WASHINGTON – Ten-time Grammy Award-winner Pharrell Williams said Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election would cause millennials to “galvanize” and “refuse anything less than equality.”
Williams, who wrote and performed the hit the song “Happy,” also predicted that Trump’s win would lead women to “recognize” that they have the “ultimate power.”
“My reaction is that I believe the millennials, they’re looking at this like, ‘OK, you know, the older people messed it up,’ you know. But I believe in them. I believe they’re going to galvanize and they’re going to refuse anything less than equality. I believe women will recognize that they have an incredible ability to galvanize just like they did in this film,” Williams, who endorsed Hillary Clinton, said about the presidential election results before the screening of Hidden Figures in D.C. last week at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“The power of women galvanized is to not only change their present conditions, but to actually have the things that they do serve humanity and take us all to a greater place. I believe women are going to recognize they are the absolute reason why mankind is on this planet – they therefore have the ultimate power and they’re going to recognize that power and they are going to show us and they are going to lead us – that’s what I think,” he added.
Hidden Figures tells the story of the African-American women who did calculations for the Mercury Seven flights and Apollo 11. They worked on the missions at West Area Computers, a segregated division of the Langley Research Center.
Grammy Award-winner Kanye West recently met with President-elect Trump in person at Trump Tower. He reportedly requested the meeting to discuss “multicultural issues” including “bullying, supporting teachers, modernizing curriculums, and violence in Chicago.”
Williams, a friend of West’s, was asked if he thinks it was a good idea for West to meet with Trump. Williams was also asked if he is open to meeting with Trump in the future, but he declined to answer both questions after a handler started to interrupt the interview.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the handler said while PJM was interviewing Williams.
“I think that the millennials and the women are going to save this planet – that’s what I think,” Williams said.
Some of the events documented in the film take place during segregation. Pharrell commented on the state of race relations in America today.
“The skeleton key for race relations is empathy. They have to understand what we and our culture has gone through, what they continue to go through, and there needs to be empathy for women, period. Like, as men we need to recognize what it’s like to be a woman and live in a world that is pretty much chauvinistic, you know, us fish we don’t know we are wet. We don’t know we are in water right now,” Williams said.
Actress Janelle Monáe plays aerospace engineer Mary Jackson in the film. She connected the story told in the movie to the current state of race relations in the United States.
“I think that this story, this story of a shared humanity, is so important for us to look at and use as an example of how we all work together to achieve a greater goal,” Monáe said.
“If the astronauts and the mathematicians and scientists, no matter what their color or gender was, if they did not all work together for that shared goal to get the first Americans into space, get John Glenn into orbit, then we would not have made history with doing that. So I think it should serve as a fine example of what we do when we remember at the end of the day we all bleed the same color,” she added.
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