Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
“As many of you know, I was adopted. As African-Americans in general, it’s often hard to know where our ancestry, where our roots are. As someone that was adopted, for me, it has been even harder. All I ever really knew was that I was from Milwaukee, but recently, I took an Ancestry DNA test and discovered that my ancestors are from Ghana and Nigeria. It changed everything for me. It helped me know that my history did not begin with being adopted. It did not begin with slavery. It’s even part of why I wear this Afro now. I’m not going to hide who I am.” —Colin Kaepernick
“I see the ways in which the media has sold me, and other light-skinned actors in general, as monolithic representations of a Blackness. It is so damaging and gross – honestly, it’s nasty.” The anger in her voice is palpable. “It’s just like sneaky racism.” She says that she is now very wary when people try to position her as representative of all Black people’s experiences. “I have only one sliver of experience, and that sliver is also drenched in light-skin privilege.”
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Photography: Miranda Barnes / Styling: Karla Welch
Ever since her breakout role in The Hunger Games, Amandla Stenberg’s career has gone from strength to strength. Here, the actor talks to Micha Frazer-Carroll about her involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement, how the pandemic has made her re-evaluate her life and why she’s keenly exploring other creative avenues
Speaking to Amandla Stenberg feels strikingly like hanging out with a close friend, as well as interviewing a compelling voice from Hollywood’stwentysomething cohort. As we connect over Zoom, the conversational ground quickly spans from grumbling about media depictions of Gen Z to lamenting the elitist hierarchies that have emerged at queer Zoom parties. She also laughs a lot.
The laughter subsides and Stenberg reflects on the turbulent times that 2020 brought. She’s been Airbnb-ing and short-term renting for two years now – between New York, LA, Paris and Copenhagen – and has felt constantly unsettled since the pandemic hit. “I think sometimes I forget the lens through which I’m looking at things,” she says. “I can kind of get stressed out, wondering why I have so much anxiety, or why I’m in a constant state of paranoia and fear – and then I remember the circumstances.”
There are things to be grateful for, too, of course – she stresses that she doesn’t want to sound all “the pandemmy’s been so hard”, particularly since the actor, whose father is Danish, spent three months of the past year in the rolling hills of rural Denmark. “The thing I’m grateful for is definitely the opportunity to move more slowly – like actually thinking about my habits, the way I move through each day and what my priorities are.”…