Lena Dunham has acknowledged that "white privilege" had a big hand in helping her find a foothold in Hollywood.
The 34-year-old actress took to Twitter to respond after discovering she was trending on the social media site due to a tweet from The Hollywood Reporter which read: "@LenaDunham was 23 when she sold #Girls to HBO with a page-and-a-half-long pitch, without a character nor a plot."
The tweet was then retweeted by numerous BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) filmmakers and actors, who compared their own experiences in the industry to Lena's.
The Girls star quick to respond to the flurry of tweets mentioning her Twitter handle.
"Whenever I find out I'm trending, I have to immediately check if I’m alive!" she began.
"Then, I try and see if there’s a constructive dialogue to have on Twitter. Often there isn't, but today there really WAS. It actually wasn’t a dialogue - it was just me agreeing that the Hollywood system is rigged in favour of white people and that my career took off at a young age with relative ease, ease I wasn’t able to recognise because I also didn’t know what privilege was.
"The past 10 years have been a series of lessons. The lesson now? Sit down. Shut up, unless it’s to advocate for change for Black people. Listen. Make art in private for a while - no one needs your book right now lady. Give reparations widely. Defund the police. Rinse and repeat."
The topic of racial inequality has been widely discussed in recent weeks following the killing of George Floyd by police officers, which sparked Black Lives Matter protests around the world.
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