Oprah Winfrey has eliminated the word “diversity” from her vocabulary, and its all thanks to director Ava DuVernay. “Just like we aren’t sitting around talking about being black or being women”.
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“I have more tools to do it and more planks to build the house now, but ultimately if the story is not solid, it doesn’t matter how much money you have”.
“I used to use the word “diversity” all the time”, she said.
“We’re hearing a lot about diversity”, she told the New York Timesin a January interview. “When I see a film or a TV show about black people not written by someone who’s black, it’s an interpretation of that life”, DuVernay said.
‘And not trying to spend my time knocking on doors that were closed to me, begging people for things that put me at a disadvantage because they had it and I didn’t’.
“We aren’t sitting around talking about diversity”, DuVernay said.
She says, “Forward-thinking people and allies of this cause within the industry have the common sense to know that this is systemic”.
“No, no one’s going to stop me from doing what I want to do; I just have to figure out a way to do it that might not be the easy route that my counterparts who don’t look like me and identify as I do have”. “If you treat being black as a plight”, says the director, “it impacts your creativity”.
As black artists, what responsibility do you feel to include the challenges facing the black community in your storytelling?
DuVernay said Black Lives Matter is integrated from the very beginning of her new show Queen Sugar, which will premiere on Winfrey’s OWN network in September.
DUVERNAY Historically, black artists have not been able to interpret black life as robustly as we should, in terms of having it distributed, financed and shared. She and Oprah also spoke about the black story that is Queen Sugar and their goal to represent the Black Lives Matter movement in ways other than visualizing rallies. Though set a half-century in the past, Selma was deemed newly relevant in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, stemming from a series of disturbing encounters between police officers and African-American civilians across the country. “It’s really about saying that black lives matter, that humanity is the same when you go inside people’s homes”.
“Everybody gets caught up in the slogan and the hashtag and the protest”, says Winfrey.
With Greenleaf, Queen Sugar, and A Wrinkle in Time, it does feel like an exciting time for black women both onscreen and behind the scenes (“I’m telling you”, promises Oprah of Queen Sugar, “black Twitter is gonna blow up.”).
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Ava, you’ve expressed strong distaste for the term “diversity”, but Oprah has made use of it.
