A Quote by Tessa Thompson
'Dear White People' started a conversation about race. It's such a difficult thing to talk about, especially in America because of our history. I love that you can confront it with humour and with satire.
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I think when people talk about race relations in America, they talk about African-American and white people. Asians are not often brought into the conversation. But there's a historical legacy of issues between them. It's hard to be like, 'What about us?' But we are a little underrepresented.
I talk about things I'm passionate about. I talk about the wrestling business, because I love wrestling. I just love it. If I can just have good conversation with a guy who was a bada** wrestler, we're talking about something that's very near and dear to our heart.
This film isn't about "white racism", or racism at all. DEAR WHITE PEOPLE is about identity. It's about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be. And this societal conflict appears to be one that many share.
It concerns me when people frame the conversation about equal pay about the entertainment business. I don't want the wage gap issue to be viewed as this myopic problem, because it's not. It's in 98 percent of all businesses, and it's easy for people to dismiss this conversation when they think it's around white women entertainers. But this is about all women in America.
It may be hard to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980's and because of both Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan - in particular Mrs Reagan - we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it. Something that I really appreciate was her very effective but low-key advocacy, but it penetrated the public conscience, and people began to say "hey we have to do something about this too.
I talk about Africa and its meaning, being the birthplace of man and all that great history that's been erased and even hidden. I think it's my duty to be proud and to bring about the conversation that allows us to talk about the great history of my people.
The first thing that always pops into my head regarding our president, is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him... They just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white - very white; American, Kansas, middle of America. There is no argument about who he is, or what he is. America's first black president hasn't arisen yet. He's not America's first black president. He's America's first mixed-race president.
Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
White people have basically been encouraged for most of recent history in America to think of themselves as outside of race. White people do have race. They need to understand how their race has been constructed as artificially as everybody else's.
I love seeing the videos of people who go and talk to these neo-Nazis because they're like, 'I'm just here to have a conversation and understand.' Having a conversation about it and talking about your emotions without judgement. You have to be able to be completely open, because they're not going to be, but you could turn a new leaf in their life.
One of the missions of 'The Nightly Show' was to have a conversation with America in a sense, and talk about the things that people didn't want to talk about it.
When the Kerner Commission told white America what black America has always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation’s slums, maintains them and profits by them, white America could not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free - (Chapter 9).
You don't get white comedians being asked to talk about their race in their shows. I should be given the same agency to talk about what I want to talk about.
I talk about race a lot. It's been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it's true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don't want to see.
In America right now, the people who talk about race the most are people of color - and if we are going to move the needle forward, it's WHITE people who need to acknowledge their role in racism.
As a white male in America, I have privilege. As a white male who happens to be an artist with a fan base, I have a platform to spread awareness about that privilege. However, songs about race and privilege are very difficult to A) write and B) dissect as a listener. They're heavy.
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