brandos:

What I remember as a great performance when I was a kid, it definitely were the tv movies, the miniseries, and the first one: Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Cause it changed my life of course. Because of Cicely Tyson’s performance, you know? Because it was in the midst of sitcoms. It was a sitcom era. And also Roots. Roots changed my life. Even when I was younger I could distinguish from being entertained to having a human experience.

It’s been seventy years since Hattie McDaniel won her Oscar for playing a maid in Gone with the Wind and here we are now with me and Octavia Spencer getting a lot of buzz for playing maids in The Help. That image has become such a source of pain for the African-American community because it represents something demeaning. And for Black people, for African-Americans they never feel like their humanity is explored. That the person is not explored in a way that is specific. In a way that’s messy. And so, all of a sudden I’m playing someone who’s subservient, a maid with a thick dialect and I said “okay this is going to be the downfall of my career”. But at the same time I’ve walked the road and I’m in the front lines and I know what’s out there and in terms of Aibileen going on a journey that’s something that you never get.

And you know what, I’m going to be bold enough and say that you almost never get that as a woman of color.  [x]