Credit – Claudio Lavenia—Gucci/Getty Images
Yara Shahidi, the award-winning actress who starred in ABC’s show black-ish, grew up on screen. But ironically, she didn’t really grow up watching TV.
“The journey into becoming an actor wasn’t one that was necessarily anchored in this desire to be on screen, but more so anchored in this desire to be a part of storytelling,” Shahidi told Loren Hammonds, head of documentary at TIME Studios, on stage at the TIME Impact Leadership Forum in Martha’s Vineyard on Thursday.
Instead of TV, Shahidi was raised surrounded by books and authors that moved her—and that represented not just her culture, but also her friends’.
“It wasn’t until I actually turned the TV on that I realized that that opportunity wasn’t granted to so many of my peers that were raised having spent more time looking at dominant culture media that did not consider us whatsoever, and were raised in school systems that did not allow us the opportunity to study ourselves,” said the actress, who was named one of TIME’s 30 Most Influential Teens of 2017.
“My sense of audacity came from the fact that I felt so well represented in my home, from what I was looking at, from the fact that my parents formed what we call an alternate curriculum of books, folklore, fairytales, where everybody was global, Black, Brown, from every different part of the world,” she continued.
Shahidi starred on black-ish throughout her teens and into her early twenties, and also starred in and was an executive producer of Freeform’s spin-off series of the show, grown-ish. In November, she launched a podcast, The Optimist Project, with her mother. Shahidi hosts the show, and discusses topics ranging from love to happiness with her guests, which have included Janelle Monáe and Hasan Minhaj.
She talked about how growing up in a household in which her perspective was always valued was “the primer” that later allowed her to use her voice with a bigger, more public platform.
When she was on black-ish, she said she was often “underutilized,” which gave her a lot of downtime in between filming. It led to her mother asking her what else she wanted to do with her platform—which was a “catalyst,” Shahidi said, to her pursuing other projects that moved her, from production to activism.
When asked what projects she wants to work on as a producer, Shahidi said she is moved by stories that “share a slice of life.”
“Speaking particularly towards Black and Brown storytelling, the stakes have to be so high; the question of why should the audience care is something that we’re always having to answer,” Shahidi said. “Because for some reason, our general existence isn’t viewed as ‘good enough’ or ‘entertaining enough,’ and oftentimes it creates these general barriers and parameters on just allowing ourselves to be human on screen.”
At one point during their conversation, Hammonds asked Shahidi what responsibility, if any, she thinks the media has in shaping the way young people see themselves. Shahidi replied that it’s a “double-edged sword.” On the one hand, she said, social media platforms have allowed people to share their own stories on a large scale, but on the other, young people are being “totally inundated” with so much information and “noise” that can make it difficult to figure out who they are.
Ultimately, she said, representation on screen isn’t about giving young people a character to base their own identity on—rather “what it should be doing is giving you permission to be your best self, your fullest self, your most authentic self.”
The TIME Impact Leadership Forum was presented by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
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