juicy beef sounds like.
The steaming hug of two slices of melted cheese, the crunch of tangy pickles and sliced onions, all topped with a toasted sesame seed bun.
That's the sound of a McDonald's quarter-bounder with cheese.
First beef at participating US McDonald's excludes Alaska Hawaiian US territories.
And we started creating our own content.
You know there was something brewing within us.
And so a few of these teenagers and me got together and we created this thing called art hoe collective.
And art hoe collective is this online platform where we get submissions from all kinds of kids of color and we post them to our larger audience and they get celebrated.
And what we were trying to do with this collective is basically fight the stereotypes that black kids are not creative, that black kids are not sensitive, that they aren't artistic.
And also claim our own space since you know the artwork of people of color has been historically excluded from institutions.
We also wanted to reclaim the word hoe.
Because the word hoe, you know it's used against black women just for doing that thing, you know, getting a little promiscuous.
And that's really silly to me because I feel like all women should be free in their sexualities to be able to do whatever they want to do.
And so we decided we were going to take that word and kind of spin it on its access and that's how the phrase art hoe came to be.
Basically there was this radical revolution against misogyny war, against internalized hatred, against all of these messages that we had received.
And love for ourselves and for each other was our most powerful tool.
So how can I be an activist in a society that disparages me?
How can I be an activist for choosing to love myself regardless?
By sending all my thoughts into the void that is the internet and actually receiving all this really incredible feedback from other teenage girls, other teenage black girls, I realized that they were all craving and I was craving this sort of validation that it was okay to exist as myself.
And I also realized something else that my personal is also my political.
You know, when we're talking about racism or sexism, we're not just doing it for fun and like flexing our debate skills.
These are things that are actually really personal to us and we're fighting for our existences, we're fighting for the ability to be ourselves.
And I think it can be easy to intellectualize and objectify these things and forget that.
But the power in personal as political is this.
Just by choosing to love myself, choosing to honor myself and be comfortable in my identity in a society that tells me I shouldn't, I am starting a revolution.
Just by deciding to be comfortable in who I am, I'm doing something revolutionary and I'm doing something political.
My activism exists through the work of my bones against weight in the morning.
You know, we have understood the bodies of white women before we have understood our own.
We've memorized this sort of pink purity and learned this morphia because we are different.
But we've also been gifted with this sacred unraveling because there is power in unearthing our limbs for ourselves.
So this is what it means to me to be a new progressive.
It's basically the yourself.
And like I know it sounds kind of cliche and like I'm going to break into the Barney theme song.
But it's true and it's valid when I am myself, most authentically myself, free of self hatred, free of self judgment, then I am also my most revolutionary.
It takes vulnerability to be yourself and it takes vulnerability to find strength in your own identity.
But to me vulnerability, authenticity and power go hand in hand and hand.
When I am most authentically myself, I am also the self that people are more easily able to connect to.
And I also happen to be the best version of myself that happens to create the most controversy.
And at the end of the day, isn't that kind of how we connect to other human beings through our authenticity and through our vulnerability?
And isn't that how we can actually transcend these barriers that we've constructed, you know, these barriers of race and gender, which you know they actually aren't real, but they're real to us now.
So we have to figure out how to deal with them.
Can't we transcend those barriers through vulnerability?
I'm not saying that we all have to hold hands and sing kumbaya and everything's going to be okay.
I mean, I never want to invalidate the anger of oppressed groups because it's always valid.
But I'm saying that there's a lot of strength in vulnerability.
I'm saying that oftentimes vulnerability is our strength.
Authenticity is our strength.
My hope for the future is that if we continue promoting this sort of authenticity and self-love and pride, if we continue dismantling these negative Eurocentric beauty standards, and if we continue making sure and demanding that we have a space in media and we have representation, then in the future, little black girls who grew up hating their hair actually won't hate it in the first place and that they won't have anything to unlearn, that they won't have to find themselves again after this time of challenging trial and error.
So to me, authenticity as activism is a base.
It's the core of who I am as an activist and if I didn't have this core, I wouldn't be able to do anything else.
And I'm still working on it.
Like, I don't have any of these ideas figured out all the way, you know.
But I feel like if I can focus on this part of myself first, then the possibilities for how I can change my community, how I can go forth and change the world, those possibilities are endless.
So basically, it's a call to action.
If you have experienced oppression, if you have been historically oppressed, then your love for yourself is your revolution.
If you have historically been an oppressor, then your love for yourself and everyone else, especially, is a revolution.
I don't think that we can go forth and fight anything if we are still fighting these internalized messages.
And so to me, that's the first step.
But imagine all that we can do if we are first just comfortable in our own skin.
Thank you so much. I'm Oprah Winfrey and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast.
You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate and review this podcast.
Join me next week for another Super Soul Conversation.
Thank you for listening.
It's okay if you aren't ready for kids right now.
It's okay if you don't want to be a mom, now or even ever.
It's nobody's decision but yours.
But do you know it's not okay?
Not knowing how effective your birth control is.
Talk to your doctor about effective birth control options so you can make an informed decision.
Tap to learn more.
