Daily Inspiration Quote by Ava DuVernay

DuVernay’s line lands like a mission statement disguised as common sense: tell your own stories or live inside someone else’s version of you. The first clause sounds collaborative - “we need” - but the second clause turns it into a warning. Silence isn’t neutral; it creates a vacuum that gets filled by whoever already has the microphone, the budget, the distribution, the authority. That’s the subtext: “someone else” isn’t just an individual outsider, it’s an industry, a canon, a set of institutions with incentives to simplify, exoticize, or flatten whole communities into familiar stereotypes.

The kicker is “and they usually get them wrong.” “Usually” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not a melodramatic claim that outsiders are incapable of empathy; it’s a practical observation about power and perspective. When people who don’t bear the consequences of a narrative control it, accuracy becomes optional and comfort becomes the goal. “Wrong” isn’t only factual error. It’s tonal error, moral error, context stripped for pace, nuance traded for digestibility.

Coming from DuVernay, this isn’t abstract. It echoes the stakes of Selma, 13th, and Queen Sugar: projects built as counter-programming to the way Black history and Black interiority are routinely framed - heroic but sanitized, tragic but de-politicized, present but not centered. The intent is both cultural and logistical: build pipelines, claim authorship, own the narrative infrastructure. Because representation isn’t just who appears onscreen; it’s who gets to define what counts as truth.