“Why don’t you go back to your third-world country, bitch?” he yelled at me.
I yelled something back about the irony of a white man with an accent telling me to go back to some non-descript place when I was born here.
“I should beat you up for even daring to speak to me.” He came closer as Taz guided me towards home. They followed us, still threatening me. I couldn’t show them my fear. They walked behind us for a few blocks before turning around and heading south.
Ten years separated these incidents. Ten minutes was the distance between where they happened. And in their eerie similarities, it was as if nothing had changed at all.
Taz and I never spoke about what happened that night. During the confrontation, she was laughing at its absurdity. But that didn’t ease my feelings about being an unwanted visitor. We were getting used to men’s attempts to hit on us by bringing up race: that they had never danced with a Black or brown woman before; that their friend once dated a woman like us and they wanted to know what it was like. However, we experienced these sexually racist pickup lines in different ways. Around town, brown women and white men were one of the more common interracial pairings we’d seen. To men, Taz was still exotic, but they were used to seeing women like her. They saw her as passive, smart, respectable enough.
For me, the conversations veered directly into stereotypes: addressing me as Boo, Ma, Ebony, or Chocolate. The verbs were endless: “I’ve never danced with/fucked/spoken to/touched/seen/talked to/dated/kissed a Black girl.” If I rejected an advance, I was a Black bitch. If we talked about my multiracial background, they’d focus on me being Jamaican and “Black enough,” adding a wink. They called me Beyoncé, Solange, Nicki Minaj. Sometimes men would stand in front of me, staring at me with a smirk as they hit on me, their friends laughing behind them. Sometimes they said nothing, only leered. Many of the men Taz met wanted to get to know her, but most men wanted to know what I was like in bed. White guys who approached her at the bar would gently pull her aside to talk, or take her on dates during the day. Meanwhile, men were either approaching me to make a racist remark and leave, or to ask if it was true that “Once you go Black, you never go back.” As men put their hands on the small of Taz’s back, they were shoving me out of the way.
Men treated me with a mix of hypersexuality and animalistic aggression, pushing me around like I was less than a woman, less than human. They were quick to anger around me, quick to threaten me with physical harm just for opening my mouth.
One of these men was a big dude—a tall and burly Rick Ross look-alike twice our age. His face, dark and glistening with sweat, didn’t crack a smile as he towered over Taz, who just minutes ago, was standing alone as I went to get us drinks. “Yo, Indian girl, you’re so sweet, let me talk to you,” he said as he swiped at her like a bear blindly trying to catch a fish in a pond.
“Can you leave her alone? You’re making her uncomfortable,” I said. He swatted me out of the way.
“I’m trying to talk to your friend,” he said in his deep voice.
I put myself in front of her. “She clearly doesn’t want to talk to you.”
He turned around to face me, several inches taller than me, so close I could smell the saltiness of his sweat. “Mind your business.”
“It’s my business if you’re harassing my friend.” I led Taz away from the crowd, but he grabbed her other arm, yanking her back. Taz was silent, her eyes wide and fearful in the middle of this tug of war. Eventually, we broke free. We were both shaken up and decided to go home.
As we crossed the street, a black suv screeched, sharply turning onto the road, speeding towards me at nearly sixty kilometres an hour. Its lights blinded me as the driver floored it.
Taz pulled me out of the way but the suv swerved towards me, roaring as it accelerated, headlights blinding me. It mimicked my pattern as I moved forward and stepped backward. When it got close enough that I could see past its beams, I saw him behind the wheel—the guy from the bar. I had poked the fucking bear.
I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me. I stood in the road, drunk with liquid bravado as he sped closer, the people around me gasping and squealing.
I closed my eyes, waiting for the end. The car was revving. It was charging towards me. Then it stopped, barely a millimetre from my shin.
He rolled down his window, contorted his fat fingers into a gun shape and pointed it at me, all while looking me dead in the eyes. “Nigga Mercy!” he yelled before rolling the window back up, swerving around me, and driving off.
