Smize On The Prize—6 Black Women Who Continue Richard T. Greener’s Harvard Legacy - Page 3
2. Yara Shahidi, 24
Source: Cindy Ord / Getty Images
For 10 years, Yara Shahidi played the popular social media-obsessed teenager Zoey Johnson on ABC’s Black-ish and its spin-off series Grown-ish. But the talented actress says in real life, “I was always a nerd, always straight As.”
The model credits her mother, Keri Shahidi, a successful actress, for her wanting a well-balanced quality of life: “She’s the one that really set the standard to say that acting is something that we do, but it’s not who we are.”
Still, it was Shahidi’s cousin, rapper Nas, who exposed her to the prospect of studying at Harvard. He invited the mother-daughter duo to the announcement of the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at the institution because he thought Shahidi “would enjoy it.”
L–R: Yara Shahidi and Nas pose as Max Mara celebrates Yara Shahidi at the 2023 WIF Max Mara Face of the Future Award Recipient Cocktail Event on Nov. 29, 2023, in Los Angeles. Source: Vivien Killilea / Getty Images for Max Mara
“It was the first time that I saw Black and brown students in an Ivy League environment,” she recalled on the Sherri show, explaining that before visiting the campus “I just didn’t even think there was space for me at Harvard.”
After receiving a recommendation letter from Michelle Obama The Optimist Project host graduated in May 2022, earning a Bachelor of Arts from the African American studies department with a “[concentration] on Black political thought under a neocolonial landscape.”
