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If there's one thing you're going to watch today, let it be Lizzo's TED Talk on the Black history of twerking and how it taught her to love herself, just as she is.
The speech, which has dropped online in full, opens with the superstar talking about her "heinie" and learning to appreciate it:
"I used to hate my ass, believe it or not. I have my father's shape and my mother's thighs, so it's big, and long. I used to think that only asses like J.Lo's or Beyoncé's could be famous. I never thought that could happen to me."
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Lizzo explains how she was able to truly reach a point of self love by changing the way she viewed her body:
"How did this happen? Twerking. Through the movement of twerking, I realised that my ass is my greatest asset!"
Her talk discusses how the dance we see all over social media today was in fact, inspired by West African dances such as Mapouka, and like many things Black people create, "from fashion to music to the way we talk," it's been appropriated by pop culture.
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"Black people carried the origins of this dance through our DNA, through our blood, through our bones. We made twerking the global cultural phenomenon it became today."
And this is exactly why she's giving this TED talk - to help stop the "erasure of Blackness from twerking," and highlight it as a celebration of the body:
"I twerk because I'm talented. Because I'm sexual, but not to be sexualised. I twerk to own my power, to reclaim my Blackness, my culture. I twerk for fat, Black women because being fat and Black is a beautiful thing."
Watch her full, powerful speech below:
(Feature Image Credit: @TED/Instagram)
