This episode is an act of recovery, uplifting the artistic careers that McCarthyism upended through an immersive blend of conversation and artivism performances.
Host Kimberlé Crenshaw is joined by award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen; and former President of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and film scholar Jacqueline Stewart.
Hear powerful artivism performances by two-time Tony Award winning actor Kara Young (Purlie Victorious, Purpose) and Tony-nominated actor Jon Michael Hill (Purpose, Elementary, Detroit 1-8-7, A Man in Full), directed by Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at Oberlin College Justin Emeka.
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Liberation Calendar is a new daily practice for Black History Month. Beginning February 1st, the
Liberation Calendar will guide users through a daily intentional practice to build our personal and
collective resilience. Sign up to receive daily emails with suggested rituals, opportunities for reflection,
and calls to action, designed to carve out a space for liberation in your day. Join us in following the 2026 Liberation Calendar, a block History Month partnership with Block Heritage Academy and the AfricanAmerican Policy Forum. Sign up for free at AAPF’s website AAPF.org. That’s AAPF.org. Happy Black History Month.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
I’m Kimberlé Crenshaw, and this is Intersectionality Matters. The podcast that brings intersectionality to life by exploring the hidden dimensions of today’s most pressing issues from say her name to the war on woke, DEI and CRT, and the global rise of fascism. This idea travelogue lifts up the work of leading activists, artists and scholars and helps listeners understand politics, the law, social movements, and even their own lives in deeper, more nuanced ways.
Speaker 3:
Order. Order. The committee will come to order. Please take your seat.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
For years on this show, you and I have explored the arts and why they matter, and we’ve talked about why the story of us, of who we think we are as a nation is so consequential. Throughout this conversation, we’ve submerged ourselves in something that I call Artivism. Artivism is the use of art as a tool for collective resistance. It emerges out of a legacy of black women, Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, and Toni Morrison, among others. They use their art to give voice and rhythm to our social movements. Their work transformed hostile realities for black audiences. They did this by centering black experiences and telling authentic stories about the joys and the tribulations of black life. Their art.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Challenge the public to imagine a world where the black experience is an integral part of America’s
national story, and they inspired other artists to use their gifts in the same pursuit. On today’s episode,
we’ll explore the legacies of black artists who dared to speak truth to power and who dared to tell the
story the true story of who we are as a nation.
Speaker 3:
Now, Mr. Paul Robeson, are you now or have you ever been a member? The Communist Party.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
We’ll also talk about the incredible suppression they battled as their influence grew and government
forces increasingly saw their stardom as a threat.
Speaker 4:
Would you like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see? I thought I was here about some passports.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
And perhaps most importantly, we’ll talk about the incredible legacies they left for us to build upon in this moment when similar cycles of suppression are repeating
Speaker 3:
We will get to that in just a few moments. You are here, sir, because you are promoting the communist
calls.
Speaker 4:
This is complete nonsense.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
We uplifted sacred threads of hidden history recently in Park City, Utah at the Sundance Film Festival
during our annual event, The Story of Us.
Speaker 4:
The reason that I am here today from the mouth of the State Department itself is because I have struggled for years for the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa. I am being tried for fighting for the rights of my people who are still second class citizens in this United States of America.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
This episode isn’t just a historical deep dive, it’s a Sankofa moment where we look back in order to go
forward. In the 1950s, many black artists were silenced with subpoenas and Hollywood blackness for
speaking truth to power. Those same tactics have resurfaced today through hearings, executive orders, intimidation and copycat censorship laws in dozens of states. Recognizing the motivations for these attacks and the historic through line will prepare us to resist in the days to come. I know many of you listening are artists, thinkers, and cultural practitioners yourselves. Perhaps you’re living with the fear or consequences of being outspoken in your own community.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
As you listen to this episode, I invite you to feel bolstered by the legacy of those who survived similar
conditions before you find strength in their stories. As you’ve assert your artistic independence, it is vital that you continue to create and support honest storytelling. Every artist must decide now where they stand, and every audience member must do so as well. For this timely conversation, I was joined by Ava DuVernay, a groundbreaking and celebrated cinematic storyteller whose works include Selma, Origin, and when they see us. Viet Thanh Nguyen, a professor of English at USC and the author of the
Sympathizer, which was made into a HBO series after winning the Pulitzer Prize.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
His new book is called To Save and Destroy Writing as an Other. And finally, we welcome Jacqueline
Stewart. Jacqueline is a professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago, host for
Turner Classic Movies, and was the inaugural president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
You’ll also hear incredible performances by two-time Tony Award winner Kara Young and Tony Award
nominee John Michael Hill. This pair of powerful performers animated the voices of blacklisted artists
throughout our evening under the direction of Justin Emeka, who is the resident director at Pittsburgh
Public Theater and a professor at Oberlin College. Enjoy the show.
