Twenty year-old actor Amandla Stenberg has lived out the motto of free self-expression and transparency in their acting, as well as with themselves. Their role as Starr Carter in The Hate U Give was deemed by The New York Times a passing "self portaiture." They've been transparent throughout their self-discovery process, having come out initially as bisexual and later as gay. They post humourous, candid photos of themselves to their 2 million followers on Instagram — satirically @amandlasponsored — in addition to advocating for #BlackLivesMatter and criminal justice. And they've called out the tokenization and appropriation of black culture, all while learning to fully and openly embrace their own black heritage.
Stenberg's first explicit encounter with racism — sprouted from the discontentment of their character, Rue's skin colour in The Hunger Games — impelled them to fully confront and rewire negative perceptions about black features so ingrained by society. "I think that as a black girl you grow up internalizing all these messages that you say you shouldn't accept your hair or your skin tone or your natural features, that you shouldn't have a voice or that you aren't smart," they told Solange Knowles in a Teen Vogue interview. "I feel like the only way to fight that is to just be yourself on the most genuine level and to connect with other black girls who are awakening and realising that they've been trying to conform." Stenberg's own awakening came from rocking their natural hair to sporting unshaven armpits on the red carpet.
In an effort to spread this liberation, they co-directed a three-part video series with Teen Vogue for Twitter and Instagram to empower black beauty and sprinkle "#BlackGirlMagic in every crevice of the universe." They've thanked the changing social media climate for increasingly encourageing individual expression: "In the past, you could look only to movies or TV or music or celebrities in order to feel like you had representation," they said. "Now, you can go on Instagram and you can see a girl who looks like you who is killing the game and expressing herself. Just being able to see that is so affirming."