Speaker 1: Wake that ass up in the morning. Breakfast Club Morning.
Speaker 2: Everybody is dj En v Charlamagne the God. We are
Speaker 2: the Breakfast Club. You got a special guest.
Speaker 1: In the building in front of the room, Yes, indeed,
Speaker 1: we have Erica alexand in the back. Welcome you.
Speaker 3: I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1: Y'all.
Speaker 3: In your King chairs. It's fabulous.
Speaker 1: We will have King chairs there too, shortly, King and Queen.
Speaker 4: It's gonna spend though, because this is really not okay.
Speaker 4: The problem heavy the head that wears the crack.
Speaker 1: How are you.
Speaker 4: I'm doing well. I'm well and highly blessed and highly favored.
Speaker 4: I love to hear thank you.
Speaker 3: These are n Ray locks of great debor hair.
Speaker 1: Baby.
Speaker 4: She created these. You actually seen these when I played Max.
Speaker 4: They were in black, they were yard. It's just done
Speaker 4: the color, yeah, because the the more it wears, the
Speaker 4: more it looks Matt like real locks.
Speaker 3: So it was a costume. I did not know that
Speaker 3: was a cost.
Speaker 1: I thought that was your real head a whole time.
Speaker 3: No, it was it.
Speaker 4: It was a hairstyle that i'd gotten right before I
Speaker 4: had gotten the Audi edition, and I came in with
Speaker 4: that look and it just worked for the character and
Speaker 4: then became sort of synonymous with it. And then I've
Speaker 4: rocked with her for now thirty years and she's innovated
Speaker 4: on it.
Speaker 3: These are the nray lots.
Speaker 1: The executives fight you didn't like, you can't you can't
Speaker 1: wait dreadlocks on TV.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, they didn't fight me because they had
Speaker 4: already fought the Bowser about the entire character. They had
Speaker 4: asked her to get rid of it. They didn't want Max,
Speaker 4: and she said, no, if you get rid of Max,
Speaker 4: you get rid of me, because I'm identify most with
Speaker 4: her because I wanted to be a lawyer. She went
Speaker 4: to Stanford, so she said, okay, I'll put her across
Speaker 4: the street.
Speaker 1: Wow. Why didn't they want the character? They felt like,
Speaker 1: the cat's too big already or too strong?
Speaker 3: Wow, too black?
Speaker 4: Too strong, Wow, too strong? They said, the character's too strong.
Speaker 3: Rid of it?
Speaker 4: She said, no, why am I doing the show then?
Speaker 4: And so that was a compromise. So that's why you
Speaker 4: always saw her coming across the street. She was supposed
Speaker 4: to live in the apartment with the girls.
Speaker 1: But wow, the bullshit in Hollywood have gone off for
Speaker 1: a long time, long time.
Speaker 3: Somebody need to write a book. Oh they have no.
Speaker 2: I thought about you the other day when Taraji was
Speaker 2: talking about speaking about against work conditions and getting paid.
Speaker 2: You're worth yeah, And when you were here I'm not
Speaker 2: for show. It was the first time, a second time,
Speaker 2: a third time you were comparing other shows and saying
Speaker 2: that these other shows were getting so much more money,
Speaker 2: but the ratings were pretty similar. So when you see that,
Speaker 2: what was your thought?
Speaker 4: Well, I hate to think about it because my heart
Speaker 4: goes out to her. I love Taraji Pans and she's
Speaker 4: right here. I am crying. I'm crying because I hate
Speaker 4: to see black people in pain, anyone in pain, but
Speaker 4: especially black people.
Speaker 3: Because there is a systemic.
Speaker 4: Paradigm, a template that's placed upon us, and it acts
Speaker 4: upon you whether you know it or not. People try
Speaker 4: to equate it with, say, the contracts that athletes get,
Speaker 4: and that's the wrong thing to compare it to. People
Speaker 4: don't understand how it works, so they make all these
Speaker 4: assumptions you negotiated that you shouldn't have taken, That there's
Speaker 4: a floor and a ceiling already, and it doesn't exist
Speaker 4: based on merit or say performance performance. It's based on
Speaker 4: anything they could come with that day. But it's based
Speaker 4: on mostly your skin color, your gender and things like that.
Speaker 4: And it doesn't matter often what you've done and how
Speaker 4: much you've made, how much you've contributed to the culture,
Speaker 4: the overall.
Speaker 3: American culture, none of that.
Speaker 4: It's random, and so it hurts to go and you
Speaker 4: do all that work, and then each time you go
Speaker 4: to the table, it's like starting at at you know,
Speaker 4: at the base.
Speaker 3: Again. I've gone through that my whole life.
Speaker 4: And did people say, well, it's because you haven't been
Speaker 4: successful in film in this way and that and that way?
Speaker 3: I said, is it really? Because I see people who.
Speaker 4: Have none of my success, none of my experience and
Speaker 4: or talent, and they get more coming in the door.
Speaker 4: So what is that They didn't even need to prove themselves.
Speaker 4: Often they're getting offered these roles and we're still auditioning
Speaker 4: for it, and they have tons of tape on us.
Speaker 4: So it's true, and she's not the only one to
Speaker 4: speak about it. She won't be the last. And there
Speaker 4: needs to be something done. But unless you get it
Speaker 4: at the root, meaning in distribution and creating a whole
Speaker 4: different system, then we're always working underneath that.
Speaker 2: Now you said something, you said negotiate, right, So the
Speaker 2: first thing that man people say is is something that
Speaker 2: you said, you have to negotiate what it is? But
Speaker 2: the problem negotiating if they're not negotiating anything close. Do
Speaker 2: you not take a job? Do you not take an opportunity?
Speaker 2: And when do you finally work? If they're all negotiating
Speaker 2: at the same scale.
Speaker 4: That's right, But you know who does know those numbers?
Speaker 4: The agents they negotiate all those contracts, and somewhere in
Speaker 4: there there is a real conversation, a hard conversation about
Speaker 4: why they're starting their female and the people of color,
Speaker 4: meaning their actors of color, their clients of color at
Speaker 4: a lower at a lower starting, and that goes to
Speaker 4: how they see us, how they value us, if they
Speaker 4: value us at all. I was told by someone who
Speaker 4: used to manage me for a very short time, but
Speaker 4: he said, Eric, if you ever wanted to know why
Speaker 4: I didn't really do much for you, you it was
Speaker 4: because I had three different partners from the same and
Speaker 4: it's a big management company take him out to lunch
Speaker 4: to tell him they'd seen his roster of clients and
Speaker 4: they said, that's casting, that's not investing.
Speaker 3: Wow, And they all took him out.
Speaker 1: Do you break that down the difference between casting and investing.
Speaker 4: I mean, when we need them, we can get them,
Speaker 4: we don't invest in their careers. There's no way that
Speaker 4: we want your time put in those careers. So we
Speaker 4: don't want to invest as a as a management company
Speaker 4: in that, we don't want you spending your time.
Speaker 3: He was a black man. I've heard that over and
Speaker 3: over again.
Speaker 4: So if they're already dissuading you from representing your people
Speaker 4: or the type of person, unless it's maybe somebody who's
Speaker 4: already crossed over big, if you're not Will Smith, if
Speaker 4: you're not Denzel Washington, then they're basically saying, don't invest
Speaker 4: in those people. Perhaps maybe an athlete or maybe a
Speaker 4: singer might make the cut, but not actresses, because you're right,
Speaker 4: they can just go get someone else if you don't
Speaker 4: take what they're offering.