Speaker 5:
Now, let’s get into it. The repression of artists and academics who spoke out against racial exclusion 70 years ago is not only an untold dimension of that past, but…
Speaker 3:
Hold it, hold it right there. I have a very important announcement to make. From this day forward, the
usage of the following words and concepts in federal programs and grant proposals will trigger an
immediately review and presumptive rejection as embodiments of the scourge of wokeness. And herein, they are declared to be improper ideology. And so, these words must be thoroughly and irreversibly eradicated. First and foremost, black community, cultural competence, disability, disadvantaged, discrimination, equal opportunity, evidence-based historically, inclusivity, intersectionality, mental health, oppression, people of color. Who is that?
Speaker 3:
Privilege, peanut allergies because all allergies matter. Queer, racism, safe drinking, water, trans,
anything, vaccines. And finally, finally, most importantly, women.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
So, this might seem like fiction, but that right there was real. That’s a real list that has been promoted by our regime in power to purge ideas, grants, projects that utilize these particular words. This is our new normal. What we want to talk about is what the implications of that may be for cinematic filmmakers. So, last year, we came together in the days after the insurrectionists were released from custody, and we considered film’s role in facilitating the view that they were defending a country that was being taken away from them. And we looked at the birth of the nation, which used brilliant cinematic storytelling to sear this idea of who this country belongs to into the deep consciousness of Americans.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Tonight, we are exploring the afterlife of another moment in our history, the afterlife of McCarthyism and how it too created a troubling baseline for how Hollywood depicts race, how it distorts the story of us through its censorship, through its repression and through punishment. So, we started with Paul Robeson, but those who know about McCarthyism, if you were to ask him name us some names, they probably would tell you Trumbo. They probably know that, or they probably could tell you the story of a good night and good luck. But probably precious few of them could tell you a story about Paul Robeson.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
They probably wouldn’t name Harry Belafonte or Lena Horne, and probably less than 1% of them would know about Canada Lee or Hazel Scott, who together were the Michael B. Jordan and the Beyoncés of their days. Imagine 50 years from now, no one knowing who Beyoncé was, just imagine. So, we’ve also lost the perspective of how far blacklisted artists fell from the heights that they were once on. So, Paul Robeson, who some said was the most famous American on earth at the time, it wasn’t just that he was no longer employable in Hollywood, his name was erased from awards.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Even owning one of his records was enough to make a person’s loyalty be questioned. That is the strength and the power of the red Scare and the erasure that it created. So, what we want to do is try to recover some of that history and understand why it is critical to make sense of the crisis that’s facing us today. So, I want to start first with Jacqueline to just ponder for a minute what seems like a perfect crime. So, first, artists who questioned the status quo were blacklisted, and later the stories about this blacklisting focus pretty much exclusively on white creators.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
We don’t know much about others, so tell us what things were starting to be part of storytelling that then suddenly abruptly we’re no longer speakable.
Jacqueline Stewart:
Yes, thank you. Thanks for the question. And it’s great to see this room so full of people who are here for this urgent conversation. So, thank you for being here. There were a couple of films like No Way Out, Sidney Poitier’s First starring Role. This is a film in which he plays a young, very handsome doctor who faces a virulently racist white patient who calls him every name spits on him. And the film almost starts to do something radical in the way that it’s going to represent this insurgent black resistance. But it stops short.
