Brooke Obie Receives ‘The Root 100’ Most Influential African Americans of 2019 Honor
At the 10th anniversary of Black media site The Root’s annual ‘The Root 100’ gala celebrating the 100 most influential African Americans of 2019, Shadow And Act’s managing editor Brooke Obie received her award for the bombshell Shadow And Act exposé How ‘Green Book’ and the Hollywood Machine Swallowed Donald Shirley Whole. Obie’s interview with the family of Dr. Donald Shirley (portrayed in the film by Mahershala Ali) shifted the conversation around the film from mostly positive to the most controversial Oscar Best Picture winner since Crash.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – NOVEMBER 21: Brooke Obie 2019 ROOT 100 Gala honoree at The Angel Orensanz Foundation on November 21, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)
“I’m so grateful to the Shirley family for trusting me and Shadow And Act with their story. And I’m grateful to The Root for finding their story worthy of honor,” Obie said of the award. “We will continue to hold Hollywood accountable, dismantle harmful narratives, disrupt systems designed for our oppression and uplift Black creatives and narratives of our humanity and glory.”
In the 2018 Shadow And Act interview, Dr. Donald Shirley’s youngest and last-living brother Maurice Shirley dismissed the film as a “symphony of lies,” about his brother and decried the erasure of the Shirley family in the writing and production of Green Book. In her Shadow And Act review of the film, Obie labeled it a “poorly titled white savior film.”
The 10th annual The Root 100 gala took place on November 21, 2019, at New York City’s Angel Orensanz Foundation and featured speeches from The Root 100 list-topper Stacey Abrams and The Root founder Henry Louis Gates Jr. Other honorees included New York Times‘ The 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pose‘s Angelica Ross and more. Read more about the gala at The Root.