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Ashley 'Dotty' Charles: 'Few moments compare to meeting Oprah!'

The rapper and radio presenter on the problem with online activism, the power of protest, and the moment Oprah squeezed her hand

Ashley “Dotty” Charles is the host of BBC’s 1Xtra breakfast show. Charles, 32, grew up in south London with two brothers and a sister and began rapping at 13. After a brief spell in Los Angeles with her family as a teenager, Charles moved back to the UK, graduated from Kingston University and, in 2012, signed to Virgin Records – the first British female MC to sign a major label album deal in more than a decade. She now lives in Surrey with her wife and their three-year-old son, with another baby on the way. Her forthcoming debut book, Outraged: Why Everyone Is Shouting and No One Is Talking, is published by Bloomsbury.

Your book is a swipe at the empty rhetoric of activism that only exists with a hashtag online. It’s timely now, but what prompted it?
I was on holiday in Thailand when I checked my phone – I shouldn’t have – and landed on an online feeding frenzy, one of those occasional social media moments where everyone is shouting about the same thing. Wall-to-wall fury. The currency of outrage, to me, was so twisted that I ended up writing about it in the Guardian. The feedback was amazing and I felt I’d found my tribe. Book publishers got in touch after that.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3dCcQhT
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