Last week, we discussed Ava DuVernay and her Oscar campaign for The 13th, a documentary about mass incarceration of African-Americans. Ava chatted with Vanity Fair last week about the current state of the country and incoming baby-fisted administration, which Ava has plans to “resist.” Over the weekend, Ava took part in an Oscar-campaign-y event in LA at the home of Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos. It was a conversation with Ava, CNN’s Van Jones (who is awesome) and Oprah Winfrey. I would recommend you read EW’s full coverage of the event here, just because Van Jones’ comments are pretty interesting, but Ava’s comments are the ones I’m most interested in, because she’s a lot like me – completely unsympathetic to the “poor Trump voters” narrative. Like, she’s not playing. Some assorted quotes from Ava:

She has no sympathy for people who voted for a man she considers racist, violent and homophobic. “For me, right now, I don’t have a lot of empathy for someone who chooses to put their name next to, raise their hand for, someone who represents violence to another human being. I’m challenged that we are not holding people accountable for their vote, for where they are right now. I can’t get with the, ‘They were left out of the circle so let’s help them come back from the dark side.’ It’s what marginalized people are often asked to do.”

Trying to “understand” Trump voters is a distraction from her focus on her work. “The distraction of trying to educate and love this side is what will diminish me. How am I going to stay centered? What will I do? I need to stay focused on my goals. What I’m going to try to do to get through these four years is to get enlarged, and to do that will take all my focus.” Racism and sexism are distractions, she said, “to my humanity and what I’m doing… Distraction is if I stop and try to talk to folks who have clearly demonstrated that they’re not open to hearing that. What they will hear is what I do: How I move forward, the art that I make, the energy that I put out into the world.”

She didn’t want to end the documentary with commentary from activists, so she ended it with images of real black people in America: “It didn’t sit right with me. When you got to the end [and saw all the activists and their efforts] you thought, ‘Oh, they’ve got it. Those people are really smart and they are going to take care of it.’ It let you off the hook,” said DuVernay, who said she was thinking a lot about Common’s song for 13th, “Letter to the Free,” and images of “black joy, and BBQs and black babies running on the beach and graduations and all the beauty of our lives, actual images of black lives mattering. Those images are what we ended with, as a punctuation to all the chaos and destruction and the purposeful dismantling that we show you.”

[From EW & The Wrap]

This is the discussion for liberals and progressives in the coming months and years, and it’s fascinating to me that Van Jones and Ava represent the two different sides so well. Van Jones argued that we should try to understand the Trump voters, these overwhelmingly white, middle class voters who chose a sexual assailant, a racist, and a misogynist for President of the United States. Ava argued that she doesn’t have any time for those people and she has no desire to empathize with them either, because they’ve shown with their votes that they have zero empathy for her and for other people.

Photos courtesy of WENN.