This is like an itch I have to scratch, because I can’t get it out of my head and I just have to say it: “I gave an award to a Tunisian” is the new “I have a black friend.” Wait for it! As we all know by now, Meryl Streep, African, declared her allegiance to the mother continent in Berlin. Meryl was appointed as president of this year’s Berlinale jury, and during the press conference for the jury, Meryl was asked some questions about the all-white jury and whether she, personally, would understand the viewpoints of artists and directors from Africa and the Middle East. At first, Meryl’s answers to those questions came off as offensively dismissive, as we thought she just huffed, “We’re all Africans, really.” The AP issued a correction/clarification a week later – go here to read. There was some added context in Meryl’s answer, and while I still think she could have come up with a better answer, with the clarification Meryl did not sound AS bad and dismissive.

So, instead of dealing with this controversy in real time during the Berlinale, Meryl waited until the festival was over to write an essay about how she’s totally not a blithe, oblivious African woman dismissive of calls for increased diversity. And she’s totally not racist because she gave an award to a Tunisian!!! Here’s African Meryl Streep’s HuffPo essay:

Something wonderful happened at the Berlin Film Festival this past weekend, something about which American audiences may be unaware or indifferent. In Fire At Sea, which won the top prize, Gianfranco Rosi takes a hard look at the overloaded boats filled with despairing, half-dead immigrants from Africa who land on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa en route to Europe. Those who are not drowned at sea encounter the overwhelmed and dedicated people of the island, whose simple actions are evidence of the best in human nature, where one part of the human family helps another.

The Silver Bear for Best First Film went to a Tunisian, Mohamed Ben Attia, whose film Heditells the story of a diffident but dutiful second son, who runs away from a proscribed future into the complicated present. Set in this Islamic North African nation so recently tested by bombings of its museum and tourist sites, it brings the big issues of irreconcilable differences tenderly down to a human level. Another Silver Bear went to the 8.5 hour A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, Lav Diaz’s saga of the Philippine people’s journey to independence from their colonial past, and the Cinematography Award went to Crosscurrent, a brilliant, elegiac film from China, directed by Yang Chao.

The lede was buried in the story of the Berlin festival, the largest in the world. These stories of people from China, Somalia, Mali, Sudan, and Tunisia — testaments to the impact, importance and diversity of global cinema — have been smothered in the U.S. by the volume of attention given to five words of mine at an opening press conference, which is too bad.

The German director of the Berlin festival convened his jury, of which I was president, and this one consisted of Polish, Italian, French, British, German and American people. As with any artistic jury, even as president, I had no input into who would serve with me.

Contrary to distorted reporting, no one at that press conference addressed a question to me about the racial makeup of the jury. I did not “defend” the “all-white jury,” nor would I, if I had been asked to do so. Inclusion — of races, genders, ethnicities and religions — is important to me, as I stated at the outset of the press conference.

In a longwinded answer to a different question asked of me by an Egyptian reporter concerning the film from Tunisia, Arab/African culture, and my familiarity with Arab films specifically, I said I had seen and loved Theeb, and Timbuktu, but admitted, “I don’t know very much about, honestly, the Middle East, …and yet I’ve played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures. And the thing I notice is that we’re all — I mean there is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture, and after all, we’re all from Africa originally, you know? We’re all Berliners, we’re all Africans, really.”

I was not minimizing difference, but emphasizing the invisible connection empathy enables, a thing so central to the fact of being human, and what art can do: convey another person’s experience. To be in Berlin is to see proof that walls don’t work.

I do defend all the choices the jury made. This is work we took very seriously. I hope the press will shower Yang Chao, Lav Diaz, Mohamed Ben Attia, Gianfranco Rosi and the other artists we honored with as much energetic attention as that directed at my misconstrued remarks. Their work is newsworthy, and deserves celebration. It reflects a diversity of place, race, viewpoint and humanity that should not be invisible in America.

[From HuffPo]

It sounds like the awards were given to racially, ethnically and religiously diverse filmmakers, so good for the (all-white) jury. But even with Meryl restating her original comment, there’s still something sticking in my craw. Like, I get that Meryl wasn’t asked specifically about the all-white jury – something she genuinely did not choose – but there was an implicit racial aspect in the journalist’s question, about whether a white American woman would be able to empathize with the stories being told in Arab and African films. And of course there was a simple answer: of course Meryl would be able to empathize and understand, because the human experience is universal. But Meryl heard the racial implication in the question, which is why she went to “we’re all Africans, really,” which will always be a boneheaded deflection away from a legitimate conversation about diversity. Which is why she’s still Meryl Streep, African.

Photos courtesy of WENN.