Thicker than Water: A Memoir

by Kerry Washington

“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.

This is when the connection between art and social change became crystal clear to me. I started to understand the power of representation, the need for people to see themselves in the content they consume, but also the power of content to change how they think and feel and behave. When our ability to connect authentically with our audiences was challenged—because a church didn’t want us to mention homosexuality, or a school board was resistant to us using the word “condom”—our devotion to the material, in service of our audience, propelled us into activism. It wasn’t just what we were saying in the show that made us educators and activists. It was also how we protected the art we were making, how we defended it, how we fought for the right to have it live in the world.

Blood may be thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood.