1 of 2 | Actress Amandla Stenberg, best known for playing Rue in the first installment of "The Hunger Games" trilogy, returns to the spotlight as a student with something to say in a video discussing cultural appropriation. Photo by Amandla Stenberg/Tumblr
HOLLYWOOD, April 17 (UPI) -- Hunger Games actress Amandla Stenberg played Rue in the first film and released a video in February calling out areas of cultural appropriation in the entertainment industry. It has since gone viral.
Called "Don't Cash Crop My Cornrows: a crash discourse on black culture," the video, made for a history assignment, features an eloquent Stenberg, 16, chiming in on topics like black hair, clothing and accessories associated with hip-hop culture that white stars adopt into their lives and public images.
Citing Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Iggy Azalea, and Taylor Swift among others, the young star mentions the issue of entertainers using black culture "as a way of being edgy and gaining attention."
"In 2013, Miley Cyrus twerks and uses black women as props. And in 2014, in one of her videos called 'This Is How We Do,' Katy Perry uses Ebonics and hand gestures and eats watermelon while wearing cornrows -- before cutting inexplicably to a picture of Aretha Franklin," she continues.
Stenberg mentions Iggy Azalea, who is notoriously silent when it comes to black issues -- like the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, among others -- although she has explicitly adopted components of black culture.
"That itself is what is so complicated when it comes to black culture," she says. "I mean, the line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange is always going to be blurred. But here's the thing: Appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated but is deemed as high-fashion, cool, or funny when the privileged take it for themselves."
The video, which Stenberg posted on her Tumblr blog three months ago, received almost 59,000 notes apart from being relentlessly shared thousands of times over other social media platforms like Twitter.
She recently corrected Billboard, who presented the video as one meant to create "conflict instead of constructive [conversation]," by saying, "this is not a petty criticism of Taylor Swift, who, btw, I love. This is about creating a dialogue between races."
Billboard never responded.
