Dear Joaquin Phoenix…
While your speech about privilege and lack of opportunity for people of color was true…you do not get an invitation to the cookout. What is the cookout you ask? Well, it is a place where you’ll find laughter, love, good food and if you’re lucky a game of spades. The cookout out is where we as black folk cut up, hug up, and do the electric slide to Frankie Beverly ft. Maze’s greatest song “Before I Let Go.” The cookout is sacred. It’s family…it’s home.
You do not get invited to our safe space because you chose to create a speech about the injustice of your privilege. You do not get to sit at the table we’ve had to create for ourselves because you so eloquently made your peers uncomfortable for one night only. You do not get to be praised and lifted up as some savior who’s come to use his allyship to showcase what we’ve all known all along.
We. Are. Not. Welcome. Not at your table, not in your space. Yet, while your speech and its message resonate with me it changed nothing but the smiles of white faces to uncomfortable blank stares.
I don’t look to punish you for your efforts, instead, I challenge you to continuously do more. Enlist help and stop at nothing to exemplify the voices that have been unheard for too long. Because just like your table, our seats are coveted too and only those who are truly for us will receive an invitation to our cookout.
“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”― Arundhati Roy, Sydney Peace Prize Lecture
You can find more on Phoenix’s speech here.
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This post was previously published on Equality Includes You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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