She Rules Her Generation

Hollywood’s most promising young star, YARA SHAHIDI, is refreshingly candid when it comes to her activism. She gets it from her mother.

- Chloe Malle

Yara Shahidi shimmers. Her fingernails are painted a pale iridescence that catches the light of the fixtures overhead as she gesticulates exuberantly while explaining the importance of “intentional intersectionality.” We’re in New York’s Crosby Bar on a rainy afternoon, and the 19-year-old actress has just come from a luncheon at which she presented an award to Taraji P. Henson. She has changed out of a striped Tory Burch pantsuit, but her clear shimmer lip gloss and nacreous lavender eyeshadow remain, and she seems to reflect light from every surface. But it goes beyond her makeup—she seems to glow from the inside.

Shahidi entered the cultural lexicon at 14, playing Zoey Johnson on the ABC sitcom Black-ish, but she cemented her position there offscreen, by speaking out on issues of social justice. The first word used to describe her is as often activist as actress, and no less an eminence than Oprah Winfrey has said she hopes she is still alive when Shahidi becomes president, because “that is going to happen if she wants it to happen.” (For her part, Shahidi says she would prefer to remain “policy adjacent.”) For her 18th birthday she hosted a voting party, with a registration booth, and launched a national initiative called Eighteen x 18 to galvanize young people to vote, a project she continues to focus on. “With midterms coming up it was, of course, our priority,” she says. “But now it’s about impressing upon people that there’s no such thing as an off year.”