Did Denzel Washington Say ‘Your Own Family’ Will Discredit You When You’re ‘Breaking Generational Curses’?

On July 28 2021, a Facebook page shared the following meme, which purportedly contained a Denzel Washington quote about “your own family,” who will “talk shit about you” when you’re “breaking all their generational curses”:

Against a backdrop of a northern lights, a screenshot of text read:

“Your own family will talk shit about you when you’re in the process of breaking all their generational curses. this ain’t for the weak.” — Denzel Washington

Misquoted memes and commentary attributed to celebrities are a constant fixture on social media, often because words travel faster when credited to a very popular public figure. We have also examined an attribution to Bob Marley about wishing the world was populated by hippies doing yoga in cottages and an insight about depression purportedly from Jim Carrey.

More broadly, Frida Kahlo is a frequent target of quote-attachers — extremely viral commentary attributed to her includes a poem by Marty McConnell, “you deserve a lover …,” and remarks about displays of affection. Ben Franklin was the subject of another viral attribution concerning justice in August 2020.

Among the living in 2021, Tim Allen was probably tied with Dave Ramsey for spurious attributions. Ramsey and Allen both are public individuals who sometimes legitimately do offer pithy or witty commentary;  they both also share first and last names with a number of others, sometimes exacerbating confusion.

Clearly, celebrity attribution equals higher share counts and better Facebook engagement — and by this point, locating an attribution is fairly rote for us. We searched “Denzel Washington” and after typing a “y,” “your own family” autopopulated on Google and created the impression of a documented utterance:

Those results provided a starting point, with the highest-ranking result published on April 30 2019. It began:

I read this quote somewhere and it really struck a cord in me…in a good way, like affirmation I was on the right path.

“Your own family will talk shit about you when you’re in the process of breaking all their generational curses. This ain’t for the weak.” – Denzel Washington.

WOW! Let that soak in for a minute… Do you feel the vibration of that statement? I sure do.

That totally resonates with me right now in my life. Before I dive into they WHY, I actually want to share a quick story that ties into the quote.

“I read this quote somewhere” did a lot of heavy lifting, as it was vague enough to cover “I saw a meme” as a citation. We searched portions of the quote with the date restricted to results on or before March 31 2019, and only one result was returned.

That result was a meme aggregation site’s post from March 6 2019, and it contained a screenshot of a tweet by @misstaylove on February 28 2019. There was no mention of Denzel Washington, and given the absence of any other previous iterations of the quote, it was likely the first version:

ya own family will talk shit about you when you’re in the process of breaking all their generational curses.

this ain’t for the weak.

— 🦂 (@misstaylove) February 28, 2019

Although its wording was slightly different (and again, it did not mention Denzel Washington), the tweet read:

ya own family will talk shit about you when you’re in the process of breaking all their generational curses.

this ain’t for the weak.

Commentary to the effect that your “own family will talk shit about you when you’re in the process of breaking all their generational curses,” and “this ain’t for the weak” was attributed to actor Denzel Washington at some point before the end of April 2019. The earliest variatio we located for that string of words was a February 28 2019 tweet by @misstaylove, likely the originator of the observation. Clearly the remarks struck a chord with social media users, where Washington was misquoted ad infinitum. However, credit for the words likely belong not to Washington, but to @misstaylove.