Lizzo looks at the police violence in U.S. and surmises that someone very important just doesn’t care.
Lizzo, 32, graces the cover of Vogue‘s October 2020 issue and, in an in-depth interview, the “Truth Hurts” singer touches on police violence, voting and the appropriation of the body-positivity movement.
“They don’t actually care,” Lizzo said of police violence in the U.S. “And ‘they’ — I don’t know who ‘they’ are. But I know that they don’t care, because if s**t like this is still happening, there has to be a ‘they.’ They don’t care about somebody’s actual life.”
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“I just want to encourage people to register to vote,” she continues. “That is the most important thing to me. Because there’s a lot of upset people, and there’s a lot of people who have power. There’s a lot of voter suppression in Black communities.”
To Lizzo, voting is a form of protest and she encourages all of her listeners to get out and vote in the upcoming U.S. election.
“There’s a lot of angry white kids now. And I’m like, ‘Yo, register to vote. Go out,” the rapper insists. “You won’t get suppressed if you try to go to your ballot box.’ You know? I think it’s important to remind people of what they can do.”
“My job isn’t to tell you how to vote. But my job is hopefully to inspire you to vote,” she explains. “To activate you, so that you can take your protest to the ballot box.”
Always one to speak her mind, Lizzo also touches on how the body-positivity movement is being appropriated.
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“It’s commercialized,” she says. “Now, you look at the hashtag ‘body positive,’ and you see smaller-framed girls, curvier girls. Lotta white girls. And I feel no ways about that, because inclusivity is what my message is always about. I’m glad that this conversation is being included in the mainstream narrative. What I don’t like is how the people that this term was created for are not benefiting from it.”
“Girls with back fat, girls with bellies that hang, girls with thighs that aren’t separated, that overlap. Girls with stretch marks. You know, girls who are in the 18-plus club. They need to be benefiting from,” she concludes. “The mainstream effect of body positivity now. But with everything that goes mainstream, it gets changed. It gets—you know, it gets made acceptable.”
The October 2020 issue of Vogue is available Oct. 6.
