During a recent interview on the British TV show This Morning, Leigh-Anne Pinnock opened up about her decision to publicly speak out about racism and said she “doesn’t care” if she loses followers because of it. The Little Mix member also told the show’s hosts that racism is “something you can’t ignore.”

“Some people that have posted [about racism] have lost a lot of fans. I think it’s disgusting — but it just proves what we’re saying,” she explained.

As fans know, this came a few days after the former X Factor contestant posted a powerful video on Instagram where she talked bout her experiences with racism. Throughout the video, Leigh-Anne also recounted several moments when she felt that she constantly had to “work 10 times harder and longer to mark my place in the group because my talent alone isn’t enough.”

While speaking about her moving Instagram video on This Morning, Leigh-Anne said that now was the “right time to post it.”

“I spoke about my experiences briefly last year and I just didn’t feel like enough people cared, like enough people were listening,” she said. “This is the first time in my life that the whole world is speaking about racism, speaking about Black lives and I was just so overwhelmed by it and I just thought, ‘You know what, I feel like I need to kind of get rid of this pain that I’ve been carrying around for nine years and hopefully relate to people.'”

Now, after the positive reaction to her social media post, the “Wings” singer said it feels like there’s “been such a weight lifted.”

“Now, I just feel like people are starting to understand and educate themselves and see that this problem is massive and we need to talk about it and there needs to be a change because we just can’t go on like this anymore. Four hundred years of oppression, it just can’t go on anymore,” she added. “I was hearing from people who have been in the same sort of experiences that I have, so being the black girl in their band in the pop industry, saying how they felt exactly the same way as me and I’ve never ever had conversations with people who have had similar experiences as me.”

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