We feel it is our duty to use our fame for something bigger than empty things.My beautiful baby boy So curious and pure Yet SO clear about what you don’t want “NO!” you say with vigor When you don’t like something going on in your small but powerful 5-year-old-world I hope that never changes I hope that inner strength and fire Never extinguishes And you never feel the sway to fit in Or be silenced I have a STRONG feeling you won’t That’s just not the fabric from which u came Look at you: Future architect, Builder, Mastermind, Wisdom keeper, Re-shaper, Change maker… My Beautiful Baby Boy You are unstoppable!!! #Blacklivesmatter Link in my bio for ways you can stay involvedĪ post shared by Alicia Keys on at 1:06pm PDT I intend to keep on speaking out, as do a number of my peers. And when we listen to music it is as if the consciousness changes around us. Music has an uncanny way of getting to people’s emotions. We seem to be able to connect to millions of people who have either lost faith in the system or who need to feel a part of a community.
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We are artists and we are human, alive to what is going on around us. I know critics will say that people like me should stick to making records. Education, for example, is a vital opportunity for the poor – in Nigeria and elsewhere – and we must fight for it. But we need to know what steps to take to really effect the change we believe in. It is up to us to realise that if we put equality and human rights at the core of our value system, then change is possible. I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, and saw a lot of mental illness, which I think also raised my concern about healthcare. In the US, 86 people die from guns each day. And the scars run especially deep for those who know very well that at a certain point in their history their family were slaves. This is a country that has a huge legacy of racial inequality and brutality. For those of us who live in the US, social and racial injustice is glaringly obvious from the incarceration rate of people of colour and the huge amounts of money being pumped into the prison system. It is not just people in Nigeria, Sudan or Gaza who have been failed by their governments. Why, for example, is there such an obscene economic gap whereby 85 people have the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the global population? Surely it is time to re-evaluate our economic priorities? If we can bail out Wall Street why can’t we bail out the poor? Drop their debts and give them hope. On the other hand there appears to be more violence and a refusal to accept we are all equal and deserve the same rights and privileges. We see no international borders because of the internet, we are more global and more savvy. On the one hand things are surprisingly positive, my generation and the one after mine want to change things.
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A woman becomes a lioness when she sees her unborn child’s future juxtaposed with the horrors of the world. My awareness of social injustice became more apparent after I became a mother, and now I am pregnant with my second child. That was followed by the idea of galvanising fans of my music into a social movement which could become part of a 21st-century peace initiative. It resonates with the way many of us feel at the moment: the world is out of balance and terrible brutality is coming at us all the time in our news feeds.
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I went off and wrote the song We Are Here. Over the summer, a friend asked me the existential question, why are you here? From the process of asking others the same question I realised that if you can define why you are here, then you have discovered your purpose.
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I hope my involvement can send a strong message that the global community has not forgotten about the Nigerian girls. I want to be in the thick of it, to draw attention to things I believe are wrong. It’s not enough for me to tweet and go on news shows talking about my work. But as someone with a huge platform to reach people it makes me ask, how can I stand by and just watch that happen? As a mother, this cruel bombing leaves me heartbroken about the pain the parents must be feeling. And as if Nigerians have not suffered enough, now comes news of a bomb in a school in Yobe in the north-east of the country, detonated during the school’s assembly and killing at least 47 people and injuring scores of others. As for the girls, according to Human Rights Watch, many kidnapped by Boko Haram have been beaten, raped, made to kill and subjected to other unspeakable atrocities.