Speaker 1: Next, is it because there's I was I'm sitting there
Speaker 1: trying to think of who would be the black woman
Speaker 1: equivalent to a Denzel or a Will Like. Who's the
Speaker 1: person that has done three or four blockbusters that have
Speaker 1: made profit for a theater, for a for a studio.
Speaker 4: I don't know, Well, maybe Halle Berry at one point there.
Speaker 4: You might say that Viola is in that space now
Speaker 4: because she's done the help and she's also done woman King.
Speaker 4: I don't know if those numbers meet the standard, but
Speaker 4: her life does. And if you just say okay, when
Speaker 4: she puts it, she talked about it. She said, you know,
Speaker 4: Merle Street did this, I've done that. If you just
Speaker 4: sort of equate it with Merrill the great MARYL.
Speaker 3: Street.
Speaker 4: No one wants to take anything away from her. She
Speaker 4: should be on par and I doubt she is. She's
Speaker 4: saying she's making a tenth of what her white female
Speaker 4: counterparts are making. Jessica Chastained famously linked her salary to
Speaker 4: Octavia Spencer so she could get her first payday. Wow,
Speaker 4: why is that after she scotten her oscar? That's great?
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 4: That's being not only an ally but an abolition issue.
Speaker 4: You're linking your you know, your star power to someone
Speaker 4: else to make sure that they get something. But that's unacceptable.
Speaker 1: I saw, I think I read. American Fiction has made
Speaker 1: almost six million dollars at the box office with a
Speaker 1: budget of like almost two. If I'm not mistaken, it's.
Speaker 3: The budget was more. I think it was over five.
Speaker 1: It was over five. Yes, okay, but it's very critically acclaim.
Speaker 1: But then I see like Booker Clarence had a budget
Speaker 1: of like forty million, but they've only made three million
Speaker 1: at the box office. Color Purple had a budget of
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty. They made close to sixty. So
Speaker 1: what do you feel the route to go is when
Speaker 1: you're making black cinema?
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, we shouldn't call it black cinema.
Speaker 4: We should call it cinema. They've done that to television
Speaker 4: when they started saying that we were on a black show.
Speaker 4: Suddenly those marketing dollars went down. Here when you're on
Speaker 4: the Jeffersons, when you're on even Sanford and Son or
Speaker 4: What's Happening. Those were shows on NBC, in ABC, they
Speaker 4: were sandwiched white between Mash and other shows. And I
Speaker 4: think that that was a paradigm ship that actually armed us.
Speaker 4: We're always using their pressor's language to define us and
Speaker 4: black music.
Speaker 3: What's that?
Speaker 4: All this music is ours, but it starts to categorize
Speaker 4: us and put you know, it's redlining. If you can't
Speaker 4: get past that, and they're already say it's a black show,
Speaker 4: they don't say it's a Chinese show. I don't see
Speaker 4: nobody saying it's black basketball or black football. Showed me
Speaker 4: white football, then no, that's football soccer right same.
Speaker 1: Well, there you go.
Speaker 4: Don't tell that to all those you know, there was
Speaker 4: countries of color. So well, but that's what we're talking about.
Speaker 4: And that goes down to the myth that we don't
Speaker 4: translate well overseas. But they don't say that about the music.
Speaker 4: You couldn't put a black They would expect you on
Speaker 4: some sneakers to link that with a black player because
Speaker 4: they're seen as the best, but no, we won't buy
Speaker 4: your stories. So then they did in twelve years Slave
Speaker 4: in other countries. They put Brad Pitt right center in
Speaker 4: big and minimized the lead character. And Brad Pitt was
Speaker 4: furious when he saw it and he said, absolutely not,
Speaker 4: You're not going to do that. But they've been doing
Speaker 4: that for decades, and so that's a problem. We shouldn't
Speaker 4: call it black cinema. We should call it cinema. And
Speaker 4: we should also know that those marketing dollars and the
Speaker 4: promotion is not the same. And when we are living single, unfortunately,
Speaker 4: we were mostly sent to cities of color, DC Atlanta,
Speaker 4: and we said, look, can we go to Prioria? Can
Speaker 4: we go to We have fans all over. But they
Speaker 4: didn't want to spend the money. So then therefore they're
Speaker 4: limiting their own bottom line. Why are they doing that?
Speaker 4: Because was the Cosby Show a black show? Or was
Speaker 4: it a television show? Just after that they started to
Speaker 4: create the type of language and very distinctive around television shows.
Speaker 4: They had already done it with excuse me, with music,
Speaker 4: but around television shows.
Speaker 3: And we've paid the price.
Speaker 4: And unless we get in there and look at the
Speaker 4: system and diagnose the real problem, because it is systemic,
Speaker 4: and it starts at representation and all those things that
Speaker 4: know those numbers and yet continue to offer their clients
Speaker 4: as less than valuable, then we'll never get past the problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely right. I wonder you know, because a lot
Speaker 1: of times we do it out of a sense of pride, right,
Speaker 1: like we say black music, you know, black black film.
Speaker 1: But I guess we're kind of doing that to our
Speaker 1: own detriment business.
Speaker 3: Wise, right, singing a black book.
Speaker 4: That's what American Fiction Party is about, is that he
Speaker 4: doesn't want to be in a category of black anything.
Speaker 4: He wants to say I'm an author that happens to
Speaker 4: be black, and Tony Morrison talked about it, saying very
Speaker 4: famously that everyone's seen the clip where the woman asked her,
Speaker 4: would you ever write about white characters the way you write?
Speaker 4: She goes to you, no idea. How insulting that is
Speaker 4: because you would never ask a white author that. But
Speaker 4: you presume that we want to be in your world.
Speaker 4: She said, I'm writing my book and it's about the
Speaker 4: characters that I know. So it's not meant to be
Speaker 4: a book that's meant for black people. It's meant to
Speaker 4: book be a book for everybody. But we don't say
Speaker 4: those things to anyone else. So black people are constantly
Speaker 4: being attacked by an American paradigm that's locked us in
Speaker 4: a black identity, which is an identity crisis for them.
Speaker 4: It makes them schizophrenic. They have no idea where to
Speaker 4: put us. But with music. That music is all of ours,
Speaker 4: rock and roll, punk, metal, all of ours. So why
Speaker 4: are we excluded from country and see being seen as
Speaker 4: rock and rollers? Why is little Richard demanding that even
Speaker 4: while he's passing away and can't make a living, can't
Speaker 4: pay his rent, And we have Lisa Cortez make that
Speaker 4: great documentary, but we shouldn't have to do that after
Speaker 4: they pass away. We should be working toward that right now,
Speaker 4: to destroy those things that are destroying us.
Speaker 2: I was gonna ask, you know, we talk about all
Speaker 2: the time, but now it seems like it's.
Speaker 1: A lot different.
Speaker 2: We always say that we have to support our own
Speaker 2: support our own movies, but from hearing from you, it
Speaker 2: seems like you're saying that we don't have the same
Speaker 2: marketing dollars. So a lot of times, a lot of
Speaker 2: our people don't even know our movies are out when
Speaker 2: it comes to you know, the Book of Clarence that
Speaker 2: just recently came out, or even the Color Purple that
Speaker 2: you know, we don't get the same amount of marketing
Speaker 2: dollars that an action box office.
Speaker 1: Movie Orgin that's coming out. I just knew it was
Speaker 1: outside of the I think it was the Golden Globes
Speaker 1: passing out flyers for Origin, which is insane. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: what are you going to say?
Speaker 2: So I was asking it. So it doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 2: that we're not supporting. It's a lot of times we're
Speaker 2: not aware of some of the stuff that's actually happened
Speaker 2: that's what it seems like that you're saying that. It's
Speaker 2: not the fact that we don't want to support.
Speaker 1: Or we can't support.
Speaker 2: It's the fact that, you know, we're saying that we
Speaker 2: don't hear about it. We don't have the same promotion,
Speaker 2: We don't know. It's not on our mind mind every
Speaker 2: ten minutes like some of these other movies are.
Speaker 4: You know, often that can be the case, but it's
Speaker 4: also not the level of sophistication that we deserve. They're
Speaker 4: not putting the marketing dollars into how they present it
Speaker 4: to us of a level of importance, allowing us to
Speaker 4: sort of have the same types of ability to take
Speaker 4: it in in a way that says, not only is important,
Speaker 4: we know it's important because look at how well that
Speaker 4: it's presented. We depend a lot on word of mouth,
Speaker 4: and black people have the least amount of time to
Speaker 4: watch movies and these types of things. We're doing so
Speaker 4: many things all at once. Sometime all you want to
Speaker 4: do is go home and watch the game. You don't
Speaker 4: want to step out the door. And yet we do
Speaker 4: support the film and television and the books that people
Speaker 4: are doing.
Speaker 3: We're great readers.
Speaker 4: We buy books and all these other things we're willing
Speaker 4: to go to to a lot of things. It says
Speaker 4: that we're thirteen percent of this population and many of
Speaker 4: us are incarcerated, many of us are on huge burdens
Speaker 4: that have nothing that take our numbers down. What they're
Speaker 4: not doing is promoting to white audiences.
Speaker 1: Why do you think this last question?
Speaker 2: Why do you think they pick certain movies to do that?
Speaker 4: On?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Like we talked about a couple of movies, but then
Speaker 2: I'm watching the game the other night and I see
Speaker 2: the Bob Marley movie and I see that prime time,
Speaker 2: So it's you know, it's like, well, why do you
Speaker 2: promote this one and then not.
Speaker 1: All of them?
Speaker 2: You know, it was just always a thought to me.
Speaker 4: But it's a great thought envy, because the truth is
Speaker 4: a lot of white people embraced Bob Martin. When they
Speaker 4: go down to tour the tourists, they put that on
Speaker 4: and if you know it, you know, they know him
Speaker 4: almost better than we do. A lot of people don't
Speaker 4: know that he's the son of a British officer, he's mixed,
Speaker 4: you know, they don't know that about Bob Marley. We
Speaker 4: don't know about him. They should do a movie about him.
Speaker 4: They should advertise it to everything. That's what they should do,
Speaker 4: like they did Black Panther. What they won't do is
Speaker 4: something that they don't value. They won't do it to that,
Speaker 4: and they've already made that calculation. Then that's what you're seeing,
Speaker 4: and you can tell in the amount of power that's
Speaker 4: put behind it and where it's going. Black people shouldn't
Speaker 4: have to always save everybody, including us. We should have
Speaker 4: a right to sometime make choices based on whether we
Speaker 4: want to see something. They're giving an opportunity to say
Speaker 4: yes or no, and we are not.
Speaker 1: American fiction explores so much of what we're talking about
Speaker 1: right now. I watched it last night. Very interesting film.
Speaker 1: What is it about? That's the obvious question for the
Speaker 1: people who haven't seen.
Speaker 4: So cour Jefferson is the writer director. He's a very
Speaker 4: accomplished writer. He wrote and with Damon lindelof the Watchmen
Speaker 4: series that we see with Regina King. They put a
Speaker 4: whole reparation storyline in. It's because the Great Court Jefferson
Speaker 4: was there on it and really strong.
Speaker 3: Stable.
Speaker 4: Let's just say writers, you know a writer's room that
Speaker 4: could talk to it. And Damon Lindeloff has right to
Speaker 4: include that, so he won the Emmy for that. He's
Speaker 4: been writing on Succession. He's done Late Night, but he
Speaker 4: hadn't directed, so he he says the story that he
Speaker 4: suffered a great defeat. He was trying to do a
Speaker 4: series that didn't make it. He was so heartbroken during
Speaker 4: twenty twenty. He's a reader, so he started reading book
Speaker 4: and he read person for Everett's Erasure. This is based
Speaker 4: on Perceonval Evertt's amazing book Eraser, And he said, I
Speaker 4: can see this as a film, and so he put
Speaker 4: his mind to that, and then he thought the whole
Speaker 4: time he's writing it, he heard Jeffrey Wright's voice and
Speaker 4: he wrote Jeffrey Wright once he was finished and said,
Speaker 4: you know, I think this is you. I hope that
Speaker 4: you like the script, and I have no plan b.
Speaker 4: Jeffrey right at the time was grieving his mother, the
Speaker 4: loss of his mother, and that's what also Core Jefferson
Speaker 4: had gone through. They're both men who were raised by
Speaker 4: women and loved their mothers. And so Jeffrey Wright didn't
Speaker 4: get back right away, but eventually got back and said,
Speaker 4: you know what, let's see, let's try this out. It's
Speaker 4: a magnificent script. It's funny on the page, which is
Speaker 4: hard to do to laugh out loud. He did it well,
Speaker 4: and so he got his first choice there and he
Speaker 4: started and he had a list and all his first
Speaker 4: choice you see in the movie I Am one of Them.
Speaker 4: Coraline plays the love interests of Jeffrey Wright's character Monk.
Speaker 4: Monk is an author who wants to be seen as
Speaker 4: an author and not a black author. He's in the
Speaker 4: Black session, but he's like, why am I not up
Speaker 4: there with everyone else?
Speaker 3: Why do I have to be in this section?
Speaker 4: I don't think he would complain if he was there
Speaker 4: and the African American section, but just being the African
Speaker 4: American session section is he feels dehumanized. He feels like
Speaker 4: he's not on par with his contemporaries. And that's what
Speaker 4: the story is about. It's about a man who's discontented.
Speaker 4: And I think in midlife we can see and be
Speaker 4: some time really restless with how our life has panned
Speaker 4: out thus far. And some people can shift or pivot
Speaker 4: and be all right with it. Other people are like no,
Speaker 4: and they raise hell and they want to do something
Speaker 4: that totally turns it on his head and he does,
Speaker 4: and that's what the story is about. I play Coraline,
Speaker 4: his love And now I gotta say real quick that
Speaker 4: this the movie at first was called fuck. The title
Speaker 4: was fucked.
Speaker 1: Oh like the book.
Speaker 4: Yes, okay, that movie was called fuck. So there we
Speaker 4: were filming it thinking it was fuck. But so when
Speaker 4: it came to me and they said, this director wants
Speaker 4: to speak to you. He thinks he'd be great for
Speaker 4: this role. You always want to be invited. It's wonderful
Speaker 4: to be invited to something. And I looked and it's
Speaker 4: Jeffrey Wright is the lead character, and you play his
Speaker 4: love interest.
Speaker 3: And I saw the word fuck on it. I said,
Speaker 3: my god, this is my nine and a.
Speaker 4: Half weeks be like Branda, We're gonna be in blue Light,
Speaker 4: just having sex, eating grapes and drinking wine. Talking about
Speaker 4: deep stuff is fab I've waited my whole life and
Speaker 4: me start doing my ad work.
Speaker 1: Nah, what like that?
Speaker 3: You know, I get to snuggle on him and you know,
Speaker 3: hump a little bit, you.
