What if ?

“Hollywood wants you to be tired of slave movies, because they want you to be tired of slave movies altogether.” — Arnold Burks (Medium, Opinion)

They ask us to self-silence and play the game. They ask us for our credentials and qualifications. They ask us when the slave films will cease. They ask us to to stray away from our pain-filled stories. But they don’t stop inflicting pain.

The following piece is rooted from the micro-aggression that fueled this project (names/specifics have been replaced). The exaggeration and sarcasm in which I stylistically use in this satirical piece is how I read between the lines and interpret unintentional discrimination. I feel that art is the person of color’s ability to escape, relieve, and heal. Through it we learn and reimagine. I wrote this screenplay to do so. And most importantly to reimagine the what if. What if we spoke out in every undeserved circumstance?

“There still are a lot of Americans in the marketplace who don’t really want to see the reality of slavery − and Hollywood being a business may be wary about showing too much of that.” — David D’Arcy (BBC, International Film Critic)