Jane Fonda used her acceptance speech for the Life Achievement Award at the Screen Actors Guild awards show Sunday night to rebuke President Donald Trump and the fascistic ideology he espouses — and offer a community-oriented activism and empathy as an antidote to what she alluded to as tyranny.
Empathy is not weak or ‘woke.' ‘Woke’ just means you give a damn about other people.
JANE FONDA AT screen actors guild awards
“Empathy is not weak or ‘woke,’” she insisted. “‘Woke’ just means you give a damn about other people.”
Fonda said acting is a craft dedicated to cultivating empathy through storytelling and which, in turn, facilitates us turning toward each other rather than away from one another. “A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening — what is coming our way,” the activist said. “And even if they’re of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge, but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent because we are going to need a big tent to resist, successfully, what’s coming at us.”
Fonda also used her time to support unions, as corporatization and late-stage capitalism threaten the power of the collective, arguing that SAG was singular in what it protected. Unlike most unions, which protect workers who produce tangible products, SAG protects actors, whose work is the creation of empathy.
The speech was on brand for the 87-year-old Fonda, who is as much an activist as she is an actor. Consider her vocal support of the Civil Rights Movement and vocal opposition to the Vietnam War (in the 1970s reactionary parties in the U.S. referred to her as “Hanoi Jane”). She met the ire of then-President Richard Nixon who derided her in one of the infamous tape recordings of his Oval Office conversations. More recently, she has devoted her energy to climate activism, repeatedly getting arrested at the U.S. Capitol, where she has engaged in civil disobedience.
Fonda’s speech evoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s words: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” She talked about the entertainment industry’s role in resisting the oppression and cultural violence of McCarthyism in the 1950s. And she connected this political moment to other significant moments of political resistance as a call to take Trump’s agenda seriously.
“Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements, like apartheid or our Civil Rights Movement or Stonewall, and asked yourself: Would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge? Would you have been able to take the hoses and the batons and the dogs?” she asked. “We don’t have to wonder anymore, because we are in our documentary moment. This is it. And it’s not a rehearsal.”
She concluded on a fiery, optimistic note, calling on people to “not isolate”: “We must stay in community. We must help the vulnerable. We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future — one that is beckoning, welcoming, that will help people believe,” she said. “To quote the novelist Pearl Cleage, ‘On the other side of the conflagration, there will still be love. There will still be beauty. And there will be an ocean of truth for us to swim in.’ Let’s make it so.”
Fonda’s indefatigable commitment to activism is a profound example of how to leverage one’s privilege in service of a more just world.
