Daily Inspiration Quote by Eriq La Salle

La Salle’s line lands like a needed eye-roll at Hollywood’s most persistent semantic dodge: the way whiteness gets to be “normal” while everyone else gets filed under “identity.” By invoking The Sixth Sense and Insomnia as “not good white films,” he’s pointing to an unspoken industry default. Nobody watches those movies thinking, Ah yes, a triumph of Caucasian cinema. The characters’ race is treated as incidental, a background condition of storytelling. That’s the privilege.

The intent is diagnostic and slightly confrontational: stop congratulating the system for allowing minorities onto the screen only when the movie is branded as “Black film” or “Asian film,” as if representation is a genre rather than a casting choice. La Salle is also calling out a commercial alibi. Studios often claim audiences won’t show up for films led by people of color unless the story is “about race.” His counter is practical, not utopian: make good movies where the cast isn’t implicitly restricted to white people, and let excellence do the selling.

The subtext is about gatekeeping disguised as taste. “Good film” is treated like a neutral standard, but the pipeline that decides which scripts get funded and which actors get read for “universal” roles isn’t neutral at all. Coming from an actor who spent years inside mainstream TV, the frustration is earned: he’s not asking for a special category, he’s asking to abolish the category that keeps everyone else “special.”