John Leguizamo: Minorities Need Access To Jobs That Get Their Stories Told | Big Think

As a Latin person, you know, minorities, black people have to do it as well. We have to immerse ourselves in white culture and learn about white culture. And it’s all we were taught in school and in movies. And so we learn, but it’s not reciprocal, you know. It’s not a reciprocal thing that happens that white culture wants to learn about Latin culture or black culture. But there are a few. There are a few. Jane Elliott being one of the great ones.

I mean tackling it in my industry, it’s like Hollywood is so – Oscar is so white, which was the symptom of a disease, which is Hollywood is not making movies or being conscious about including Latin and black people in their movies when we’re almost 50 percent of the population. So it’s a very unbalanced representation of reality and causes great harm, especially for youth who need to see themselves in movies.

I think it’s about the work that needs to be done is not so much understanding people of different ethnic backgrounds as much as giving them the jobs. That’s really it because we’re all really the same, you know. We’re just slightly different, you know, flavors and slightly different colors. But I think it’s all about giving those jobs and people rise up to the occasion. I mean that’s all you’ve got to do.

And what’s interesting is because I just did my show – I’m doing it in Berkeley, and they brought this group of high school kids, and some of them were Latin. They were just flabbergasted, the kids seeing a Latin person performing on stage. They’d never been to the theater, never seen a Latin person on stage, and it just changed their whole entire perspective. They all of a sudden felt like they could do it, you know. And it was a beautiful thing.

Despite organizations opening up and giving the opportunities, that’s how these things happen. It’s kind of like Viola Davis said, the reason she won that Emmy was because somebody finally gave her the role that she needed to win. Because she’s always had the same talent and she’s always been around, but finally, somebody wrote the right role that was ample enough for a person of color to win an Emmy.

I mean, there are a lot of issues or aspects of myself because, you know, I’m also from a lower class socioeconomic group, and that has a lot to do with differences too. I mean the fact is that Latin and black people are mostly in the lower socioeconomic group. So you have that cultural gap. It’s an economic gap. Culturally, I mean, I guess – so the socioeconomic group in America becomes also your ethnic and cultural group, and so yeah.

When I’m in certain groups that are mostly predominantly white, you want to appear predominantly white, so you try to use their lingo and try to use their terminology and the way they speak, you know. Like I’m talking to you a little bit more right now. I’m talking to you with my whiter side of myself more. And then when I’m with my friends from high school and we’re all like Latin and from a socioeconomic group, you know, we’ll go back to the lingo that we used, like a little more street, a lot more Ebonics, a lot more Latin words because we know we understand each other, and there’s shorthands. And that’s what we do, you know.

I mean luckily, you know, when I was trying to be an actor, it was really difficult because they weren’t really – when I started out, they weren’t really casting Latin people. So, and I had worked real hard to cover, you know, to pass is what I would say more. Pass as opposed to cover. But I’m sure that goes on too.

And I had to try to clean my speech, change it, you know, so that it didn’t have such a street accent. But it didn’t matter because I was still recognized visually as a Latin person. So even if I changed the way I sounded or the way I behaved, it didn’t matter because I wasn’t going to get cast in those roles anyway because I identify as a Latin person.

So then I gave up, and I was like, you know what? Forget it. I’m not going to try to fit in. I’m going to stay the way I am and I’m going to write for...