Speaking at the Human Rights Campaign’s National Dinner on Saturday night, Oscar-winning actress Anne Hathaway attacked “straightness” and “whiteness” saying, “It is important to acknowledge with the exception of not being a cisgender male, everything about how I was born has put me at the current center of a damaging and widely accepted myth. That myth is that gayness orbits around straightness, transgender orbits around cisgender, and that all races orbit around whiteness.”
Hathaway continued, “This myth is wrong, but this myth is too real for too many. It is ancient, so it is trusted. It is a habit, so it is assumed to be the way things are. It’s inherited, so it’s thought immutable. Its consequences are dangerous because it prioritizes a certain kind of love, a certain kind of body, a certain kind of skin color, and does not value in the same way anything it deems to be other to itself.”
Then Hathaway segued to the idea that it is a select few white people who hold money and power and deny that same money and power to all others: “It is a myth that is with us from birth, and it is a myth that keeps money and power in the hands of the few instead of being invested in the lives of the free.”
Hathaway, whose older brother is gay, left the Catholic Church with her family after her brother went public about his sexual orientation; the family joined the Episcopal church.
She added, “I appreciate this community because together we are not going to just question this myth, we are going to destroy it … Let’s tear this world apart and build a better one.”
In July, reacting to the murder of Nia Wilson, who was black, by John Cowell, who is white, in Oakland, Hathaway wrote on Instagram, “White people- including me, including you, must take into the marrow of our privileged bones the truth that ALL black people fear for their lives DAILY in America.”
Hathaway, who hails from New York City native, was appointed as U.N. Women’s Global Ambassador in 2016.
