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CONVERSATION: Munroe Bergdorf

INTERNATIONAL ACTIVIST and model Munroe Bergdorf gave a special keynote address to students at Oxford Guild on Tuesday (Nov 21) at Oxford’s Historic Wadham College.

Munroe was a part of the Guild’s Infinity Speaker Series, a unique and special speaker series embracing diversity and targeted at encouraging women, LGBTQ people and ethnic minorities to believe that they can succeed in their chosen career path or profession.

During her empowering speech, the transgender model shared her thoughts on tackling racism. She said: "This is were we realise racism involves all of us. It's not just on people of colour to be the frontiers of the race debate. We can't put all that pressure on people of colour to always explain their oppression. It's not fair and it's not really going anywhere when it's met with deaf ears."

"Society is all of us so if we want to make change, we all individually need to be making changes," she added.

Munroe is making waves as one of the influencers raising awareness of social issues that are affecting thousands of people across the world today. She has shared her own life experiences as well as speaking about sensitive subjects and topics some perceive as ‘taboo’; challenging stereotypes on gender, race, diversity and sexuality.

These issues have been very pressing in 2017 and Munroe has been at the forefront of media stories that have sparked international debates.

As the first transgender model to be selected for a UK beauty campaign, which was intended to represent diversity, her story became global news when she spoke out on racism faced by black people. This triggered a worldwide debate about systemic racism, equality and also questioned brands intentions for selecting models based on ‘tokenism’.

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