Speaker 4: Know, you know, I just finished imply, you know, you know,
Speaker 4: to rub you know, lotion on myself. But other than that, now,
Speaker 4: but I was excited because he not only invited me
Speaker 4: to play, but I knew that I was being asked
Speaker 4: to play against somebody admired, and he was probably only
Speaker 4: asking me because he thought that when you go to
Speaker 4: the majors and you're in you know, a major league,
Speaker 4: you know team that you yourself or hit her, or
Speaker 4: you a runner or this, and you can be counted on.
Speaker 4: And so I felt like, yeah, I'm in my class,
Speaker 4: heavyweight class. That's where I'm supposed to be.
Speaker 1: Random question about it detail because you just mentioned it.
Speaker 1: We was watching it last night and after it was
Speaker 1: implied that y'all had just slept together, and I go older.
Speaker 1: I said to mar they're implying that they just slept together.
Speaker 1: And she was like, yeah, he's getting dressed. She'sutting lotion
Speaker 1: on her hand, and you just said that too. What
Speaker 1: what what is the lotion on the hand for?
Speaker 4: When no women come up to me, it's say we love.
Speaker 4: We thought that was one of the best sex scenes
Speaker 4: we ever saw. I said, what sex scene? You know afterwards,
Speaker 4: when you put the lotion on your hands. They liked
Speaker 4: the efficiency of that.
Speaker 1: Hand after I never thought about it.
Speaker 4: She's washed up and she's putting lotions on her hand
Speaker 4: to show that, you know, not they've done something.
Speaker 3: But she's yeah, she's just clean.
Speaker 4: She's clean, she got off the shower, she's done her thing,
Speaker 4: and she's backing. You know, listen, it takes Look, I
Speaker 4: don't know why I was ready to haunt the man.
Speaker 1: Do you hear? What is a detailed women?
Speaker 4: Know?
Speaker 1: Clearly? Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Especially I think again it's a mature relationship. We don't
Speaker 4: need to see him going in and bucking his back and
Speaker 4: doing all this. This is ain't Jason Lyric.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying. We grown. That implies enough.
Speaker 4: And then we get on with the discussion about not
Speaker 4: love so much but liking and being sort of saying,
Speaker 4: you know, there's is there symbiotic relationship here?
Speaker 3: Do we we feel the chemistry?
Speaker 1: Is that?
Speaker 3: Okay? That's mature. I think people need to see that
Speaker 3: more often.
Speaker 1: Why Why did the title turn on American fiction? Then?
Speaker 1: From fu Well?
Speaker 4: Apparently he was really strong on that court was like, no,
Speaker 4: that's what it is. You know, I just got to
Speaker 4: stand by it. And then they started cutting it and
Speaker 4: they said, look here, whenever we put it in, you know,
Speaker 4: this is when the all those people start to get
Speaker 4: involved in marketing, and we put that word fucking porn
Speaker 4: comes up all the time. They wanted to be synonymous
Speaker 4: with porn. And he said, you know what, let me
Speaker 4: think about it. So he says, he went and you know,
Speaker 4: spoke a little Ganja, thought about it and came up
Speaker 4: with a few.
Speaker 3: American fiction was the one chose.
Speaker 1: You know. They told me that about my first book
Speaker 1: because I wanted to name my first book, I Don't
Speaker 1: give a Fuck and neither should you a self help
Speaker 1: guide on how not to give a fuck. And they
Speaker 1: told me that a book like that would never sell.
Speaker 1: You could never have the title fuck. And then Mark
Speaker 1: uh Mark Marin comes out with the subtle art and
Speaker 1: not giving the fuck and has sold millions of copies international.
Speaker 1: So there you go.
Speaker 3: I think your instincts were right on. But Fear's fear.
Speaker 4: Did they make that based on solely the writing or
Speaker 4: were they actually factoring.
Speaker 1: They told me wouldn't sell color.
Speaker 3: There you go, different person.
Speaker 4: We're always having to go through some kind of you know,
Speaker 4: thing that we don't understand, we maybe can't see now.
Speaker 4: And as powerful as you are in the world, they
Speaker 4: will always lay that on you.
Speaker 1: That's one of the reasons I push back and named it. Well,
Speaker 1: I didn't push back, but I named the Black privilege
Speaker 1: because I knew the reason that I couldn't say fuck
Speaker 1: was because I said black privilege and still sold millions
Speaker 1: of copies. So there you go.
Speaker 4: I mean, but I mean we would never know, and
Speaker 4: you know, you could start it off the whole, the whole.
Speaker 3: Kick to right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So what does the title of American fiction mean
Speaker 1: to the movie?
Speaker 4: You think, so American fiction being not true or you know,
Speaker 4: there's fact fiction and there's non fact nonfiction which is true.
Speaker 4: What is the American fiction that's all around us the
Speaker 4: definition of our lives around the America's definition of us.
Speaker 4: Black people have had to carry that weight our entire
Speaker 4: time since we arrived in America, throughout the enslavement, after emancipation,
Speaker 4: and the reconstruction through civil rights, and now there is
Speaker 4: a fiction around us. But that fiction is locked with
Speaker 4: American exceptionalism. So it's not just the the idea that
Speaker 4: black people are working inside of an identity crisis. It
Speaker 4: was put upon them by people who created the nigger
Speaker 4: and we've adopted their language of our oppressors. That's when
Speaker 4: it's successful. That's when you know, it works. I don't
Speaker 4: know any other people that have done that as successful
Speaker 4: they do. You know a lot of Latinos who go
Speaker 4: around calling themselves went back fun.
Speaker 3: We're I feel for.
Speaker 4: Us, you know, because I see the strength and sort
Speaker 4: of trying to take that word and reframe it. But
Speaker 4: can you reframe something that was meant to damage you
Speaker 4: from the core? Has it's done its job the minute
Speaker 4: you start to reframe it towards yourself and your children,
Speaker 4: and then they carry it on and then the world
Speaker 4: adopts it for themselves. I don't know, but that's what
Speaker 4: American fiction is. Jeffrey Wright is playing a man who's
Speaker 4: saying that I am not that version. There's telling him
Speaker 4: that you're not writing books that are black enough. But
Speaker 4: who are they to say that he's not black enough?
Speaker 4: He's black. He's an author. That's his book that's black enough.
Speaker 4: They didn't say that about our music. They just put
Speaker 4: Elvis up and he started shaking them legs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, right.
Speaker 2: So that's what attracted you to this film, how strong
Speaker 2: and how powerful it is.
Speaker 4: Absolutely in the writing por Jefferson is a modern master,
Speaker 4: and he's made for this moment. His road to being
Speaker 4: here was through being a journalist. He was a white
Speaker 4: house journalist, so he didn't get here just overnight, and
Speaker 4: I think that helped him. I think that he didn't
Speaker 4: have he had different voices in his head every time
Speaker 4: he was creating something. And he said he didn't want
Speaker 4: to do journalism anymore because they had him on the
Speaker 4: race beat. I want to write about tray Tavon Martin,
Speaker 4: You want to write about this? He's like, you know,
Speaker 4: I'm a full person. I can write about more than racism.
Speaker 4: I know it's very important, but I have other things
Speaker 4: to say. So a lot of people have said that
Speaker 4: that they've been forced into a position of having to
Speaker 4: carry that weight and they're happy to, but they don't
Speaker 4: want to always have to speak to it. Can't we
Speaker 4: have something that we just you know, talk about. There's
Speaker 4: tons of movies where they're not doing any of that.
Speaker 4: And you know, at one time I was married to
Speaker 4: a writer and he was He's the first African.
Speaker 3: American to write a movie that made over one hundred
Speaker 3: million dollars. He wrote Eraser.
