WHAT JUSTICE MEANS TO ME

BY NNAMDI ASOMUGHA

Webster’s Dictionary defines Justice as, "The virtue which consists in giving to everyone what is his due."

There are many angles I could take to explore the meaning of justice, but I want to speak from a personal place, one that may be a little more unexpected. I got into the film business because I loved movies. I loved watching them. I loved dissecting them. I loved grabbing my popcorn at the concession stand. I loved when the lights dimmed because I knew it was showtime. It was just that simple for me. But my favorite movies rarely had characters that looked like me in them. So while I enjoyed the movies, somehow I always felt adjacent to them, like it wasn’t quite my reality. The characters were not people I could fully embrace because I didn’t entirely see my connection. And then I found out that this had been an ongoing issue since the beginning of cinema. There was always a shortage of our stories.

When I finished playing in the NFL, I was advised that the next career path I chose to take should be one that I loved. So when I decided to make films, I felt right at home. But you don’t know the path you’re headed down until you begin the journey. My journey started with finding scripts that I enjoyed, nothing more and nothing less. No hidden agenda. No big message that I was trying to say with the projects. Just a fairly uncomplicated criteria: did it make me laugh, cry, get angry, feel happy? Did it speak to me in any sort of way profound or not?

“Every now and then, I think back on these films and wonder what it would have been like, if someone, at some point in history decided to step out of the pack and take a chance on telling them.”

But I noticed very early that the scripts I gravitated towards, all surrounded the Black experience, both in America and throughout the world. The first one was a film called Beasts of No Nation about child soldiers in Ghana. Then there was Crown Heights about a Trinidadian-American who is wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Then came Harriet, the story of abolitionist, Harriet Tubman. Then The Banker, the story of two African-American men who revolutionized the American banking system but never got the credit for it. And finally, Sylvie’s Love, a civil rights era romantic drama about two Black people falling in love. I didn’t actively choose these projects, but, slowly, they started to choose me. 

I quickly realized that the same issue hampered all these projects; none of the studios and financiers in Hollywood wanted to make them. They felt that there wasn’t a strong enough audience for these types of stories. There were no comparable films that the studios could draw on to make it worthwhile. At some point in the process of making each of these films, I was advised to find a more commercial story to tell. But I didn’t want to let them go. So I took what they called “a risk” and tried to turn it into a reward. I decided to make them. Thankfully, the films all went on to reach audiences across the globe and prove the previous theories wrong, but it wasn’t without a fight.

Every now and then, I think back on these films and wonder what it would have been like, if someone, at some point in history decided to step out of the pack and take a chance on telling them. If someone said, “Let’s tell the Harriet Tubman story and bring it to the big screen because people deserve to see it.” Or, “We don’t have many black love stories from the civil rights era that are just about the love and not about the struggle, let’s tell this urgent story.” Generations of people would have been able to enjoy these stories long before now. I think about the many Black people that had these lived experiences decades ago, that would have been able to see themselves on screen and be proud of their story. In many ways, I’m proud that these stories were able to be told regardless of how long it took because their descendants now have the chance to experience them. And to me in some sort of way, that’s justice.