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[0:00] Tonya Pinkins: Hi, my name is Tonya Pinkins, and I'm the host of the podcast You Can't SAY THAT on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:07] Tonya Pinkins: This fall, I have a special treat for you. In honor of my debut feature film RED PILL, Marissa Lynn Daniels Studios has been hosting weekly conversations with my fellow Broadway colleagues and co-host Sierra Renee about the red pilling of America.

[0:27] Tonya Pinkins: These conversations create a safe space for us to talk about the things that are on our mind with an election and a global pandemic. So join us for The Red Pilling of America, a spotlight series every Saturday at 5 p.m. or on the Broadway Podcast Network. You can't say that.

[0:54] Tonya Pinkins: Join the conversation. We gotta speak to live. We gotta say what's new for you.

[1:12] Rashad Robinson: Yes, I mean, the inspiration for me for writing the movie was, um, you know, I was clear that he was gonna win the first time because I was like, Hillary couldn't beat a black man with the middle name Hussein. There is no way she's gonna beat a white man. And so it was just delusional for me to even, you know, I wasn't gonna do. So I thought, how can I influence people and focus them with what I do, which is I'm an artist. I can tell a story, I can tell a story that's horror. Horror is the number one genre in the world. It is the genre that you can put your politics into because you can make it that, oh, that's a pretend world that we're talking about, but you can say real things inside of a world that feels like it's not quite like living next door.

[2:01] Rashad Robinson: And so for me, RED PILL is about the difference between the Democrats who are very smart, who are very educated, who are very politically correct and not very effective, and the other team who is like, we may not agree on a lot of things, but what we can agree on is we're gonna take them out. And that is what RED PILL is. It is the two ideologies and the two different ways those ideologies work. And you can probably guess what the ending of RED PILL is just based on what I told you. But I was like, how can I, how can I do this with something that goes right to people this really? Because all of my talking about it, people just, you know, treated me like I had two heads, like I was stupid or something to try to talk about it. So I said, I'll just I'll make a piece of I'll tell a story about it.

[2:51] Tonya Pinkins: Well, this is actually, I love that story because, you know, on the left, we do a lot of things of saying, I'm cool, I'm cool, I'm cool, instead of just being cool. And you know, you're just you're like just instead of like you move from just talking about it to like, I'm gonna put some content on. I like oftentimes when I talk to, you know, Democrat elected officers and they're like, you know, asking me questions about engaging with the Color of Change community and what they could do. And you know, as we've grown, everyone wants to like talk to our members on IG Live or something. And um, and you know, one thing I oftentimes say is like, don't talk to me about like low wage workers, go to Walmart on Thanksgiving and have dinner with some people. Like, like, don't talk about it, do it.

[3:38] Rashad Robinson: And the more we do things, then we actually have the like, don't talk about standing up to polluters. Like, don't turn down their money and hold them accountable. Like, there is like, there's like, you know, we're the only national black civil rights organization that doesn't take corporate financial support. And the reason why we don't is because I can't hold them accountable if I do. Like, I just can't. Like, it is not like there's not good people that work inside of corporations. There's not like there's not some corporations where like, you know, um, you know, folks are really trying to do the right thing, but I can make them do more of the right thing if when I get on the comp phone with them, they know that, um, the bottom line for me is how much justice they're gonna get, not how many dollars they can, how many zeros they can put on a check.

[4:29] Rashad Robinson: And that is like really important for us. And so, even when the pandemic launched, there were all these corporations announcing all this money they were giving us, and I was seeing these press releases, and I was like, I don't understand. These people should have at least called me first before they put our name in a press release because we have turned down millions of dollars. Um, and um, and we've turned it down um so that we can do the work. Um, but we've also turned it down so that we can be very clear to the people that we're not just playing the same exact game as our opponents, and that becomes the problem sometimes, and that's one of the other things is that is that sometimes folks can say they're all the same, so at least I'm gonna pick the person that feels like they're just telling me what they think rather than the person that's like giving me a lot of talking points, and a lot of people, unfortunately, feel that Donald Trump says exactly what he thinks, and he does, he likes says it all. I mean, like to the point of like saying the strategy on stage, like, oh, you just said that, you're gonna lose the left. Like he like, there is no filter to everything that he does.