Speaker 4: Wow, right, you sometimes just want to write Eraser, you know,
Speaker 4: but that's not if you come at all from a
Speaker 4: racial paradise, you know, conversation, they will always try to
Speaker 4: put that on you, even when you're trying to talk
Speaker 4: about something else.
Speaker 1: You said something that made me think about the N word,
Speaker 1: Like I always tell myself, I'm gonna stop using that
Speaker 1: word because I never use it as a term of endearment.
Speaker 1: I use it. I use it as the oppressor, you know,
Speaker 1: I do. So that's one of the read I got.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't feel the need to hold on
Speaker 1: to that, you know.
Speaker 4: I think we've forgotten who we are. And I think
Speaker 4: when we remember, we understand that maybe we've been brought
Speaker 4: across the ocean to make this case, to live these
Speaker 4: lives so we can create a better tomorrow. Today we're
Speaker 4: having conversations about voting, We're having conversations about the next election.
Speaker 4: And I always remember that black women are the marines
Speaker 4: on the front line, but they don't want to always
Speaker 4: have to be. That's where men are supposed to be.
Speaker 4: They're supposed to see the clear and present danger and
Speaker 4: stop the wolf at the door from hurting the most
Speaker 4: vulnerable people.
Speaker 3: That's what it is. Black people are tired of that.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I'm.
Speaker 4: Going to do it I said, what's your choice. Could
Speaker 4: have should have, would have worked toward that. But right
Speaker 4: now you can see there's a danger at the door.
Speaker 4: That wolf stopped them. You're a warrior, you're a king.
Speaker 4: You're supposed to do that. That's what we were, That's
Speaker 4: what we have to do right now. Don't want to
Speaker 4: hate it, but that's what we're doing. I don't want
Speaker 4: to have to keep talking about these things. I'm an actress.
Speaker 4: I would love to be a river run through it.
Speaker 4: Remember when there was another movie that Meryl Streep did
Speaker 4: where she gets in and she's fighting somebody in a
Speaker 4: canoe taking her family. Love it, Let's do it. No,
Speaker 4: you're going to have to do this. Erica, your dark
Speaker 4: skin and you're napy headed. You will not be Zendeia.
Speaker 4: You will not be halle Berry anytime soon. You won't
Speaker 4: even be able to cross over. Thank God for Court Jefferson,
Speaker 4: who saw me as being delicate and put me in
Speaker 4: more in a position to be desired. I needed that
Speaker 4: black man to step up to create the space to
Speaker 4: see me as a woman who could just chill and
Speaker 4: drink wine and have somebody seduce her and she seduce him.
Speaker 4: I get to drop my tomatoes. You see, that's called
Speaker 4: meeting cute lead me cute cute like Meg Ryan and
Speaker 4: Tom Hanks does a black man saw that and he
Speaker 4: took somebody who's usually hired as the hammers, the ham
Speaker 4: Jeffrey Jeffrey Right is a hammer.
Speaker 3: I'm a hammer. You bring me in.
Speaker 4: It's like, what do you need done? He's like your hammer, Erica.
Speaker 4: But I also see you as being desirable and beautiful
Speaker 4: and delicate, and we need some of those muscles.
Speaker 3: Work that out here.
Speaker 4: And so I lay in the cut a bit and
Speaker 4: do a little less of what I've been asked to
Speaker 4: do for over four decades.
Speaker 1: The movie got me to think, and how you know,
Speaker 1: how hard is it to sell things of substance in Hollywood?
Speaker 1: You know? Because then, and you know, I got me
Speaker 1: to thinking about you as a creative because everything that
Speaker 1: you do is of substance and it ha intension behind it.
Speaker 1: So how hard is it to sell things of substance
Speaker 1: in Hollywood?
Speaker 4: Well, for somebody like me, it's near impossible, because they're
Speaker 4: always gonna rate you as what you've done before, and
Speaker 4: if you haven't leveraged that power yet, they don't think
Speaker 4: you have it. So I needed somebody like you, Charlottagne
Speaker 4: and Kevin Hart to hire us the color farm part
Speaker 4: of me, who's got a company, to create something and
Speaker 4: get the opportunities because you're in rooms that I'm not.
Speaker 4: So we need men mostly who have those opportunities, have
Speaker 4: those conversations with cigars and cognac to bring up the
Speaker 4: women and say, you know what, I'm going to make
Speaker 4: sure that I bring them to the table. They're always
Speaker 4: with me because you don't have those opportunities.
Speaker 1: Which is so fucked up, because we're in nowhere and
Speaker 1: it is brilliant. I mean, like not even clothes.
Speaker 3: You certainly are.
Speaker 4: The thing is that you know that there's a there's
Speaker 4: a wide sort of palette that we're missing if we
Speaker 4: don't bring our women in. And again that's why I
Speaker 4: say black men are supposed to protect the most vulnerable.
Speaker 4: They're also the lift and elevate them and if done well,
Speaker 4: we can change the world. Look at what thirteen percent
Speaker 4: have done thus far. We are the world. We had
Speaker 4: white culture, European culture impressed upon us. The world chooses
Speaker 4: our culture as their own. That's phenomenal, that's great power.
Speaker 4: And there used to be a time where black men
Speaker 4: want you want to be cool like them, and they
Speaker 4: became so on a dark and kind of angry, materialistic
Speaker 4: and just grabby, grabby, and now I'll do this and selfish.
Speaker 4: What is that we weren't doing that James Baldman, Malcolm X.
Speaker 4: You saw him at the door. That's the famous picture.
Speaker 4: I'm not saying that I'm not a strong woman not
Speaker 4: able to protect myself. I certainly most we will. And
Speaker 4: I have no children on my own, but I will
Speaker 4: protect yours as my own.
Speaker 3: I vote for the village. So that's what we need.
Speaker 4: We need that whole thing to come together, because I
Speaker 4: think if we start thinking and having conferences about how
Speaker 4: do we get past this, how can we stop looking
Speaker 4: at our great players die like dogs and not say anything.
Speaker 4: We have beautiful people like Whitney Houston and MJ and
Speaker 4: all these people just passing away.
Speaker 3: Those are generals.
Speaker 4: We can't just come together when there's George Floyd and
Speaker 4: use them as props. We have to come together before
Speaker 4: to say how and only can we protect you? How
Speaker 4: can we strengthen you? How can we give you financial
Speaker 4: management training? How can we show you what you How
Speaker 4: can we say that your mental health not only matters,
Speaker 4: but you can tell us when you're not winning, when
Speaker 4: you're under stressed because you don't have the dress to
Speaker 4: go to that place, and you're ashamed and embarrassed to
Speaker 4: admit to people what you don't have. We need that
Speaker 4: for our people in our community. And it's not just
Speaker 4: us that we're lifting. We're lifting everybody that's that's Latino,
Speaker 4: there's all of that. The Asians are now pushing forward.
Speaker 4: They got the Gold House. Check out what they've done
Speaker 4: with the Gold House.
Speaker 3: What is that? They say, Well, they know how to
Speaker 3: support each other. We do too. Segregation, we had to
Speaker 3: support each other.
Speaker 4: That didn't die just because we got blown across the
Speaker 4: you know, like a diaspora in America. But what happened
Speaker 4: is we stopped talking to each other and realizing that
Speaker 4: we need to support each other no matter where we live.
Speaker 4: And so we need more of that. And black men
Speaker 4: need to lead the way you are and you are
Speaker 4: points of power that we are not.
Speaker 3: Still.