Jacqueline Stewart:
I think that we can say that about so many films about African-American experience that were released
during this period, that there was an attempt, sometimes there was an impulse by filmmakers very, I guess well-meaning white liberal filmmakers to address some of the most urgent issues regarding race in America. But they always stopped short and there was always this kind of silencing and there would
always be this way in which the films never felt authentic to black audiences. And I think that that’s
exactly the kind of thing that this kind of red baiting and this building up of fear created in Hollywood.
Jacqueline Stewart:
It was almost worse in some cases that they tried to tell a liberal story and then just didn’t really do it. So, I think back to a filmmaker like Oscar Micheaux, one of the pioneers of African-American cinema who made over 40 films between 1918 and 1948. And he is someone who could not have been active in mainstream filmmaking, precisely because his work was grounded in the authenticity of black stories.
Jacqueline Stewart:
So, I think that any attempt that there could have been made during that time for black writers and
directors, many of whom tried like Langston Hughes, like Zora Neale Hurston, incredible, brilliant
talents, but there was always this barrier that had to do with not going too far in terms of empowering
black people to tell their own stories.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Yeah. And one of the things about recovering some of these films that push the envelope films like Pinky, films like No Way Out, is that it complicates our belief that we are always on a upward trajectory, right? When in fact, sometimes the films in the forties, were going a little bit further out there than the films of the ’50s or even the ’60s. So, there’s this ebb and flow, there’s this pushing forward and then pressure to go backwards. Some part of recovering history is recovering this back and forth understanding. The baseline against which we tell modern stories is actually shaped by these moments in the past, where some of these stories were erased or made impossible to get funded.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Ava, I want to come to you. Biographers of Paul Robeson often argue that without Robeson’s global
activism, there wouldn’t have been Martin Luther King. The same repressive ideas that were used against Dr. King that you talk about in Selma were actually, we might say beta tested on people like Robeson a decade earlier. I think historically we have a sense of what it meant to the movement to label Martin Luther King, the most dangerous man in America. We have a sense of what COINTELPRO actually did to the freedom moment. This surveillance and the suppression that happened in the ’50s against black storytellers did damage that we’re still living under.
Ava DuVernay:
Yeah, when we were talking about McCarthyism and the surveillance of black storytellers and what that has done to constrict voice and imagination, I won’t say imagination, voice reach and access, it’s
something that we are experiencing now. I feel very acutely through artists that are interested in speaking about Palestine. It’s not so far off that we’re really encouraged not to talk about it, encouraged not to wear the button to the thing, encouraged not to go to the Q and A for that particular movie, that Palestinian movie. And so, it’s not a far off concept for me to think about how do you create art?
Ava DuVernay:
How do you move imagination forward? How do you tell stories in an environment that makes saying
some things unacceptable writ large, you can’t get booked on the morning shows, you’re not going to get that double truck review with the two pages. Some ads aren’t even accepted. This is a reality for
Palestinian filmmakers and filmmakers making films about Gaza. So, I don’t think we have to only think
back to wonder what it’s like. We’re in the midst of artists who are currently being censored and we’re,
and we’re in the midst of people who support those artists being discouraged from doing so. And so, it is incumbent upon us to learn lessons from the past.
Ava DuVernay:
You look at Robeson, you look at Micheaux. Oscar Micheaux was distributing and exhibiting his own
work as I learned from this queen right here, we have to think about what is success outside of the
mainstream. So, no, he may not remember him as widely as a Orson Welles or I don’t know what are the other ones, or DW Griffith, right? But the people that he made those films for know him And Oscar
Micheaux took those films from community to community, from city to city and played them for the
people that he made them for, which was black people. And he is remembered in his name is known. And so, I think also for artists, it’s a question of our proximity to success. What is the center for you?
Ava DuVernay:
And more and more I have come to realize for myself that it is to be close to the people that I’m telling it for, not necessarily to the people who will pay me or the people who will deem it an achievement or a
claim. If I’m going to be a storyteller, then we have to strip ourselves of chasing this thing that really is so outside of the story. And so, when I think of Robeson, when I think of some of the blacklisted filmmakers who continue to write, continue to write the script, continue to make films for smaller audiences, but still robust, still saying what they wanted to say and realizing that right now realizing that this has happened before, we can see the repetition, we can see the patterns, and it’s incumbent upon us to learn the lessons and not duplicate them.
