Yara Shahidi plays Zoey on ABC’s Black-ish. She’s only 16 years old and already brands herself as a budding humanitarian and activist (her words). I recently ran across Yara’s work on Tracee Ellis Ross’s Instagram page. Tracee wrote, “🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾I don’t remember being this ‘woke’ or this clear when I was her age, but intelligent, conscious young women like my TV daughter @YaraShahidi give me so much hope for the future!“ After reading Tracee’s statement, I was intrigued so I watched the short video of Yara on Tracee’s Instagram page before finding and listening to her full speech on YouTube.

Art+Activism= the degradation of harmful stereotypes and tropes (thank you for the love) pic.twitter.com/KK2br6RDA3

— Yara shahidi (@YaraShahidi) July 13, 2016

2-minute video snippet. Here are two of my favorite quotes from Yara’s speech at the 2016 Conference on Volunteering and Service (blog post):

• Children are the anomaly if they succeed, the expectation if they fail.

• I’m cool plus I’m black which is cool so I win twice ✌🏽️

Click the image below for more pics of Yara at the BET Awards.