Janelle Monáe.Photo: Gabriel Olsen/Getty
Janelle Monáeis no stranger to utilizing her platform in order to shine a light on the experiences of the Black community.
TheHidden Figuresstar says that after releasing “Hell You Talmbout,” she had an eye-opening experience and “learned about the amount of women — Black women in particular — who had lost their lives to police violence and their stories were not covered,” Monáe says. “I just felt like it was super important that we all, on a global scale, became aware.”
Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, cofounder of the African American Policy Forum, says the community has “fallen out of awareness around this tragedy that’s happened to too many Black women” and the growing activism is “the kind of shift that’s necessary” in our society to “reverse injustices.”
She adds, “We say their names, we bring awareness to the fact that so many of their families experience not just the loss of the daughter, but the loss of the loss. It’s like their killing doesn’t mean anything and because it doesn’t get reported, there’s an additional trauma that the family has to deal with.”
Janelle Monáe; Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw.Jacopo Raule/Getty; Rachel Murray/Getty
“We basically try to mend and tend to the spirit and the body, to the trauma and to the possibilities that still lay ahead,” Crenshaw tells PEOPLE. “So this song, the tremendous gift that the artists are giving us, will allow us to do more of the work that frankly, a lot of people don’t even know needs to be done.”
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However, Monáe ensures that the focus is not on the celebrities she collaborated with but the AAFP and the historical impact they can make.
“Each of us is a daughter and we came together on a human to human level, sister to sister level to honor these names,” she says.
“Music has always been therapy for me. What this [song] is also doing is capturing a moment in our history and how we all came together to spread the word about who they are,” the singer adds. “To be able to uplift their names in this song is taking a piece of American history and taking a piece of what has happened so that history won’t repeat itself again.”
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source: people.com