Ava DuVernay:
And again, the way not to do it is to not to, it’s hard to say not to want that thing, not to want them to give us permission, not to want them to say it’s okay not to want it. Last thing I’ll say on this historic day, because I know him, Brian Cougar was going to make sentences whether they liked it or not. Okay. He’s going to make it whether they liked it or not, just that exact way he made it, right? And Robeson and King and Nkrumah and Lumumba and Sankara, anyone you want to say, everyone who did anything to move the black voice forward rejoices in that film separate and apart from what the industry has said it means, because it’ll always mean its own thing separately.
Ava DuVernay:
And so, we have to recenter ourselves and get really sober about where we are. And if we want to be
artists, we need to realize that we may not always have the awards, we may not always have the money. But if you’re storytelling you’re artist and you have to do it, then do it. And you will find like-minded people who want to hear you.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Yeah. Thank you, Ava. Thank you. So, Viet, you have explored how international threats have been used to justify domestic repression. Along these lines, you’ve also noted that while the state has swapped yesterday’s label of communist and subversive for today’s labels of terrorists and woke, the playbook remains kind of the same. A global conflict then gets used to criminalize domestic dissidents, especially traditionally marginalized and immigrant groups in the United States. So, can you uncover some elements of this that happened in the ’50s and it’s potential connections to some of the things happening now?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Sure. Thank you so much. I think one thing we have to understand is that the most important American
religion is capitalism. You could say, “Oh, maybe Christianity is more important.” But I’ll bet that if you
put your average American to a test and say you have to choose capitalism or Christianity, they’ll choose capitalism. And in fact, we have evidence already they chose Donald Trump. That is the most explicit evidence that capitalism matters more than Christianity. And you said that Martin Luther King Jr. was the most dangerous man in America of his time. And I would say that that’s true.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And it’s not only because he stood up for civil rights and black empowerment, but because he criticized the American military industrial complex and he criticized capitalism and his speech beyond Vietnam, which I’m pretty sure most people in this room have never read, even though you can find it easily online. He said the United States is guilty of not just racism, but militarism and extreme materialism. You cannot say that. So, there is a little red and black line in this country, and I’ll say yellow line too. In order to enter into the American conversation and be accepted, you have to apologize and you have to confess, especially if you have any taint of communism.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So, that’s what we saw with Paul Robeson. He refused to apologize. He refused to confess, and the system attempted to crush him. Now, if you’re an Asian immigrant and you come from a country that is somehow affiliated with communism or anti-communist war like Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, China, you have to say, I’m not a communist. And you say it explicitly or you say it implicitly, but you have to say it. And so, when we go back to the 1950s, what we see is the Chinese confession program, and it’s a predecessor to everything we’re seeing today. You’re seeing people being deported, dragged off, the streets, murdered, all these things happen to Chinese immigrants.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Starting in the 19th century, the first racist exclusionary immigration laws were directed at the Chinese.