Speaker 4: But black women are often told you're the ones saving
Speaker 4: us ninety percent y'all voted no, no, no, no, no, no no,
Speaker 4: don't do that to black men. They need to be
Speaker 4: reminded that they put us in those slave dungeons because
Speaker 4: they wanted you to hear the screams of the women
Speaker 4: and the children and not be able to help them,
Speaker 4: and that would break your spirit before you got on
Speaker 4: the boat. And then they put them out and humiliated them,
Speaker 4: raped them in front of the women and children. So
Speaker 4: the women sought, no, I'm going to protect black men.
Speaker 4: I'm not going to say anything. And they they did
Speaker 4: that and often treated their children so hard that they
Speaker 4: didn't people don't think that we have a core. They
Speaker 4: did that to because they were losing their children all
Speaker 4: the time. So they created this hard coding. And then
Speaker 4: we have conversations now online about whether black women are
Speaker 4: too masculine, how dare they? Where were we supposed to
Speaker 4: be this idea of feminism that they want. We're supposed
Speaker 4: to curl up and relax on the white couch with
Speaker 4: miss Kardashian or power to them. But when was that
Speaker 4: supposed to happen. We're doing that and we're saving the
Speaker 4: village and we're trying to push forward on ourselves. And
Speaker 4: you see it when you see Stacey Abrams. You see
Speaker 4: it when you see Anna Pressley, you see it when
Speaker 4: Katanji Brown we need more of that. What black men
Speaker 4: need to understand that their place is not behind and
Speaker 4: this it is in front because we can do it together.
Speaker 4: And we were raising your black children. That's our goal
Speaker 4: in the world, not just black children. These children are
Speaker 4: markers of the world of how high up is. They
Speaker 4: are the standard, so let's act like it.
Speaker 1: You know, in American fiction, the one thing I wish
Speaker 1: that they would have explored more was why people liked
Speaker 1: the book Fuck, Because like when y'all had the argument
Speaker 1: at the table, I thought you was about to tell
Speaker 1: him why you liked it and he was about to
Speaker 1: have a revelation. But why don't you think they explored
Speaker 1: why people actually liked Fuck more because that is a
Speaker 1: part of us too, as black people, Like we can
Speaker 1: be righteous, hand ratchet and we can blend the two.
Speaker 4: Maybe that's what she dug was maybe the mindlessness of it.
Speaker 4: You're right, they should have had that conversation in it.
Speaker 4: Right now we're left to sort of to think that
Speaker 4: Jeffrey Wright is writing great novels.
Speaker 3: Who knows. They could suck.
Speaker 4: They could be intellectual, they could be they could be
Speaker 4: like a professor that's not really accessible. Remember they said
Speaker 4: he's closed off, So maybe his novels are closed off.
Speaker 4: Maybe when he allowed himself to go a little crazy
Speaker 4: during his you know, his his anger moment where he
Speaker 4: writes the novel, that's the closest he got to being
Speaker 4: open and writing characters that allowed him to be because
Speaker 4: he didn't have you know, he didn't have any the
Speaker 4: stakes in the game that he puts on the other ones.
Speaker 4: You're right, we don't have the conversation. You can send
Speaker 4: that complaint to court.
Speaker 3: Jefferson. I can't only speak so far for myself.
Speaker 1: Because I feel like, you know, well, I'm gonna ask you,
Speaker 1: do you think it's possible to put medicine in the
Speaker 1: candy to find that balance between substance and the bullshit?
Speaker 1: Because that's what I was hoping he did ultimately, or
Speaker 1: that was the conclusion of the movie.
Speaker 4: I think that that's where black people are, people who
Speaker 4: are clever do all the time, is that they make
Speaker 4: it entertaining, yet you're seeing something that could be really
Speaker 4: like questionable. Dave Chappelle does it all the time. Absolutely,
Speaker 4: our comedians do it all the time. So I believe
Speaker 4: that smugglers are important. And they did that, especially when
Speaker 4: they had the black codes on and they also when
Speaker 4: they were blacklisting Jewish writers, they had to, you know,
Speaker 4: be under aliases. They did all the time when they
Speaker 4: wanted to talk about things in the seventies, and they
Speaker 4: you thought you were seeing something different, but it was
Speaker 4: really just a different sort of way to go into
Speaker 4: a subject that was maybe more radioactive. So great creators
Speaker 4: have done it all the time. Black people have had
Speaker 4: to do it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, have you ever an attempted to do it?
Speaker 1: Or that what you do with the comic books, Oh,
Speaker 1: that's what you want to do with the comic books and.
Speaker 3: The comic books, that's exactly it.
Speaker 4: So if you look to Concrete Park, which I did
Speaker 4: with Tony Perrie, the writer I'm talking about, you'll see
Speaker 4: that in there, You'll see how beautiful it is. Frankly,
Speaker 4: you'll see how these gorgeous, beautiful, bodacious bodies are you know,
Speaker 4: just made for you know, being I don't know, in
Speaker 4: that in the place where you have black nerds and
Speaker 4: white nerds and nerds I shouldn't say black nerds' is
Speaker 4: nerds overall you'll dig it. But what they're talking about is,
Speaker 4: you know, or since it's poor, its youth off to
Speaker 4: another planet. Will they where they reproduce the violence and
Speaker 4: the hostility and the racism, or will they make something new?
Speaker 3: And that's Concrete Park. But look at Star Trek, same thing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Jane Roddenberry wanted to talk about race and those types
Speaker 4: of things. So he made a very colorful, diverse cast
Speaker 4: that is on the starship Enterprise and where are they
Speaker 4: going to seek new life, new civilization, to boldly go
Speaker 4: where no man has gone before, which was his model
Speaker 4: for how do we get through this world being different? Well,
Speaker 4: let's go someplace where everyone's different than humans and let's
Speaker 4: see how they figured that out with their prime. You know,
Speaker 4: the thing that they can is that they can't they
Speaker 4: can't interrupt the new civilizations. They're not supposed to disrupt them.
Speaker 4: They're not supposed to come in and change things, which
Speaker 4: is difficult because everywhere he went he was tested.
Speaker 3: We were tested. Uhura Ah, you know all that you
Speaker 3: needed that?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, Eric, I think you're just brilliant.
Speaker 1: I love everything you do, Like finding Tamika was did
Speaker 1: we do big pay back before finding to Meka? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we did a big first, big pay back. We did
Speaker 1: that with the Black Effect. Yes, phenomenal podcast that turned
Speaker 1: into a documentary, Yes, right, and then Finding Tamika that
Speaker 1: we put out on Audible, myself and Kevin Hart. You
Speaker 1: want a Webby for Best Podcast Series, Documentary, Audible's Best
Speaker 1: in True Crime, and you won the DuPont Award for
Speaker 1: Excellence in Journalism. How did that make you feel? Talk
Speaker 1: about the impact of Finding to me.
Speaker 4: Well, let's correct that we won. Yes, we wanted together.
Speaker 4: It was a great collaboration. We wouldn't have gotten that
Speaker 4: far without the power and strength that you provided and
Speaker 4: Kevin provided and the leveraged that that matters, and certainly
Speaker 4: to the Houston family were allowing us to be intimate
Speaker 4: with him and tell that story.
Speaker 3: What was the question?
Speaker 1: What was the impact of that? How was the impact?
Speaker 1: How did it make you feel?
Speaker 3: It was a huge So there's a black and missing foundation.
Speaker 4: They've been doing this type of work for a long time,
Speaker 4: and it helped tell their story and they had been
Speaker 4: featured in another documentary. But it also talked about this
Speaker 4: thing that up until that point people didn't really know
Speaker 4: what it's about, which is the white women's missing syndrome.