[5:40] Rashad Robinson: Yeah. And it's kind of refreshing for people. And you know, for me, I funded my movie myself. And so I'm the bottom line. And there's some points of view in my movie that, uh, you know, when I'm getting my critiques about it, you know, there's some people like whiteness is not centered, white ineffectiveness is centered. You know, there's a lynching in my movie, and it's like sometimes like that's too long. And I'm like, too long? Y'all did this for over 100 years. You're still doing it. We can't get lunch in legislation. How can it be too long on my movie? This was postcards for you. Yeah, like literal postcards that people would put in the mail, not in an envelope, and send it.

[6:24] Rashad Robinson: We're like passing hands. Yeah, I mean, this I'm, you know, um, Bryan Stevenson, who I've unfortunately had to follow once or twice on stage after you talk, which you never want to do, is so eloquent in talking about sort of the ways in which we have uh not remembered. And if anyone, and when sort of the pandemic is up, then you have a chance to get to um his um the EGA EGI's um memorial, it is um an absolute uh experience. And walking through that space, and actually, when you get to the very end, there's a space where they ask you to sign up to take action, and that's Color of Change. That's the space where they ask you to take action. Um, it's um signing up to take action uh uh with us um as sort of the the the the kind of last thing you get as you're as you're leaving.

[7:23] Tonya Pinkins: Fantastic. So we were I wanted to just talk a little bit about the fact that Color of Change has been working with Hollywood to get more um representation, and we saw this We See You What letter sort of speaking to white American theater. And um, you know, I wrote an essay about that, and you had this experience of we got more bodies that had color uh melanation, but what came out of their mouths was different. And I also wanted Sierra, who's uh Hawk girl to talk about it in terms of her experience as a superhero, but tell us about what ended up happening from your work with Hollywood in terms of more representation.

[8:03] Rashad Robinson: So I mean, this is complicated because it's at every industry, right? We have this theory at Color of Change is don't mistake presence for power. Presence is visibility, awareness, but power is the ability to change the rules, right? Um, if you don't change the rules, you can mistake presence for power and think you've done something that you haven't done. You know, you can think a black president means that you are post-racial. You can think that because America has a lot of black celebrities that they love that America loves black people as much as America loves black culture, and America can love, celebrate, monetize black culture and hate black people at the same time. And those two things don't actually have to be in conflict. In fact, they can be sort of deeply intertwined in terms of how uh the systems work and the systems operate.

[8:52] Rashad Robinson: And so, you know, one of the things that one of the places where we've really um leaned in at Color of Change is crime procedural shows. And the thing about crime procedural shows is that, and I've been saying this since I was at GLAD, like when we were like shifting content, I was always like, I was like, who's doing the crime procedural work in the civil rights space? Someone needs to do it. I actually like I wrote notes to the Color of Change at the time. Like, like, if you all started, I will like come and help you all. And they were like, you should just come and run Color of Change. And I was like, no, I don't want to come run Color of Change. And then sure enough, that's what ended up happening.

Um, and you know, the thing about our report, Normalizing Injustice, and you can get you can go to normalizinginjustice or you can get it at our site changehollywood.org. The thing about that report, which is like really powerful, is we spent a year with the Norman Lear School at USC looking at all the crime, those crime procedures, the CSIs and law and orders, but not just looking at the representation of race, but the representation of crime on those shows and how they like were interrelated.

[9:56] Rashad Robinson: And we released it in January, and a couple of things that were really powerful. One, that most of these shows had all white writers' rooms or one black person in the writer's room. Law and Order SVU, the season we looked at, all white writers' rooms, and it was about sex crimes, and they had one woman in the writer's room, um, or two women in the writer's room. Um, Chicago PD had all white writers' room. Look, these are places where folks are getting jobs, and actually the cast on those shows were deeply diverse, deeply diverse. And so, you know, but then you had an all-white writers' room. Then you then we went back and we looked at sort of the representation in deep weave. Way more black judges than ever existed in the real world on those shows, and so we started tracking it.

You know, I'm not trying to take jobs away from black folks, right? But way more black judges, and so this is the trick that ends up happening, right? It's so all white writers' room will send justice through the mouths of oftentimes a symbolic black character that has no backstory. What would it be like for a black woman in her 60s to be a judge? What may she have to go through? What would she like think about the criminal justice system? But she becomes this sort of weird symbolic archetype for like stateliness and justice, and and so that the people who are watching can feel like justice is being served. Surely this black person is not being railroaded by this black judge, and you have all these black judges on these shows away disproportionate, and it almost operates as a tool so we don't question the justice that's on screen, where you know, these shows don't actually force us to challenge a system that is deeply broken in all of the cities where the police are out always doing the thing, you never see police raping anyone, you never see police actually harming, you don't see the police unions, you don't see the fact that most cases never go to trial.