The immigration and Naturalization service was created to police. Chinese immigration. Angel Island
Detention Center was the first detention center for immigrants. So, while Ellis Island welcomed you, if
you were white, you didn’t have to show any papers. If you were a Chinese coming into the United States from the west coast, you were detained in Angel Island. People committed suicide in there, people were killed in there. You can visit Angel Island Detention Center and read the poems that the Chinese immigrants wrote there, decrying what was being done to them. But it’s in Chinese.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So, if you want to read what’s written in English, you have to read the accounts of Asian Americans who tend to be apologetic and compliant with American capitalism. And so, the stereotype about Asian
Americans that we’re the model minority is somewhat true, but it’s been a socially and politically
engineered situation. And so, the Chinese Confession program, what happened in the 1950s is that the
Chinese were pressured to confess. First of all, they had to confess that they were undocumented because a lot of them were, and then they had to confess and name names of people who were communists or ostensibly communists.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And that’s exactly what’s taking place today, except with a different affiliation about loyalty. So, I want to end though not with this idea about apology and confession, but the idea of resistance that you can resist. You’re just going to pay a price for it. And I want to name names, but I’m not going to name the names of communists because I’m afraid of them. I want to name the names of Asian American radicals who existed and who have been ignored, who have been erased, and who have been overshadowed. That would be writers like H.T. Tsiang, who wrote in China Has Hands in the 1930s, Carlos Bulosan, who wrote America Is in the Heart in 1946.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
He was all lauded American writer, even though he was a communist because in the 1940s, as with Paul Robeson, you could stand with the Soviet Union and still have a platform. By 1956, Carlos Bulosan, a immigrant from a colonized country who was a Marxist labor organizer, was dead of alcoholism and persecution by the FBI on the steps of Seattle City Hall, Yuri Kochiyama, Japanese-American activist who cradled Malcolm X as he was dying. Grace Lee Boggs, who was partnered with James Lee Boggs as two of the most important radical thinkers in the United States in the later half of the 20th century.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So, Asian American radicalism exists, but it’s overshadowed because these people didn’t apologize and they did not confess, but they existed and their names should be heard.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Thank you. So, we’ve been hearing about the deeper complicated dimension of what the Red Scare was all about. There’s a way of reading the perpetrators of the Red Scare is basically just anti-communists. Well, we don’t read them as is racist. We don’t understand the degree to which simply promoting equal justice, or demanding respect on a set as an artist would also get you branded as a communist. Artists like Hazel Scott.
Speaker 3:
The session of the House Un-American Activity Committee will come to order Ms. Scott.
Hazel Scott:
Mr. Chairman and honorable members of the committee. I appreciate your granting my request to appear voluntarily before the House Un-American Activities Committee, I appear as an American citizen. I appear as a musician, a member of the artistic profession, to which I have long belonged and which has rewarded me with many satisfactions.
Speaker 3:
We are not here for that Ms. Scott. There are many that are accusing you.
Hazel Scott:
This is the day for the professional gossip, the organized rumor monger, the smear artist with the spray
gun, A few cunningly, contrived lies, some false statements, and impressively long list, such as red
channels and the years of preparation, sacrifice, and devotion are killed. We should not be written off by the vicious slanders of little and petty men, little and petty men, little and petty men, little and petty
vicious men. That was me back when I thought that the truth mattered when I thought I had nothing to
hide. So, I had nothing to fear that was me.
Hazel Scott:
When three days a week, I was looking directly into America’s living rooms as the first African-American to host a variety show my very present saying, I am your equal. That was me when I refused to pretend that civil rights were some radical fantasy instead of a moral necessity. That was me When I believed that being the highest paid entertainer in New York would earn me respect. That was me. Before I realized that in America, talent is welcome as long as it doesn’t come with conviction. That was me before I knew that signing for petitions and attending meetings for believing that artists should have minds as well as hands, my name would appear in a little book that threatened to end my career.
Hazel Scott:
No trial, no evidence, just suspicion printed in ink. So, I went to Washington voluntarily and stood up to
tell the truth. I sat under those hot lights before the House Un-American Activities Committee and said,
“The blacklist is un-American.” Do you know what happened after that? They told America that I was an enemy within that thinking too freely was suspicious, dangerous. My television show was taken from me. No soldiers came, no doors were kicked in. I was simply erased quietly, efficiently, like chalk wiped from a board. After the show was gone, they didn’t archive it or preserve it.
