Politics & Power Quote by Viola Davis

Viola Davis is naming an ugly, practical truth about “accessibility” in American entertainment: whose ears get catered to, and whose speech gets treated like a barrier to entry. She opens with a careful personal anchor - her mother, her relatives - to block the predictable accusation that she’s distancing herself from Blackness. That move matters. It signals she’s not arguing that accents are wrong; she’s arguing that the industry has made them costly.

The operative word is “adjust.” It’s a polite verb for code-switching, the kind of constant, often invisible labor required of marginalized people to be legible in spaces built without them in mind. By framing the change as something “you have to” do, Davis isn’t selling assimilation as virtue; she’s describing a coercive norm dressed up as professionalism. “Accessible to people” carries the sting: which people? The phrase exposes the default audience as implicitly white, middle-class, and accustomed to a narrow band of “neutral” speech that’s treated as universal.

The quote also sits in the tension between craft and conformity. Acting demands transformation, but Davis is pointing to the difference between choosing a voice for a role and sanding down your natural cadence to be employable. In film and TV - where sound mixes, network notes, and mass-market anxieties rule - “thick” becomes shorthand for “risky,” and “risk” becomes a reason to limit who gets centered.

Davis’ intent reads as both defense and indictment: a refusal to shame her community paired with an honest map of the gatekeeping that still decides whose authenticity counts as art and whose gets labeled “hard to understand.”