In fact, 90% in lots of places never go to trial because people are forced to please because they don't have lawyers, but now you have all these lawyers operating, defense attorneys are seen as nefarious, like they have all these resources, and even when they have white characters that have done the crime, oftentimes the white characters are deeply manipulative or cunning or smart. They're criminal masterminds, and the black characters are oftentimes just violent. They are just like evil, right? So even when the white characters have done something, they've done something where they have like figured out something that makes them like really like entirely admirable, something that you can do.

Admirable as it may be a criminal, right? And um, so we looked at all of that, and we released it in January, and we spent time really pushing. We got all the stories in Variety and Hollywood Reporter, and even Chicago Tribune did a great piece on the Chicago shows. Dick Wolf said, who's the creator of a lot of these shows, said his shows are apolitical.

[12:56] Rashad Robinson: You create a show about in cities that are about race and crime and like. What has happened is that since the since about June, we have the organization has been in the writer's room for basically every crime procedural on air right now. Overnight.

[14:00] Rashad Robinson: Zooms on the side from like black writers who are saying, "Hey, I just got hired."

[14:07] Rashad Robinson: Um, like then I have to let them know I'm like, "Hey, here's my number," because I don't know if anyone knows whoever owns the Zoom, you can even see private chats.

[14:20] Rashad Robinson: So if you do use Zoom, because we do a lot of work at Silicon Valley, if you've ever doing private chats with someone on Zoom, the person who owns a Zoom can see all of the chats, even the private ones afterwards.

[14:31] Rashad Robinson: Hope I'm not making people think back too long. Just think forward. Just think about how you do this forward. The person who owns a Zoom can see all the chats, even the private, and it says private next to it. And so they can see communication back and forth. So I just let you know that brother, that sister know I'm like, hey, they can, you know, contact me off this because whatever we say next, your bosses are gonna see. Um talk about presence and power as being a superhero on three TV shows.

[15:00] Rashad Robinson: Yeah. I mean, this is yeah, I mean, but we but we have a real opportunity here in some of these shows, and some of these shows, hopefully, it's not just the season, but some of them are entering storylines that they've sent us the scripts for that are like new and interesting. And because they've hired police officers to be consultants on these shows, they should be engaging folks like us to provide a level of balance and insight and perspective from community to help shape a better reality. But we're gonna have some shows that are gonna look at police unions, they're gonna look at police misconduct, and that will be on the air in a way that we've never seen before. And so um, you know, that is a result of both building the infrastructure and challenging it, but also leveraging moments that you can't always create, which is the moment of uprising this summer where we knew like this is a window, and hopefully, more black writers get jobs. Hopefully, we can force um folks to look at those numbers clearly, but it's you know, we'll see.

[16:05] Rashad Robinson: Well, and I've been pitching a show with Bridget Carpenter about pro-Salitic pro-Salitigans because like 80% of people in court are representing themselves. And I feel like if we start looking at that and the families and way they are their lives as they're stuck in the court system instead of the judges and the lawyers who are against them, that's a whole area of entertainment that would be more realistic.

[16:30] Sierra: Yeah, uh uh yeah. So this has you know been an ongoing thing for me ever since 2015 when I I joined those shows. You know, I did not shows.

[16:42] Rashad Robinson: Sorry? Let us know what shows.

[16:44] Sierra: Yeah, so I I played Hawk Girl, uh, Kendra Munoz Saunders. She's uh supposedly supposed to be Hispanic. I am not Hispanic, so that's also an interesting representation thing. Um, so and we also never spoke about that at all on the show, and it was not a part of her identity in any form or fashion, um, which is also interesting. Um, so when I joined the show, Legends of Tomorrow, also Arrow and Flash, they're all kind of they work together. Um there were I think three female writers, um, two of which I mostly one of which uh identified as a woman of color.

