After Jada Pinkett Smith suggested on Twitter that minorities should boycott the upcoming 88th Academy Awards over the ceremony’s lack of diversity, the actress and wife of Will Smith is now calling on the black community to separate itself from “mainstream” culture.
“Hi, today is Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday,” she said in a two-minute video posted on her Facebook page on Sunday. “I can’t help but ask the question: Is it time that people of color recognize how much power, influence that we have amassed that we no longer need to ask to be invited anywhere?”
She added: “I ask the question: Have we now come to a new time and place where we recognize that we can no longer beg for he love, acknowledgment, or respect of any group; that maybe it’s time that we recognize that if we love and respect and acknowledge ourselves in the way in which we are asking others to do, that that is the place of true power?” She continued:
Here’s what I believe; the Academy has the right to acknowledge whomever they choose, to invite whomever they choose, and now I think that it’s our responsibility now to make the change. Maybe it is time that we pull back our resources, and we put them back into our communities, into our programs, and we make programs for ourselves that acknowledge us in ways that we see fit that are just as good as the so-called mainstream ones. I don’t know, here’s what I do believe: Begging for acknowledgment or even asking diminishes dignity, and diminishes power, and we are a dignified people, and we are powerful, and let’s not forget it. So, let’s let the Academy do them, with all grace and love, and let’s do us differently. I got nothin’ but love.
[…]
Complete text and video linked here.
