A hip-hop pioneer, she’s making way for women of color in the music and cinema industries.
This is the story of Queen Latifah.
This is the story of Queen Latifah.
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MusicTranscript
00:00It's important that our stories are told.
00:02It's important that our voices are heard.
00:05It's important that a woman's voice is heard, period, around the world.
00:21I've been fortunate enough to be part of a burgeoning music, a new music called hip-hop.
00:27So I was part of that genre of music being created.
00:41The women in my family are like the most significant people in my life.
00:44My friends who support me, who I support, you know.
00:57For me, the hip-hop era that I come from was able to speak about everything going on socially.
01:14Everything, whether you just wanted to party all night or whether you wanted to bring down apartheid in South Africa.
01:27If the women on this earth were together and strong, then this earth would be a completely different place.
01:39I started out as a rapper, but not, you know, shortly thereafter became a manager.
01:45You know, we opened up a management company, my partner Shaquem and I, and I was 18 and he was 20.
01:50So it was always important for me to be able to make my own decisions, to be my own boss, and not to have to follow or take direction from someone.
02:21My brother was killed in a motorcycle accident when I was 22, he is 24.
02:25My mother's a teacher, and we wanted to create something that was a positive thing out of a tragedy, and education is really important in my family.
02:51I started as a rapper, but not, you know, shortly thereafter became a manager.
02:54You know, we opened up a management company, my partner Shaquem and I, and we wanted to create something that was a positive thing out of a tragedy, and education is really important in my family.
03:00I started as a rapper, but not, you know, shortly thereafter became a manager.
03:03Walking down the street means hope, it means inspiration.
03:32One of the reasons for me to be here is to inspire other young women, young African-American women, young wannabe rappers, or wannabe actors, or wannabe entrepreneurs, or full-figured sexy women, or, you know, anyone who sees me, I hope they see me there and feel inspired and feel like if I could do it, they could do it.
04:02Anytime you sing about America, to me it should be, to me it should have more responsibility.
04:08This is like a moment where, for a change, we kind of all get to come together and feel, you know, a sense of pride, and not really worry about anything else that goes on Monday morning.
04:19It's just the fact that you don't have enough films that look like us, with us starring.
04:46Hopefully we'll see more women of color stepping into animation, sci-fi, fantasy, of course romance, and comedy, you name it, documentaries, we just want to keep seeing those numbers rise.
05:16.