100 Women We Love: Class Of 2019

Amandla Stenberg

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Amandla Stenberg won acclaim for her portrayal of a young African-American woman who witnesses the killing of her friend at the hands of police in last year’s “The Hate U Give.” Like her character in the movie that made her a star, Stenberg is not afraid to speak out. Her Twitter feed addresses weighty social topics like intersectional feminism, biracial and sexual identifies, and cultural appropriation, as with her satiric viral video, “Don’t Cash Crop My Corn Rows.” In 2018, Time Magazine hailed her as a “next generation leader.” In addition to Teen Choice and BET awards, Stenberg has been honored with NAACP Image awards and, this past February, became the recipient of the Human Rights Campaign’s 2019 Visibility Award. It may be easy to imagine that Stenberg has always been confident in her own skin, but as she said in an interview with Wonderland in 2018, “[t]he continual process of unlearning heteronormativity and internalized homophobia can be difficult, but one of the biggest blessings lies in the magic that comes from having to understand love outside of the confines of learned heterosexual roles… Once I was able to rid myself of those parameters, I found myself in a deep well of unbounded and untouchable love free from the dominion of patriarchy.” —RK


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