With a new R&B album out (Sum of My Music) and a hit TV series (Empire) under his belt, Jussie Smollett has become the definition of a Renaissance man, and he seems to do it effortlessly. A musician, actor, activist, and producer, he aims to bridge the gaps dividing industries and communities to shed light on stories that are often left untold.
Since his BET Award-nominated role in Empire launched him to superstardom, Smollett has become an executive producer on the second season of America Divided, alongside legendary producer Norman Lear and TV journalist Gretchen Carlson. The EPIX series, which premiered this spring, confronts the hidden ideologies that many U.S. citizens refuse to acknowledge. Smollett says he hopes to educate viewers on why these issues matter, and how we can come together and move forward towards social and economic equality.
The five-part docuseries highlights the nation’s disagreements over sexual harassment, Native Americans, coal mining, Confederate monuments, and sanctuary cities. In the episode, “Whose History?” Smollett travels to Tennessee to witness the movement to bring down Confederate monuments and commemorate the deaths of thousands of African-Americans lynched during decades of racial animus. While there, he interviews Lee Miller, leader of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, an organization of male descendants of those who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. It’s an interview the actor admits was especially hard to sit through.
“It’s so interesting to sit across from someone and look them in the eye, talk to them about the history of your people, and they’re trying to create something else that is not even true,” he says of Lee’s attempt at whitewashing the South’s legacy of racism. “It’s blatant lies, and it’s there only to serve their agenda.”
In another scene, Smollett asks an older Black man if he foresees justice truly prevailing in his lifetime. The older man replies, “No.”
“I think that if you look at the time that [he] grew up in, it was a different time… as far as the hope of humanity,” Smollett admits. “I think that he’s made peace. But I also think, sadly, he had to make peace.”
Smollett says the killings of unarmed Black people going unpunished — and mass incarceration, police brutality, and racial profiling in American culture — is a cycle. And it is one that continues to feed itself because we aren’t speaking about these issues to each other.
“[This generaton] is starting to put two and two together of the fact that this is not actually getting worse. It’s just getting more visible,” Smollett says. “Everybody wants to be like, ‘Oh well, why is it that it always has to be about this? Why can’t we just enjoy our lives? [Slavery] happened. It is what it is... For all those ignorant questions, America Divided answers them.”
America Divided is “showing you why you can’t have your quote-unquote history, why you can’t have your [Confederate] flags flying high, why you cannot have your monument.”
Social media has also led people to express their opinions — even those rooted in ignorance. “Sometimes people speak just to speak… people are now trying to state their opinions — that are so fucking ridiculous — just to get attention. It’s a marketing ploy. Half of the people, you don’t even know what the fuck they’re talking about.”
That’s not his own approach, Smollett says. “I don’t speak about things that I absolutely cannot. My ego is strong enough to say ‘I need to do some research, I need to figure some things out before I just spew my opinion.’ Everybody has an opinion, but everybody also has an asshole. It doesn’t mean that we need to see or hear every fucking thing... You need to be informed before you speak on things as if you are a master of it.”
In the series, Smollett uncovers truths seldom repeated, including that up to 5,000 people could be present at a lynching, turning it into a carnival-like atmosphere. There were also numerous Black women who were lynched, challenging the idea that women were “merely” raped, beaten, or imprisoned.
Knowing these details, he argues, is crucial. “If you think about all of the issues in our nation — race, gender equality, homophobia, immigration, and HIV — the running [answer] has been to silence it,” he explains. “If these things are out in the open, then we actually have to deal with truth and reconciliation. And people don’t want to do that.”
He adds, “You’re always going to have racists, you’re always going to have homophobes, you’re always going to have these idiotic people... what [we] can do is change the power of those people, those beliefs, so that the opposite of those thoughts and beliefs is what becomes the norm.”
He adds, “Without telling the truth and reconciling what actually happened, we’ll never all be free. Those white Southerners that want to keep up those monuments, they are not mentally free. They have never been physically shackled. But guess what? Their ancestors did the shackling. Mentally, they are shackled.”
Smollett’s mission with the series is to show that most people are inherently good, but still we’ve become a “desensitized nation.”
“This is a great country and we could be even greater,” he says. “However, what we’re failing to realize was that Obama was the anomaly. Donald Trump represents a lot of our country. That’s fact. This is the truth that people don’t want to accept. He represents a large mental instability and mental disorder of our country. We are a mentally ill nation. Look at what we were built upon, this place we call home. It was built on… stealing, murder, and the termination of an entire people.”
He continues, “We need to be trying to change instead of saying, ‘Oh, it’s a great place, we just have to do XYZ.’ No... Something has to be dismantled and rebuilt... The only way it’s going to happen is if the people that want to love and the people that believe in equality and peace talk louder than the people that want hate.”
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