Hazel Scott:
In fact, they took the kinescopes, the proof that a black woman once sat at a piano and spoke to a nation as an equal and they threw them into the Hudson River and let the current carry out of the American conscience. No announcement, no apology, just reels hitting water and silence, filling the space where music had been, erasure, not with fire, with acquiescence. But understand this, you do not throw something into a river unless you are afraid of what it might say.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Little vicious men. Indeed, there’s been no shortage of these throughout history as Hazel Scott reminds us. And when state authority demands private compliance, the little petty vicious men have too often acquiesced. So, during the Red Scare, it was Hollywood that collaborated with HUAC and tightened the screws of censorship on storytellers who were dedicated to broadening the story of us. This is the same HUAC whose leadership included a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. So, let’s talk a little bit more about the parallels in the machinery of censorship then. And now, Jacqueline, I’m going to come to you again. We know that that complicity of studio heads was key to the success of the Red Scare.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
The committee itself couldn’t say, don’t hire those people. It was the studios that basically ruined careers. Now, I imagine some people would say, “Well, that was then there was a studio system. Either you were in it or you weren’t. Either you could work or you could not.” But what does that overlook about the contemporary dynamics of the industry? What is it that is happening now with concentration of ownership that puts us in a very similar situation to what happened during the studio system?
Jacqueline Stewart:
Yeah, this thread is extremely important to look at because when you think about the Jimmy Kimmel
situation, also Joy Reid losing her, show her, but still she’s doing her thing
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Doing her thing.
Jacqueline Stewart:
… in her own way. But this consolidation of the ownership of media outlets, I mean, it’s a process that’s
been going on for a very long time. But right now, when we look at the percentage of companies, even
more, consolidation seems to be happening now, is happening now. Netflix is trying to acquire Warner
Media. So, when you have that kind of concentration and shrinking of the powers that then have the
ability to give us the information and the entertainment that we are accustomed to getting, it’s a really
scary and dangerous thing.
Jacqueline Stewart:
And it means that there are so many fewer voices, agents, actors, who would have the ability to push back against government influence or the fear that the government, our current government, is trying to instill in the leaders of media, corporations. I mean, when you were talking about the complicity of the studios, there’s also a really important link between the way that Hollywood said that it was policing itself through the Hays Code, the production code starting in the 1930s, and then what picked up during this red baiting that took place in the 1940s and ’50s. I mean, studios were claiming that they were going to adhere to certain standards of morality.
Jacqueline Stewart:
They were equating the representation of criminality and sexuality, overt sexuality with miscegenation,
with any hints of interracial equality or mixing. These were kind of parallel fears, and they continue to be parallel fears in the ways that artists are being pressured not to tell stories that could be deemed so-called Un-American. I think at the core of all of this is the ways that we’re being gaslighted about what the term American even means. And there’s this effort to try to redefine that when we have had artists and thinkers who are talking about democracy, and maybe that’s the term that we should be focusing on rather than this something is American or anti-American.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Yeah. So, speaking of what has to be pushed outside of acceptable lines of story, we might move from the Hays Code to the Trump code. And Ava, you told the story of the Exonerated Five, and there is a certain person who still is refusing to accept their innocence has doubled down on his calling for them to be executed, and at the same time has generated a sense of improper ideology. And improper ideology is pretty much all the things that that story is about. It was about racism in the criminal justice system. It’s about injustice itself. It’s about the long history of black defendants being forced and being tortured and being prosecuted and being convicted by kangaroo courts.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
This is all the storyline that the person in the White House has labeled as improper and trying to erase. So, as a storyteller, what are the implications of rendering stories like the Exonerated Five untellable?
Ava DuVernay:
Right. So, much of what we’re dealing with right now is a distraction to the core work. And really around when they see us in the Exonerated Five, I found myself repeating something that I’d done on Selma participating in the litigation of some word or thing they didn’t like, which took away from the thing that I’d made and what I was trying to say. I felt toward on Selma, right? Well, we don’t like the way you depicted LBJ. He was nice. Oh, okay. But this movie is about these black people in Selma and the whole campaign became about that. I was going on Charlie Rose and shows to defend the film against the thing they didn’t like with the Exonerated Five. And when they see us, the first question, it’s Trump.
Ava DuVernay:
He said this. Okay, he said that. Let’s move on to let’s talk about these boys and their mamas and what
they did to survive and how these boys are duplicated thousands and millions of times across since for the last a hundred years. Their story is a living, breathing story. But I found myself not talking about that as much because I’m talking about him and I’m talking about them fighting them on these words when we need to be fighting what they don’t want us to fight, which is you’re taking people out of their homes, you’re walking into homes now without a warrant. You rest in little kids.
