Selena Gomez on Politics, Faith, Music in Nadine Ijewere Fashion Story for Vogue US

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Selena Gomez covers the April 2021 issue of Vogue US. Gabriella Karefa-Johnson chooses a cover dress from Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, accented with Cartier earrings. Photographer Nadine Ijewere is behind the lens, capturing Selena in looks from Alberta Ferretti, Gucci, Salvatore Ferragamo, Valentino and more./ Hair by Edward Lampley; makeup by Hung Vanngo

To all the fashionistas saying that Selena looks like she belongs in a Vogue Living cooking show, AOC responds: “You insulated idiots, Selena Gomez has a streaming cooking show — ‘Selena + Chef’ — on HBO Max.” Gomez advances her cooking skills in the company of master chefs and probably throws in a bit of politics and activism to keep the convo interesting. This news was part of her Vogue Mexico December/January 2021 cover story and also Allure October 2020.

With restaurant industry folks suffering more than most in the pandemic, the world’s top chefs are organizing many online events to raise money for food and restaurant workers who are suffering terribly from job losses during the pandemic. Gomez is actively involved in that effort.

Jia Tolentino conducts the interview: Selena Gomez on Politics, Faith, and Making the Music of Her Career.

The story of Selena Gomez’s political awakening is not news either. But her October pre-election interview with Stacey Abrams is news to us. Here are the awesome Stacey Abrams — covering the current issue of Marie Claire US — and Gomez talking politics.

Note that there’s quite a lot of ignorance among progressives regarding the individual whose given Stacey support for nearly a decade. Just now, billionaire and former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg can perhaps take his foot off the Abrams funding gas pedal as she is soaring. But no one has come close to matching Bloomberg’s support of Abrams for over a decade, at times funding as much as 50 percent of her budget for Fair Fight and her other voter registration projects.

Of course, as Republicans are trying every trick in the book to changing voting requirements for the 2022 midterms, we probably do need Bloomberg’s money in new ways to get out the vote.

Selena Gomez on Voting

Another revelation from Gomez in the Vogue interview is one that agonized me with some of my closest friends in Philadelphia — Black women who didn’t vote in 2016.

In one case, this extraordinary Pan-African spiritual woman had brought me back from a terrible injury — one that involved her inflicting a high level of pain on me, as we slowly but steadily attacked breaking scar tissue in my leg muscle with massage in 2014.

The tears rolled down my cheeks in a perfect, candle light, spiritual music environment. It pained me to look at her face looking at me, watching the pain I was enduring. “Just do it,” I said. “I will tell you if I can’t take it anymore. Keep going.”

You can’t get much closer to another person than in such moments, and she fully restored all of my mobility after my doctor told me to accept a small but noticeable degree of impairment. Yet I could not persuade her to vote for Hillary. She would never vote for Trump. But she shared a common pov among millions of potential voters in 2016.

Gomez admits that she hadn’t voted at all before 2020.

“I just had no idea,” she says, sounding sad and unguarded. “Either I didn’t care or I just was not recognizing the importance of who’s running our country, and that’s really scary to think about.”

To her credit, Selena Gomez said there were “a million” people like her out there, and she has now made it a priority to connect with them into the future around activism and civic action. Goddess bless you, Ms. Gomez.

Selena Gomez also is now speaking about the reality that her paternal grandparents were undocumented. “It wasn’t for any reason that I didn’t share it before,” she says. “It’s just that as I started to see the world for what it is, all these things started to be like light bulbs going off.” Her grandparents came to Texas in a “back-of-the-truck situation,” Gomez tells me, “and it took them 17 years to get citizenship.

Most people don’t know that in 2019 Gomez served as an executive-producer for the Netflix series Living Undocumented.

“My goal was to communicate that these people are not ‘aliens’; they’re not whatever names other people have given them. They’re humans—they’re people,” she says. The author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, who wrote the dazzling, defiant 2020 book The Undocumented Americans about this very subject, tells me, “My dad was an undocumented delivery man on Wall Street, and he catered galas for the fanciest New York City families, and very important men sent him to the freight elevator with the trash because they didn’t think he was human.” She sent her book to Gomez because she felt a kinship—“another Latina young woman who was self-made and clever and beautiful and successful and kind, who struggled and reinvented herself and metabolized her suffering in her art”—and sensed that Gomez understood the elemental sin of this dehumanization. When Gomez championed the book, lending it her endorsement and speaking about it in interviews and on Instagram, it was “a special moment for thousands of Latinx youth, many of them undocumented and queer. They felt like she had our back. I felt like she had our back too.” Cornejo Villavicencio says that some of her most loyal readers now are Selenators. “And I love them fiercely.”

There are many reasons to love Selena Gomez, including that she has mastered making a fierce roast chicken. But as a long-time activist myself, I’m thrilled that we are now on the same team. And fashionistas really must get a grip on the reality that the media landscape has changed.

Hating this urgent evolution in the interests of so many people — especially women — will not make it go away. We’re not about to watch America become an authoritarian country because the fashionistas among us are sleeping at the switch. ~ Anne

Read on for more of Jia Tolentino’s interview: Selena Gomez on Politics, Faith, and Making the Music of Her Career.

Nadine Ijewere AOC Archives link