Speaker 4: Missing white women's syndrome. Why do we do that. We're
Speaker 4: talking about that now, the fiction that everybody, if you
Speaker 4: get missing, everyone's gonna come to find you. No, but
Speaker 4: they're not, And they're really gonna not come to find you.
Speaker 4: If your dark skinned and all that other stuff and
Speaker 4: live in a certain area, they're not gonna find you.
Speaker 4: They're not even gonna find you if you're cute, because
Speaker 4: Tamika was beautiful in lighter color. She's at the background
Speaker 4: being Ethiopian and mixed like that. But they will find
Speaker 4: that blonde haired, blue eyed girl and our obsession with that,
Speaker 4: So the impact was even explaining a little bit what
Speaker 4: it was. But we made a neo noir ghost story.
Speaker 4: We knew immediately because you know, you want to make
Speaker 4: sure that the audience knows they're invited. That we had
Speaker 4: to frame it in a way that we could build audience,
Speaker 4: that we could build awareness. That's your mandate is to
Speaker 4: create something that the entire because if you're not using
Speaker 4: the power, well then you're just placing it within one category.
Speaker 4: But no, we knew that we had to make it entertaining.
Speaker 4: So the neo noir ghost story was because Tamika kept
Speaker 4: showing up as a ghost in her own story. And
Speaker 4: neo noir is a genre that can actually encapsulate all
Speaker 4: those different things. She's the fem fatal, She's the person
Speaker 4: we're trying to find. She's the naive. I'm the naive
Speaker 4: in it, the narrator going through. She's also the detective.
Speaker 4: She's still looking to find herself in the world, and
Speaker 4: she helped them, the law enforcement, find her through strangers
Speaker 4: who came and said, Tamika visited me, and she's here,
Speaker 4: and it found her. So I said, what can do that?
Speaker 4: No Noir is a genre that can do that.
Speaker 3: So we did that.
Speaker 4: We just put the things that were there, but you
Speaker 4: got to be aware of them. And I think that
Speaker 4: that helps to talk about more about the sophisticated level
Speaker 4: than it rose to.
Speaker 3: I think that that helped change things.
Speaker 4: The way that we did it created a way to
Speaker 4: talk about something, to say, look at how popular that was,
Speaker 4: and that was a black woman's story that you didn't
Speaker 4: want to put nationally. But we did it, and we
Speaker 4: did it several years after we knew the end of
Speaker 4: her case, so we didn't even need the mystery of that.
Speaker 3: We just found We just were looking for her. Who
Speaker 3: is she?
Speaker 4: And all of this because We know that black girls
Speaker 4: don't have to Black girls and women don't have to
Speaker 4: go missing for us not to see them, so we
Speaker 4: looked for her.
Speaker 3: That was important. I think that changed things. But also.
Speaker 4: The fact that black women and men could go missing
Speaker 4: and now there's an awareness about the lack of support
Speaker 4: that comes to them. Now we can talk about it
Speaker 4: mainstream and people. When we were in that room at
Speaker 4: the DuPont Columbia Awards what are they called that managed
Speaker 4: the radio stations program directors came up and said I
Speaker 4: did that and now I won't. They passed on those emails. Wow,
Speaker 4: that's what it's changing. It needs to change behavior. Also,
Speaker 4: White House, the White House started looking at different designation.
Speaker 4: We went to the White House with Rebecca and the
Speaker 4: Black and Missing Foundation and they started looking at how
Speaker 4: their designated is runaways too often actually most of the time. Also,
Speaker 4: the Amber alert. There's an Amber alert and there's one
Speaker 4: for older people, but nothing in between. Why isn't there.
Speaker 4: So they're looking to change legislation and bring a new
Speaker 4: legislation or to partner with people who are doing that
Speaker 4: to push it forward. That's the change. The best change
Speaker 4: are some things that are systemic. Mind change is huge.
Speaker 4: But we got all of the above.
Speaker 1: And I remember you saying something on Finding Tamika where
Speaker 1: you said, anybody who helped Tamika with this case, they
Speaker 1: were elevated, like their careers and things were elevated. And
Speaker 1: so when I look at the success that Finding Tamika had,
Speaker 1: all the awards it won, I'm looking at you know,
Speaker 1: I feel like you're getting your flowers in a real way.
Speaker 1: And it's just like, Okay, Tamikamika wasn't playing. No, she
Speaker 1: wasn't playing at all.
Speaker 3: She wasn't playing, and she was a strong entity.
Speaker 4: Now. Look, I come from a religious background. I'm not
Speaker 4: religious myself, but I am spiritual. And I asked her
Speaker 4: please not to visit me. I said, I see you're
Speaker 4: doing that, but I'm not. I'm too vulnerable.
Speaker 1: Please listen.
Speaker 3: She did. She actually visited. J. T. A.
Speaker 4: Green, who did the audio, was fantastic with it, and
Speaker 4: she said he actually they now would say that. She
Speaker 4: came behind me and put her hands on my shoulders
Speaker 4: and I could feel her there. I said, are you're
Speaker 4: freaking kidding me? Oh, she don't do that to me.
Speaker 4: I don't need that, you know what I mean? So
Speaker 4: you know that it's a beautiful thing. But yes, elevated, Yes,
Speaker 4: I can say that this has been a magnificent years.
Speaker 4: But also it's because I'm doing something that people believe
Speaker 4: in me. They're asking me to come because they think
Speaker 4: I have something to offer, but they also are not
Speaker 4: coming the door questioning whether I can do it or not.
Speaker 3: You didn't question that.
Speaker 4: You just call me and say, Queen, you want to do
Speaker 4: a reparations podcast. I said, okay, I mean you know,
Speaker 4: and then you said, you know, remember that thing.
Speaker 3: I got a deal. We do it over here. Done.
Speaker 4: I can do the hard work of thinking about how
Speaker 4: to get it done. But you've done the hardest work
Speaker 4: of building your career so I can get it done,
Speaker 4: and then allowing us to do it and giving us
Speaker 4: the freedom not to make mistakes but to blossom. And
Speaker 4: I think that when you have that kind of support
Speaker 4: in your life, you know, it's like an athlete saying,
Speaker 4: run you can run.
Speaker 3: Now you've trained enough. Run I can win if I
Speaker 3: can run.
Speaker 1: Do awards matter to you because you know, I know
Speaker 1: American Fictua's no question. Yes, yeah, Because American Victuals even
Speaker 1: nominated for Best Motion Picture Musical comedy at the Golden
Speaker 1: Globes and they talk I saw you on Tammon Hall
Speaker 1: and they're talking about Oscar Bards around your role in
Speaker 1: American fiction. So they do matter, Charle Mane.
Speaker 4: I wish they didn't, But this world puts a premium
Speaker 4: on people who win awards, and I think if we
Speaker 4: can't make content that is uniquely on a black subject,
Speaker 4: the subject that has a black person in it, it
Speaker 4: has agency, and can't prove that we can make the
Speaker 4: dollars that's another award, Box Office and wards, then they'll
Speaker 4: keep putting us in the cultural ghetto, and we can't
Speaker 4: afford to be there anymore. So I think that it's
Speaker 4: all right for us to shoot for it, but we
Speaker 4: need to acknowledge how many people never got those awards
Speaker 4: and we're still inside of that. So if you look
Speaker 4: at the great Felicia Rashad who never got an Emmy,
Speaker 4: Patricia Heaton got eight for Everybody Loves Raymond, no shade
Speaker 4: to her?
Speaker 3: Where's Felicious?
Speaker 4: Where's Cecily Tyson before they gave her an honorary Angela Bassett?
