During an action-packed day at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, a bevy of women professionals participated in a series of panel discussions about the many obstacles women face in Hollywood. A “One on One” Tribeca Talk with actress and community activist Rosie Perez navigated her experience in the business since her foray, giving audience members a deeper look at the disparities in access and opportunity between women of a certain aesthetic and their better off counterparts.
“And when I entered and I was like, “Wait, a minute, this is messed up. Wait a minute. How many crackhead hoe scripts are you going to send me?” she said, according to Remezcla, on the politics of being a woman of color in Hollywood. “I mean, I don’t mind being a crackhead hoe but you better make me the lead!”
She also touched on how she went about getting her voice heard in a business that tends to overlook the “other” and, as a result, was made to feel outcast for doing so.
“The only way that I did that was by complaining, and what was really strange to me was that the majority of the Latino community in Hollywood, they would take me out to private lunches and tell me, “Shhh, stop rocking the boat. You don’t understand how hard we’ve worked.”,” she recalled. “I do understand how hard you’ve worked, and I’m the product of it. My confidence, my audacity, is a result of your sweat and tears. Don’t you see that?”
Google’s Educator-in-Chief Julie Ann Crommett and TV personality La La Anthony contributed to the Daring Women Summit by examining the importance of perception and the dangers of compartmentalization, respectively.