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Hollywood icon Meryl Streep in 2016 got herself into a soup when she attended the coveted Berlin International Film Festival. While taking a question from a reporter, Streep ended up saying that “We are all Africans” when asked if she understood African or Arabic movies. She later clarified that her statement was taken out of context and that it was part of a long-winded answer to a different question.”
Streep had to face a lot of backlash for her racist comment before she cleared the air on the matter. Read on to know how things got out of hand.
According to LA Times, Meryl Streep asserted, “The thing I’ve noticed from my [different] roles is there is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture. And, after all, we’re all from Africa, originally. We’re all Berliners. We’re all Africans, really.” This did not go down well with social media as they mocked her brutally on the internet. Considering the sensitivity of the matter, Streep then explained her controversial statement in an op-ed writing, “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.”
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The award-winning actress then shared, “Those five words fell somewhere in this sentence: “We’re all Berliners, we’re all Africans, really.” She continued that her statement was part of a “long-winded 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.”
Meryl Streep further stated, “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.”
She then explained, “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.’
Meryl Streep concluded, “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.”
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