Speaker 3: Exactly? Why? What is that?
Speaker 4: So? No, those awards matter and people want them because
Speaker 4: they think it's going to also help their trajectory of
Speaker 4: their work. Lucas said, said it didn't help at all,
Speaker 4: said it ruined his career. I think so. I don't
Speaker 4: want to speak for him. He's still here to speak
Speaker 4: for himself. But I think it was because suddenly pople
Speaker 4: didn't want to pay him what he was worth. They
Speaker 4: didn't want to Oh, well that next, and I told
Speaker 4: you that next you ask him for too much? Really
Speaker 4: are we from the great lugassip. So it's I think
Speaker 4: Catch twenty two. We need to do to have it.
Speaker 4: We shouldn't expect it, and don't be broken hearted if
Speaker 4: that happens. The award is the love that you get
Speaker 4: from the audience. Every day I go out, whether it's
Speaker 4: at the bank or otherwise, I get love from everybody, Jewish, black, white,
Speaker 4: all of that, every in between. It doesn't matter the
Speaker 4: you know, whether it's a working class, all of that
Speaker 4: that's sustain me and I will forever be grateful for that.
Speaker 3: That is payment.
Speaker 4: And I think that Taraji understood that what she wants,
Speaker 4: what she's earned. We'd like what we earned and we're
Speaker 4: demanding it, but we have no way to get there.
Speaker 4: And that's frustrating because people think, oh, you're just high
Speaker 4: paid spoiled children real artists. Most artists can barely make
Speaker 4: enough to get their insurance and that's like twenty four
Speaker 4: to twenty five thousand dollars a year from zag eighty
Speaker 4: nine percent of the union does not work.
Speaker 3: So we're spoiled. But it's good enough to call when you.
Speaker 4: Need to talk about something that matters to the world,
Speaker 4: to get the word out. We're we're your mouthpieces. Shame
Speaker 4: on America that they're in such a way that creatives
Speaker 4: could go underfunded, undervalued, but also shame on them for
Speaker 4: denying something that they do to a particular class of
Speaker 4: people overall, and not understanding that that's not just happening
Speaker 4: to us, if it's happening to you in corporate America,
Speaker 4: that is corporate America. You just happen to see what
Speaker 4: we do for a living, but none like you might
Speaker 4: see what Hannity does for a living.
Speaker 3: Is he spoiled? Are all these pundents spoiled who.
Speaker 4: Constantly say, well, you know that's not kitchen table that
Speaker 4: we want to go to fly over country. You've flown
Speaker 4: over us all the time, but we made it anyway.
Speaker 4: Selling out the back of our car. As you see that.
Speaker 4: These men have created whole genres from from Louis Armstrong,
Speaker 4: who was an orphan on the street.
Speaker 3: In New Orleans. No, we we We not only earned
Speaker 3: it all, we deserve it all.
Speaker 1: I asked miss doing this the other day, how many
Speaker 1: more labors of love do you have in you? Oh? Lord,
Speaker 1: that's what it feels like, all the labors of love.
Speaker 3: What does she say?
Speaker 1: I think she said none. She said, I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: I don't have any more. I'm done. I feel like that.
Speaker 1: I think that's what she said, right.
Speaker 3: And she's a marketing gene.
Speaker 1: I'm tired. I'm tired.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she's a marketing genius, Nick, she said, marketing genius.
Speaker 4: And she's used all of her her powers, her powers
Speaker 4: for good. She needs more support. We need to understand
Speaker 4: what she's up against. He's even created a place that
Speaker 4: you go to that trains filmmakers. Yeah, it's powerful. But
Speaker 4: who could do that and keep it up? And that's
Speaker 4: why I say, she's a black woman, and he's help
Speaker 4: from black men. She's a black woman who needs help
Speaker 4: from black men who have access to power.
Speaker 3: And that's white America was the children's books.
Speaker 1: What you got there?
Speaker 3: Oh oh yeah, thank you.
Speaker 4: So this when we're talking about books and everything, and
Speaker 4: so my mother wrote a book, Io, so I brought
Speaker 4: one for each of you for your family, your family's library.
Speaker 3: Rainbow Forest and the Rainbow Forest.
Speaker 4: That's great, Sammy Alexander, excuse me, Samue Alexander the twice
Speaker 4: or from woman.
Speaker 3: I speak about a lot.
Speaker 4: She's a teacher and an educator and that was important
Speaker 4: to her, and I'm helping her while she's eighty two
Speaker 4: years old to get her ideas out there. So that's
Speaker 4: Io showed them the back Charlemagne so they can see.
Speaker 4: That's amazing that Jacob what is the.
Speaker 3: Illustrations name right now?
Speaker 1: Jacob Duncan.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Jacob Duncan did it from North Carolina, A nice
Speaker 4: young illustrator did that.
Speaker 3: And then also Grandma's hand. This is a friend. This
Speaker 3: is the Bill Withers family.
Speaker 4: And so he's passed away, but Grandma's hands, with Grandma's hands,
Speaker 4: he's done a book. And after he's passed away, about it,
Speaker 4: and so I make sure it gets into as many
Speaker 4: hands as possible, and we build our libraries that way.
Speaker 4: You guys are both all great builders of families and communities.
Speaker 4: So I wanted to make sure you had that my
Speaker 4: mom's book. There you go.
Speaker 1: I got maybe two more questions, but really one more.
Speaker 1: Nikki Haley said, America is in a racist country, right.
Speaker 1: You think the decision makers in Hollywood believe that.
Speaker 3: I don't know who she was talking to?
Speaker 4: You know what, No, they you know what, they act
Speaker 4: like there is racism.
Speaker 3: But that's.
Speaker 4: That's what keeps it going, is that people want to
Speaker 4: act like these are people often that have been the
Speaker 4: most persecuted people on the earth. We can't act like
Speaker 4: it's not there. We can't afford to. And her standing
Speaker 4: that up and not facing it is making her look weak.
Speaker 4: And nobody wants a woman who's weak. They already have that,
Speaker 4: you know, in the negative. But the fact that she's
Speaker 4: taking that stance is especially coming from South Carolina, your
Speaker 4: home state, is disgusting. She should know better. Also, she's
Speaker 4: an East Indian woman, an American. Yes, she knows what's
Speaker 4: behind it. If she doesn't get to be president, it'll
Speaker 4: be because she's not a woman. And also that she's
Speaker 4: not that she's a brown woman, So she can ignore
Speaker 4: that if she wants to. But the party she's going
Speaker 4: to need to help her. Cannot afford to ignore that.
Speaker 2: All right, well, we appreciate you for joining us, as
Speaker 2: Erica Alexander so much to make sure you got there
Speaker 2: and see American fiction.
Speaker 1: That's right. Make sure you go listen to Finding to
Speaker 1: Meka on Audible, check out the Big Payback on the
Speaker 1: Black Effect. iHeartRadio podcast Network, and Erica just about to say,
Speaker 1: keep being brilliant. But you ain't got no choice, that's right.
Speaker 1: God made you what you.
Speaker 4: Thank you, you know, you know, God running the creekto
Speaker 4: rise and withou help collaboration m all as possible.
Speaker 3: So thank you, Charlemaine, thank you DJ MV. Thank you
Speaker 3: all that you're.
Speaker 4: Doing for the culture and all that you mean to
Speaker 4: us and for giving me this platform this morning.
Speaker 2: No, thank you for joining us. We appreciate you, Erika Alexander.
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen. It's the Breakfast Club. Good morning, Wake
Speaker 2: that ass up early in the morning. The Breakfast Club