Yara Shahidi Has “the Audacity to Feel Optimistic”
Actress and activist Yara Shahidi will take the stage at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall with Tory Burch tomorrow at the designer’s inaugural Embrace Ambition Summit. Ambition is a subject the two know a little something about. Burch has built a billion-dollar brand side by side with a foundation that has provided $35 million to 1,773 women entrepreneurs. Shahidi, the star of two TV shows, Black-ish and Grown-ish, will matriculate at Harvard in the fall and recently founded Eighteenx18, an organization dedicated to registering and educating first-time voters.
You might also recognize Shahidi from this site; she recently appeared in a series of short videos with her father, Afshin Shahidi, shot at Prince’s Minneapolis compound, Paisley Park. Her dad was Prince’s longtime photographer, and she knew the superstar from the time she was a little girl. In fact, one of the clips reveals that Prince kept a signed photograph of Yara. “Being so young normalized who he was,” Shadidi reflected in the video. “What was really surreal was when Paisley reopened to the public and me getting messages from people saying, your picture is in his office.” She’s also starring with her mother, actress Keri Shahidi, in a Mother’s Day video for Burch’s social channels that will debut April 25.
Eighteenx18 will be the focus of Burch and Shahidi’s conversation. Last week, Shahidi called from Los Angeles to discuss the project. “Ultimately, we want to make sure that our passion—which has led to rallies and marches and phone banks and calling our representatives—turns into policy change,” she began. Though she describes herself as “unabashedly blue”—i.e., a Democrat—Eighteenx18 is nonpartisan. “It’s about having a platform that invests in us as viable citizens who are socially engaged, and rather than seeing our engagement as the anomaly, really marketing to us, because if we aren’t participatory in these midterm elections or in our government and system at large, when we get to our young-adult years and all of these policies [around gun reform and criminal justice reform] aren’t implemented, we’re going to wonder what happened.”
The initiative has been gestating at least since the election and became a reality with a website and Twitter account several months ago. Eventually it will grow to include live events and long-form content. One of Shahidi’s first endeavors as its founder was to turn her 18th birthday into a voter registration party; she’s a living and breathing agent of change. “We saw how predictions went the last time around,” she said, referring to the presidential election, “but I have the audacity to feel optimistic. Being part of a generation that’s directly affected by school shootings, being part of a generation that feels invested in the life of Stephon Clark [the 22-year-old unarmed Sacramento man who was fatally shot by police] . . . . You have an agitated generation and we’re becoming hyper-aware of the resources we have and our true power. The next step is what we’ll do at the polls.”
Shahidi’s passion for and deep awareness of the issues yield a question: Does she have political ambitions of her own? Here’s betting it’s a line of discussion that comes up at tomorrow’s summit. She told Vogue: “What’s shifted [for me] is the idea of being aware of our own necessity. Our voices are needed. Coming into this year, being aware of that fact has really expanded what I’m open to doing, where I think my voice is needed. That’s mentally opened doors.”
The Embrace Ambition Summit will take place Tuesday, April 24. Other speakers include Margaret Atwood, Julianna Margulies, Lindsey Vonn, Congressman Joe Kennedy III, and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
