A Quote by Jesmyn Ward
My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I'm from.
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The really successful work in England tends to be working-class writers telling working-class stories. The film industry has been slow to wake up to that, for a variety of reasons. It still shocks me how few films are written or made in England about working-class life, given that those are the people who go to movies.
I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.
People tend to think that if someone is a movie star, that automatically everything is easier and there is less pressure. But all of them still keep that pressure on, are still inspired and still care about the work.
There is a lot more opportunity now, and I welcome all the conversations we are having about diversity, about women and about class... I come from a very working-class background, and I think the class thing is still probably more tricky.
When I talk about 'working class,' I don't talk about 'white working class,'. I talk about 'working class,' and a third of working class people are people of color. If you are black, white, brown, gay, straight, you want a good job. There is no more unifying theme than that.
I'm still tremendously proud of 'Crimson Petal.' I'm still very emotionally involved with these characters. I still care about them.
I live in a working-class community that is struggling at the poverty line, where people who work full-time jobs still at my corner bodega use food stamps. Do you think they care what the stock market's doing today or what the GDP number is? No.
I grew up in a working-class community. I come from a big family. I knew Donald Trump would win because I knew he is what poor Americans think a rich person looks like. And I knew that Hillary Clinton would annoy voters in their tens of millions, because she basically sucked at communicating with poor people and seemed like a person who'd been powerful and rich for decades. She was a disastrous candidate. I mean, she was up against a psychopath and she still lost. The country's thinking was beyond her, literally.
One thing I love about America is that I'm not boxed in by my upbringing here. England is still so class-based that there are certain roles that I just won't go for. I'm a middle-class boy and I won't go for the scruffy working-class role, which is frustrating, and here I can play anything.
The middle class today would be poor by the standards of the 1950s. Today, with two people working, they would still live paycheck to paycheck.
When I see an entire community disenfranchised, it disturbs me. Not that I'm a message guy, per se. I write about people. I like to write about human beings, not crap political rhetoric. I've tried to avoid that all my life. When I wrote about soldiers in Vietnam, I wasn't trying to make a political statement. I was trying to write about how screwed things were for soldiers, and how they still are.
I always quit while I am still inspired, while I could still write more. Never let the thread run all the way out.
Don't be didactic - don't write about poverty. Write about poor people. When you dramatize their lives and let life and characters be your inspiration, you will express the 'idea' dynamically and without preaching.
I feel like the kind of people I write about are the kind of people I grew up with, the families that I know in my community. Most everyone is working-class, and there are some intact families, but a lot of families aren't.
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.
I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can’t read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance.
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