[17:29] Sierra: And uh, you know, it's just I think one of the best ways to illustrate it is that we we were time traveling a lot on the show, and there were two people of color in a cast of like nine. Um, it was me and one of my co-stars, Franz Drame. And um there was an episode where we went back to the 60s, 50s, 50s, I think, 1950 something. And uh when we got the first draft of the script, Franz and I were like, oh, snap, it's about to pop off for us because this is the first time we're going back and having to like really be seen in an era where it's dangerous for us, like what's gonna happen.

[18:14] Sierra: And essentially there was no mention of what it would be like to be a person of color in America at that time. And Franz and I were like losing our minds, like this can't be. So we reached out to the one woman of color, and we were like, yo, fam, what are what what's happening here? You know, like the I was in an interracial relationship. Um, and he was like hanging out with a bunch of white teenagers um of the time, you know, like at the soda shop or whatever. It just like didn't make sense.

[18:51] Sierra: And essentially she was like, Yeah, like they're afraid to touch on the topic at all. Um, because of course it's it's being run by white cis men, the whole shebang. And she was like, they they don't want to talk about it at all. And we're like, well, this can't stand. So we're coming to you. And she was like, I don't have the power to say anything, and I'm a new hire and I'm afraid to lose my job, which she did then in some capacity, whether she stepped away or lost or was asked to go away, did lose that job. She's no longer in that position and was quickly removed.

[19:22] Sierra: So I don't know what happened there. Um, all I can say is we asked for help. She didn't even feel like she could uh have those conversations. We ended up getting mentions put in there, but it wasn't like the crux of the show by any means. It was kind of brushed off a little bit. You know, I got I got called a maid at one point, and I was like, wow, I guess this is really novel for them, as if I as a woman of color wouldn't have known that that would be an issue.

[19:49] Rashad Robinson: Right.

[19:50] Sierra: So like if I that that to me feels like a pretty good illustration of the lack of understanding and also the lack of intentionality or like wanting to actually have these conversations or or even talk to the black writer in the room, like, does this make sense? Like they weren't asking her that, clearly. Um, and she didn't even feel that she could do that. And she was probably right, you know.

[20:15] Sierra: Um, so there was just absolutely no support even in the creative side, but even just like as um like the actor, I got horribly screwed over in every sense of the word. I was being harassed, I was being taken aside and yelled at. I was um uh being hilariously underpaid. I was having amenities given to everyone else but me and the other person of color, um, lied to, caught in lies and no apology. Like, I mean, just from top to bottom, it was a disaster.

[20:49] Sierra: Um, and then essentially what occurred, so far as I can tell, but this is also like I'm I don't have the power to know this, but I know what went happen what went on. The um I tried several times with my agent and manager to have a conversation with the producers and Berlante, which I got no response to, neither did they, and he never reached out. Um, and I tried to have many conversations of uh with the people about what was going on and saying, like, you know, people might say this looks like racism, and that was the only time things started to change when we finally called them out and said, you know, we would hate to have to bring this to, you know, the populace, the general populace, and say, look at what's happening here. Doesn't this seem crazy and racist?

[21:31] Sierra: And then all of a sudden things started changing overnight. Like I got a new trailer that wasn't broken down. I got it, you know, like I all of a sudden things started to make sense. Um, but then I was consequently written off of the show and lied to first and then written off of the show, which I was already talking to my agents. I was like, please, I need to quit. How can I get out of this six-year contract? I can't do this.

[21:56] Sierra: So the truth of the matter is I wanted to go anyway because it was so awful. Um, but yeah, like I I don't I don't pay attention to those shows anymore, so I don't know that things have changed, but I know that there's more women on the show. I don't know that the the writers' rooms have changed, and I know that the executive producers have not changed. And so, you know, my even like when everything started popping off, you know, a couple months ago, my black co-star Franz Drame, he reached out to me and he asked, he was like, Look, do you want to write something or call these people out? This is the time. Like, I want to back you. I also had some of my other white co-stars reach out and say, We'll back you, we're here for you.

[22:34] Sierra: And like even now, I'm saying this here, but I'm terrified to put it anywhere else, and I'm terrified to say anything because I essentially got blacklisted for a while. Um, and I just kind of was like, cool, I don't want to act again anyway, because if that's what it is, then I don't want to do it, which sucks because it's like this is the God-given talent and also the skill that I trained in and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to train in. Um, so it's like it's heartbreaking, and I know I'm not the only one.

