Thicker than Water: A Memoir

by Kerry Washington

We were fine—but I learned a long time ago that FINE

can be an acronym for fucked-up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.

“My therapist told me the cruelest thing you can ever do to another human being is to label their suspicions as false when you know them to be true.”

His therapist explained that when you teach a person to believe that their internal truth is a lie, you take from them the very thing that is most important to each of us—our ability to know and trust ourselves.

So, I knew in that moment, as we shot the scene in which Broomhilda was struggling to withstand her lashing, that I was standing on holy ground where someone like her, like me, had died. When I cried out in pain from the carefully choreographed beating, I was weeping for generations of enslaved people who had come before me and the realities of what they’d endured.