Time & Perspective Quote by Gabrielle Union

Union’s pragmatism is doing double duty here: it lowers expectations while sharpening the ask. “I’m not going to change the world overnight” sounds like humility, but it’s also a preemptive rebuttal to the industry’s favorite dodge-that activists demand instant utopia. She frames change as granular and relational, “one person at a time,” because Hollywood runs less on policy than on gatekeepers: the casting director who gets the breakdown, the showrunner who signs off, the executive who decides what’s “marketable.”

The key move is who she hopes those people are: “people in positions of power.” That phrase quietly indicts the current power map without naming names. It also acknowledges a hard truth about representation fights: moral persuasion isn’t enough if the budget, greenlight, and hiring authority sit elsewhere. Union isn’t pitching virtue; she’s pitching infrastructure - the pipeline that puts more diverse decision-makers into “those roles,” so inclusion isn’t a special initiative that expires when the PR cycle does.

Then she drops the loaded term: “colorblind casting.” In a decade of debates over “post-racial” fantasies versus conscious representation, “colorblind” can read as either progress or erasure. Union tries to rescue it with “really, truly embrace,” signaling she means opportunity without defaulting whiteness as the neutral setting - not pretending race doesn’t matter, but refusing to let it be a disqualifier. The subtext is weary and strategic: the industry will accept reform if it can be framed as normal, scalable, and led from the top.