Ava DuVernay:
There’s no equal protection under the law, due process, birthright, citizenship, all of these things that have already been determined and we abide by in the 14th amendment of the Constitution now are in question. Oh, they go back the Supreme Court, what kind of Supreme Court? A loaded, slanted Supreme court. And so, we’re getting pulled down into conversations that take our eye off the ball. And so, we learn from history, and I thank you so much for drawing parallels to the past because we know that we need to keep our eye on the ball. And the studying king so intently, he was incredible in staying on the message, right?
Ava DuVernay:
I mean, he would give you a little flurry and talk about this, but he would always come down to what he
wanted to say. What’s our intention? What’s our democratic imagination? We can’t spend the whole four years or whatever it is, fighting these distractions that they’re throwing out. We have to stay on message to stay focused, especially in our storytelling, especially in our filmmaking. We cannot obey in advance. We cannot censor ourselves because we think the studio’s not going to want it. The critic’s not going to want it. We’ve got to say the thing. It’s the only way. It’s the only way.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
So, we had one of the strategies that’s being used to try to constrain and limit the story of us is to
problematize history, to erase memory, to frame it as divisive. So, as a scholar who interrogates how
memory has been weaponized, how does Hollywood’s past give us any insight about how it will handle
the current demand for narrow patriotic storytelling?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I’m not very optimistic. I think about the fact that Hollywood is a cinema industrial complex, and it works very easily with the military industrial complex. And it’s basically America’s unofficial ministry of
propaganda. We don’t need an official ministry of propaganda like a totalitarian society would because I think the overwhelming majority of American filmmakers sort of agree with most of what the United
States is doing. They may have some minor disagreements or they want to pay attention to the victims, but they generally sort of agree. And that’s why we can have a movie industry that can do things that
make Top Gun, I, Top Gun may be very entertaining.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
I haven’t watched it, so I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I mean, I’m sure it’s very entertaining.
But you couldn’t make that movie without the American military industrial complex. And so, you have
the whole span of things that Hollywood produces from movies like Top Gun to that’s a propagandistic
movie. But 1968 Green Berets by John Wayne set in Vietnam. That is an American piece of propaganda. It takes the basic Western movie genre, transports it to Vietnam and makes the Vietnamese communists the Indians. And that template has been done over and over and over again to different populations.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And I’ve fallen victim to it. I remember as a kid watching Exodus from the early 1960s, which is about
the founding of the state of Israel in which the Arabs and the Muslims are the Indians. And we identify
with Paul Newman basically as a very gorgeous Jewish man. The template of Hollywood, its ability to
seduce us, to get us to see the world through American eyes is not something that the government needs to compel. It’s because the ideology of American exceptionalism and the inevitability of American capitalism and an American point of view is something that has been internalized by so many of us, even many of us who might be critical of that.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So, we have to be very sophisticated in understanding how the ideology of American filmmaking works. It’s easy to look at the Green Berets or Top Gun and say that’s American propaganda, but there’s a lot more subtle American endorsement of the American ideologies happening at the same time. So, I’ll give you an example. The Quiet American, a novel published in 1955 by Graham Greene, one of the most important 20th century novelists, basically predicts the devastation that’s going to happen during the American War in Vietnam. And the Quiet American is a Yale-educated, very nice CIA agent in Vietnam who goes into Vietnam and kills a lot of people out of the best of intentions.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So, Hollywood adapts it in 1958, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz starting Audie Murphy, the greatest
American hero of World War II as the quiet American. And what does the movie do? By the end of the
movie, the English journalist who criticizes the United States in the novel at the end says, I was wrong.
