Gabourey Sidibe wants to know why everyone can’t fathom her confidence, but no one questions Rihanna’s. Check out highlights from her awesome speech from the Gloria Awards and Gala here!
Gabourey Sidibe absolutely loathes fielding questions about her ability to feel confident. The 30-year-old Precious actress, who you may also recognize from The Big C and American Horror Story, let her true feelings be known Thursday night at the Gloria Awards and Gala.
She began, “One of the first things people usually ask me is, ‘Gabourey, how are you so confident?’ I hate that. I always wonder if that’s the first thing they ask Rihanna when they meet her. ‘RiRi! How are you so confident?’ Nope. No. No. But me? They ask me with that same incredulous disbelief every single time. ‘You seem so confident! How is that?'”
Gabourey Sidibe shuts down fat shamers with a single tweet >>
After recalling the time she got shut down trying to share homemade cookies with her fifth-grade class, Sidibe explained, “I really got so excited to bake that I had forgotten that everyone hated my guts. Why didn’t they like me? I was fat, yes. I had darker skin and weird hair, yes. But the truth is, this isn’t a story about bullying, or color, or weight. They hated me because… I was an a**hole!”
At home, Sidibe also had a hard time with her parents criticizing her weight.
She went on to share, “So I got made fun of at school, I got made fun of at home too, my older brother hated me, my dad just didn’t understand me, and my mom, who had been a fat girl at my age herself, understood me perfectly… but she berated me because she was so afraid of what she knew was to come for me.”
Gabourey Sidibe told to quit Hollywood by Joan Cusack >>
Admitting there are moments when it’s hard to face the cameras at a red carpet event, the Oscar-nominated actress explained, “There’s always a big chance if I wear purple, I will be compared to Barney. If I wear white, a frozen turkey. And if I wear red, that pitcher of Kool-Aid that says, ‘Oh, yeah!’ Twitter will blow up with nasty comments about how the recent earthquake was caused by me running to a hot dog cart or something… Sometimes when I’m being interviewed by a fashion reporter, I can see it in her eyes, ‘How is she getting away with this? Why is she so confident? How does she deal with that body? Oh my God, I’m going to catch fat!'”
Referring back to her classmates, as well as all of the other people who criticized her over the years, Sidibe concluded, “If they hadn’t told me I was ugly, I never would have searched for my beauty. And if they hadn’t tried to break me down, I wouldn’t know that I’m unbreakable.So when you ask me how I’m so confident, I know what you’re really asking me: how could someone like me be confident? Go ask Rihanna, a**hole!”
Leave a Comment