After beating breast cancer twice, hip-hop legend Roxanne Shanté doesn’t view the scars from her battle as an imperfection, but rather a mark of beauty. In light of promoting her new Netflix biopic Roxanne Roxanne, Shanté alongside Chanté Adams who stars as her in the film stopped by Sway In The Morning to talk about the importance of the film, her impact on hip-hop culture and outlook on female rappers. Shanté also managed to touch base on her two-time victorious battles with breast cancer, affirming her scars as beauty marks.
The Queensbridge battle rap queen who appears fairly at peace with an aura that gooks wisdom, revealed her two-time diagnosis in an 2009 interview revealing the first time she noticed a symptom of the disease, “In March, I noticed a lump in my left breast, rather small at the time and didn’t really know what I was feeling.” Now almost ten years cancer free, Shanté continues to strive as an advocate in the fight against breast cancer.
“I still do the pink ponytail events every year. I will change the ponytail to a full pink ponytail, I would rock it for the entire month, I am a survivor. I post up my scars on Instagram,” Shanté tells Sway. “I post up my scars on Instagram mainly because I want other women who have these same scars not to feel bad.”
Overall, Shanté is on a mission to show and inspire breast cancer survivors how to embrace their scars as territories of strength. “If you have had lumpectomies, mastectomies…if you’ve had to go through biopsies and different things like that and you’re scarred up, I want them to be able to say, okay listen you know what you see so many perfect boobs out there,” said Shanté. “It’s like alright listen, I’m putting mine up here stretch marks and marks, yea. Some of those is stretch marks, some of those is marks but they all there. What they are, are beauty marks. They are the beauty of surviving.”
As a hip-hop icon, Shanté’s act of showing her scars holds the power to inform women about the importance of getting tested. The fear many women hold against developing imperfect breasts is immediately pacified when they hear the story behind another woman’s triumphant battle. That woman is the mighty Roxanne Shanté.
Watch Roxanne Shante’s interview with Sway In The Morning, below.