The United States was right. That was Hollywood’s revenge on a novel that it saw as being antiAmerican. It would take until the early 2000s, before the 2000, and I think two adaptation with Brendan Fraser directed by Phillip Noyce would finally restore the actual ending of the movie.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
So, Hollywood may get the story right, it just will do it at a time when it’s safe to say so the writer Omar
El Akkad has a great book called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He’s talking
specifically about the genocide in Gaza. People who are not willing to say anything now 20 years from
now, say, well, of course I was opposed to the genocide in Gaza. And they’re going to start making
movies about Palestinians that probably don’t start Palestinians but will start, I don’t know who, but they will not feature Palestinians. So, Hollywood can get the story. It can only do so when enough time has elapsed so that it’s safe enough for Hollywood to get that story right.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
And the reason why is because I think about the fact that Hollywood is the equivalent of a battleship. It
costs a lot of money to make a movie. It takes a lot of effort to change the direction of the battleship. So, we should not be looking at Hollywood to set an avant-garde ideal for us. We have the greater capacity to tell the truth when it matters, and then Hollywood will catch up to us.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Mm-hmm. Thank you, Viet. So, we broaden our frame of censorship to go beyond state actors. We’ve
looked at some of the forces historical and now that constrain artists. The danger though is that when
certain thoughts are framed and rendered unthinkable, we begin to shrink back from voicing those ideas out of fear. And before we know it, we have basically folded ourselves into the current moment. Now, this isn’t new black artists back-talking artists have seen this coming and they’ve warned us about the price of apathy and appeasement. Artists like Lorraine Hansberry.
Hazel Scott:
Where are our artists in the contemporary struggles? Some of them, of course have made significant
contributions to the Negro struggle, but the vast majority, where are they? Well, I’m afraid that they are
primarily where the ruling powers have always wished the artist to be and to stay in their studios. Part of this detachment is the result of the House Committee and McCarthyism in all its forms. The climate of fear, which we were once told would bear a bitter harvest in the culture of our civilization, has in fact
come to pass. We were ceaselessly told after all, to be silent, to be ignorant, to be without unsanctioned opinions and above all else, obedient.
Hazel Scott:
This means in the arts, how can one write plays which have in them implicit or explicit, a quality of the
detestation of commerciality, if in fact one is beholden to the commerciality of the professional theater? How can one protest the criminal persecution of political dissenters if one has already discovered at 19, that to do so is to risk a profession. If all one’s morality is wedded to the opportunist, the expedient in life, how can one have the deepest, most profound moral outrage about the condition of the Negro people in the United States? I know perfectly well that such institutions as the House Committee and all the other little committees have dragged on their particular obscene theatrics for all these years.
Hazel Scott:
Not to expose communists, but merely to create an atmosphere where in the first place, I should be afraid to come here tonight at all. And secondly, absolutely guarantee that I will not say what I am going to say, which is this. I think that my government is wrong. I will go further speaking as a Negro in America and impose a little of what Negroes say all the time to each other on what I am saying to you. And that is, it would be a great thing if they would send troops to finish the reconstruction in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and every place else where the fact that our federal flag flying creates the false notion that what happened at the end of the Civil War was the defeat of the slavocracy at the political as well as the military level.
Hazel Scott:
Finally, all of us who wish to exercise these rights that we are here defending tonight must really exercise them. Speaking to my fellow artists, I think that we must paint them, sing them, write about them. Otherwise, we are indulging in a luxurious complicity and no other thing.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
I know that you’re listening with bated breath to hear the end of Carol Young’s reading as Hazel Scott.
But I’m going to leave you in suspense. This year, our story of Us Cup, run it over with great
performances, ideas, and artistry. So, we’re breaking the episode into two. Keep your eyes peeled for the second half. It will be available exactly where you found this episode in two weeks. This episode of
Intersectionality Matters was produced by senior producer, Nicole Edwards. The 2026 installment of our annual Story of US event at Sundance Film Festival was produced by me and the incredible team at the African-American Policy Forum led by Kevin Minofu, Ashley Julian, and Justin Emeka.
Kimberlé Crenshaw:
Special thanks to the extended team at AAPF and to Sundance for using their magic to create an
incredible evening. The evening was made possible, thanks to support from the Foundation for Systemic Change, Ford Foundation, JustFilms and The Bertha Foundation. If you like our show, subscribe, follow us on social media, leave a review and donate to the African-American Policy Forum by going to Aapf.org.
I’m your host, Kimberlé Crenshaw. We’ll be back soon.
