“We’re More Than A Label.” Gabourey Sidibe Faces Her Fears With The Tale Of Four

Gabourey Sidibe experiences a decent amount of anxiety every time she steps away from her phone. It’s not because she thinks she’ll miss any breaking news about Beyoncé naming her twins. It’s not even because she thinks Trump will drop a narcissistic tweet  about “winning bigly” while turning a blind eye to all things presidential. Like many of us, Sidibe fears for the latest hashtag recognizing yet another lost black life to police violence. But the 34-year-old “Empire” actress who brought all of the black girl magic realness as the breakout star of Lee Daniel’s Precious eight years ago is not one to run away from her fears. In fact, these days she is looking them straight in the eye from behind the camera.

Sidibe recently made her directorial debut at the Nantucket Film Festival where she presented her project, The Tale of Four. The 20-minute movie explores domestic violence, race-based police shootings and other social issues specifically affecting people of color. The Tale of Four is a production of Refinery 29’s Shatterbox Anthology and the publication recently sat down to pick the author, actress and now director’s brain about its message.

Sidibe expresses that one of the first steps she felt she could take in facing her fear of the violence and trauma that seems to result in fatalities in the black community on a regular basis, was to make those fears audible:

“As I do with most things I’m afraid of, I talk about them, make them audible, hoping that addressing the fear will alleviate it. That’s what the film is about: addressing it, saying it out loud, and hoping that through sharing my fear and my outrage that it will cause more outrage and more fear. Because the problem’s not going to anywhere if we ignore it.”

It can be far too tempting to become numb to the headline, “Unarmed African-American Male Fatally Shot By Police” but Sidibe believes that as a community, we need to speak up over and over again to make our lives real to those who behave otherwise. Especially with the recent stories of police violence against black women. In the times we live in lately it seems as if no situation is safe. It doesn’t matter if you have a registered vehicle and proper insurance papers. It doesn’t matter if your four-year-old is present and too young to make sense of what’s happening. It doesn’t even matter if you’re the victim calling for assistance from the police. All of these situations have resulted in black lives lost. Still there are some people who refuse to recognize that this a very dark and sinister pattern. Sidibe thinks it’s a very delusional state our country is presently living in:

“You can say America is great as long as you’re white. Because for you, yes: You are correct. America is wonderful to you. But my Black ass, because I am a Black woman, born of a Black woman, born of a Black woman, who was born of a slave — I don’t know at which point in history America really had my back. I don’t want to argue with anyone, or with ‘Make America…

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