Yara Shahidi's passion for activism makes it easier for her to make friends.
The 18-year-old star of hit U.S. show Black-ish, who has now graduated to her own spin-off show Grown-ish which follows her character Zoey Johnson to college, has developed a reputation for being politically engaged and speaking out on topics ranging from racism and feminism to gender identity.
And in an interview with digital magazine PorterEdit, the young star revealed that despite being unhappy with Donald Trump winning the U.S. election, it makes things easy when it comes to finding new friends.
“Oddly, it’s exciting because I don’t think that I would look forward to voting as much if there hadn’t been so much duress happening. It has made life less self-centric, it’s more about community now," she told the publication. "It timed out really well for me in terms of going through this stage where you are trying to find your friend group, trying to find who you are... It’s not usually how you start a friendship group: ‘You’re socially aware? Cool, great. We are friends now.’ That’s really special.”
Yara celebrated turning 18 with a voter registration party, via her newly formed Eighteenx18 initiative, but admitted that celebrities often face backlash for being political even though she feels "that media has always been so inherently political".
"In the photos that you see of Martin Luther King Jr., even at the march on Washington, there’s Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte and James Baldwin, and all of these other creatives... Things will happen in the movies before they happen in real life,” she mused.
And despite being criticised, she has persisted in using her platform to empower girls in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
“I remember being at the White House and somebody asked me what I wanted to do. I said that I wanted to be a thought leader and she just kinda chuckled and said, 'You need credentials for that.' It was really off-putting," she said. "I come from such strong support; I come from the land of ‘of course’. Like, ‘of course this is going to happen’ because we have willed it to be and we are going to put in the work to make it happen.”