[23:04] Sierra: And I think like people reaching out to me saying, like, we know your story, you know, like my black friends reaching out and saying, we know your story, you should tell it, you should tell it. This is the moment. I like I hear it and I still am petrified, you know, and I still feel like I can't really say it. And I also wonder, like my big question, I think is what good, what good can I do? And I think like there is good in talking about it, right? So that people can see it for what it really is.

[23:34] Sierra: And I know that that's powerful and important. But there are other people telling their stories, right? And so not everybody has to tell the story. I think we get it, hopefully, or we're starting to, right? And there are people who have more power and more leverage and more safety in those things that are telling the story. So I'm like, is me telling the story that helpful? And then it's like, what do I hope will change?

[23:56] Sierra: You know, like I could have a personal vendetta against these EPs, these white male EPs who harassed me in every possible way and broke my spirit for years. Like, I don't. What I what I do have though is a hope that they won't continue to do that, even though I know that the truth is they probably are, right? So, like that is my one hope of like if I call these people out and I'm very explicit and say, this is what happened to me, this is what was said to me, this is who said it, maybe there will be a shift.

[24:29] Sierra: But it's also like, again, they have more power than me to take things away from me when it's already hard enough, you know. So it's like I'm not even really sure what to do with all of that. But um, you know, I'm glad that you guys are getting in the rooms finally to change it so that you know like I should not have been I guess playing a Hispanic person like and also if we were going to play that then it should have been a part of my identity like we don't know anything about her family life we don't know how she feels in regular like time and then she's time traveling and we barely touch on the fact that it's so uncomfortable for her because she ends up living in that time period for like two years because she gets trapped there the character and I only talk about the fact that I'm like I'm not a librarian and that was so hard for me because I had to be a librarian in the 1950s and it's like no it would be that would have been amazing for you to be a librarian in a 1950 that's what I'm saying I was like the greatest yeah there might have been a movie about you you know like so like I'm saying I'm like I'm like wow like we we just don't and I see this constantly with auditions like they just don't take into account like it just feels like oh this is written for a standardized white female and they're looking for diversity and I'm a palatable version of whatever diversity they're looking for.

[25:59] Sierra: So go ahead and chuck me on in there. You know what I mean?

[26:02] Rashad Robinson: Like I don't ever feel like I'm stepping into a role and being like oh they see me and what I go through or this is representative of any part of my life whatsoever. And that's why I say it's get out. It's all these white EPs, all these white writers, they get to have their voice and they get to cloak it in any skin, anybody, any gender that they want, but the voice is still the white voice and predominantly the white male voice.

[26:30] Rashad Robinson: And the thing that I've learned from making red pill is that I got to build a world. And when people come and tell me this part of the world doesn't work, or I don't get that, or I don't understand, I think, hmm, but it's my world. I'm the god of my world. White men have been the god of worlds for a century. What I want is for the industry, our entertainment industry to suddenly just let us see these other worlds that other people create and stop saying whether they're right or wrong.

[27:00] Rashad Robinson: Just go, oh my God, let's go into the world of this person from this culture and this age and this gender, and let us just see all of these worlds. And that will require the people who have the jobs and give the jobs to their friends to get out of the way so other people can come in and their voices can be heard.

[27:21] Tonya Pinkins: Right. I love it.

[27:23] Tonya Pinkins: Yeah, I mean, you know, America, I mean, for all of Hollywood's uh sort of the theory that Hollywood is so advanced and liberal. Um, America elected a black president before um Hollywood gave us a big budget, a black superhero.

[27:42] Rashad Robinson: Yep.

[27:43] Tonya Pinkins: Well, thank you, Rashad. I know that you are so busy. Thank you, Sierra. Thank you, Marissa, thank you, everyone for coming. We are gonna support you. People go to Color of Change, sign up, donate, um, take action, take action. We're gonna be taking action no matter who wins this election. We're going to be taking action because it's needed. There's only one thing to change, and that is everything. And that is a quote from Wilson Gilmore.

[28:08] Tonya Pinkins: So uh everybody wear a mask, they save lives. Thank you, Rashad, Sierra, Marissa. Thank you, thank you, thank you guys for spending this time with us today. And you can listen to the VPN on the Broadway Podcast Network, VPN.fmycst. Thank you.

[28:30] Tonya Pinkins: This is Tonya Pinkins. Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Rashad Robinson of Color of Change. This is Spotlight, the Red Pilling of America on You Can't SAY THAT on the Broadway Podcast Network.