Queer actress Sophia Bush has earned praise for comments she made about white allyship at the NAACP Image Awards on February 28.
“Art is always political,” she told Refinery29 in an interview outside the event. “As the white friend at this event, I’m gonna go ahead and say to the women who look like me – to the men who look like me – it’s incredibly important to remember that so much of what we love in America comes from Black culture.”
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“And white people need to show up for Black people the way they show up to be entertained by Black culture,” she said. “So, given who’s in office and given what we’re seeing happening to Black and brown communities in our country, we better get our sh*t together.”
Folks on social media have praised the actress for using her platform to speak out.
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whoever doesn’t love Sophia Bush is wrong pic.twitter.com/protGMrhbj
— Reeves 🇿🇦 (@singfromthehair) March 2, 2026
The comment section on Refinery 29‘s Instagram post of the interview is also flooded with praise, with one user writing, “This is what support and advocacy look like.”
Bush came out as queer at the age of 41 in a 2024 essay for Glamour Magazine, after rumors of a relationship between her and soccer star Ashlyn Harris began swirling a year prior.
Bush’s essay in Glamour magazine details the immense pain she felt during her year-long marriage to entrepreneur Grant Hughes, as she knew something wasn’t right but felt completely trapped. She also expressed her profound love for Harris and emphasized that both of them were already deep into their respective divorces — including Harris’s from fellow soccer star Ali Krieger — before they fell in love. When folks first began to suspect their relationship, there was a lot of speculation that it was born of a cheating situation.
She said it took her over a year of doing “the most soul-crushing work” of her life to decide to leave her marriage. She added that her decision was not at all “based on some hysterical rendezvous” that “never happened.”
“Just because I didn’t want to process my realizations in real time on social media and spell them out for the world doesn’t mean the journey wasn’t long and thoughtful and exhaustive,” she noted.
Bush also detailed falling in love with Harris.
“I don’t know how else to say it other than: I didn’t see it until I saw it. And I think it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option,” she wrote.
She called their first date — a four-and-a-half-hour meal — “one of the most surreal experiences” of her life.
“For a sparkly moment I felt like maybe the universe had been conspiring for me,” she said. “And that feeling that I have in my bones is one I’ll hold on to no matter where things go from here.”
Bush compared coming out to recovering from trauma and she feels like she can finally breathe.
“I don’t think I can explain how profound that is. I feel like I was wearing a weighted vest for who knows how long. I hadn’t realized how heavy it was until I finally just put it down,” she wrote.
“It is so, so scary to do the brave thing, to say, ‘I’m just not happy.’ Especially if you’re in a partnership and you have to say it first,” she added. “But if you do it, you get the chance to be happy. To find your joy.”
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