Writer-director-producer Ava DuVernay, the brilliant mind behind
Selma, 13th and
When They See Us, hasn’t let her Emmys, Peabodys, or Oscar nominations go to her head. Rather, she's committed to constant learning, especially when it comes to advice from her elders and the incredible activists and artists who came before her. During the making of
Selma, she worked closely with American Congressman and prolific civil rights leader John Lewis, who
recently passed. Speaking with Stephen Colbert during
The Late Show, she said his personal advice to her at that time has been inspiring her work ever since.“One of the things he said to me that stuck with me in the last few days, since his transition, was I said, you know, ‘What do I do?’—I don’t know what I was talking about—‘Congressman, what do I do?’ she said via video-chat during the July 23 episode. 'He said, ‘Ava, do everything.’ He was like, 'Do everything.’ What does that mean? He was like Yoda!”
“And so I’ve really been pondering that question of 'Do Everything,'” she continued. “And the answer to that is what I’m striving to figure out. But that’s one of the gifts that he left for me.”That advice has spurred on her latest project, LEAP (
Law Enforcement Accountability Project) with the aim of funding artist-activists whose work exposes the unlawful or abusive tactics of police to hold it up for public scrutiny. “LEAP is basically saying that we don’t feel that police unions are holding bad cops accountable,” DuVernay said. “We don’t see courts holding these cops accountable. We the people as taxpayers can do it.”Noting that although she has become somewhat numbed to seeing Black bodies brutalized on camera at the hands of police, what was different about the killing of George Floyd by now-disgraced Officer Derek Chauvin was that he looked right into the camera with impunity while Floyd and bystanders cried out for him to stop. “It knocked me to my knees,” she admitted. The LEAP initiative is DuVernay's way of making sure these officers aren't allowed to fade back into society without being forever remembered for their violent, racially-motivated actions.[video_embed id='1984979']RELATED: Canadian teen shares his experiences with anti-Black racism [/video_embed]These issues stemming from systemic racism in every American institution are ones DuVernay has explored in-depth in many of her projects, including her 2016 Oscar-nominated documentary
13th, which has been one of the most-streamed films on Netflix recently, and is also
free to watch in its entirety on YouTube until the end of the summer. In
13th, the exploration of the phrase “law and order,” which has become a rallying cry for those in power as a political tool, is “defanged,” as DuVernay puts it, and contextualized with the racist connotations behind it.“Really it speaks to the criminalization of Black people,” she said, “the idea that and the growth and maturation of the idea that Black people are inherently criminals who need to be controlled through mechanisms of social control, that are most prominent in the criminal justice system, of prison and incarceration systems. Once you know that, you hear those words differently.” Calling President Trump’s “law and order” rhetoric a “dogwhistle,” she says his mirroring of outdated racist ideas is “pretty basic, yet desperately violent.”That violence that's currently playing out
on the streets of Portland, where the federal government has sent unidentifiable masked police in military attire with military-grade weapons to illegally kidnap protesters and haul them away in unmarked vans, is especially concerning for DuVernay. “The outrage is going to come from the coverage of it,” she said, noting that networks aren’t covering these “shock troops” as much as social media. “This is what our country has supposedly gone into other countries to fight against,” she said.Then Colbert, paraphrasing the
Federalist Papers’ warnings about authoritarianism, added: “If someone can pop a bag over your head and take you away without cause, you have no other rights.”“That’s where we are,” she replied.[video_embed id='1993445']BEFORE YOU GO: What We're Watching: Black lives in the spotlight [/video_embed]