This man, who I’m guessing was trying to tell me that he had done me the honour of saving my life instead of running me over because we were both Black, was set on making me pay for not allowing him to sexually harass my friend. After that night, we’d still see him around Jack’s, but he never spoke to Taz again. Instead, he’d bump into me on purpose, spilling my drink. Ignoring him seemed to annoy him more. He lurked in the corner, in my direct line of sight, glaring at me with hatred. I was the woman who had refused to give in to his entitlement, and it enraged him.
One thing was clear about nights out with Taz: I was the punching bag for men. Perhaps it was our physical makeup: Taz, with her small, straight nose, long straight jet-black hair, tiny thin lips, and flushed pink cheeks, combined with her rich dark skin and long legs, was a brown Barbie doll. I had a wide nose and full lips, thick thighs, and head full of big curls. For every great night at Jack’s, I spent another against the wall with a drink in my hand feeling uncomfortable—about my appearance, my place here.
I was starting to understand that these weren’t coincidences; this was my reality. This was how misogynoir—the cocktail of racism and sexism that Black women experience—functioned. And this was how people valued my life and my humanity, if at all.
I was angry with myself for not being able to forget about these interactions and just enjoy the night, like Taz. And I felt scared, especially a few hours in, when inebriation made people vulgar, when the threat of violence or humiliation was too much to gamble on, and I’d resign myself to the few chairs at the back of the bar, wishing I was home in the comfort of my bed, while Taz danced.
Taz didn’t understand my new reluctance about going out, and it was hard for me to explain that I felt both rejected and objectified—a target of the most sexualized comments and the most abusive. How could I be comfortable in a space where my presence not only made men want to sexualize me but hurt me too?
My nights out were reproducing the tokenism I felt in my classes, but here, whatever curiosity or disdain people had for me was magnified by alcohol. I drank more than before, unable to get drunk enough to stop feeling out of place. I drank until I was doubled over from the pain in my stomach.
But as I struggled to come to terms with how I felt on our nights out, Taz was settling into her new life as a party girl. She thought she’d never have this kind of freedom. Her mother called every day, begging her to come home, saying that she had made a mistake letting her leave. She wanted Taz to transfer to a nearby school and start the process of an arranged marriage.
Taz was making up for lost time, and trying to do everything before it was up, living faster than I could keep up with. Part of me was jealous of how she was able to move through this space—beautiful, carefree, no damns given about the consequences. She didn’t worry about her safety, about feeling uncomfortable or rejected. But I had misunderstood her recklessness as fearlessness. We were both out of control, in different ways. We were just too scared to admit it to each other.
* * *
///
As I realized the new life I was bragging about wasn’t all it was made out to be, I was also trying to figure out a new but persistent pain in my stomach. It started as a twinge around Halloween, accompanied by bloating so pronounced that I looked six months pregnant. I sucked in my stomach when I zipped up my dresses and skirts, hoping the pain would go aw
ay on its own.
It was in the top part of my belly, sometimes stabbing, sometimes a dull ache. As we continued to party throughout the winter, I found myself drenched in sweat and gripping my stomach after only a few sips. The pain started to last all day.
That February, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking through a gated community in Florida when he was shot and killed by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman claimed defence; Martin was only carrying an Arizona fruit cocktail and a bag of Skittles from the convenience store he had just left.
The news of Martin’s death added to my fears about violence escalating, especially when Taz and I were out at night. I worried about what it meant to look “suspicious,” always aware of how my body could be interpreted as up to no good. It was a label often used against Black men—a signifier of being out of place, not from here, bad news. But from the way employees eyed me in a store when I picked something up, the women who looked nervously over their shoulders when I walked behind them, to the glimmer of fear in the eyes of people when my voice loudened in excitement, every action felt like it had the potential to get me in trouble even as a woman. The thoughts came in a flurry everywhere I went: Do not look suspicious. Do not act suspicious. Do not raise your voice. They will call the police. They will hurt you. That boy only had Skittles. The agonizing pain in my stomach seemed to worsen with every worrisome thought, as if my brain and belly were fused together.
Weeks after the news of Trayvon Martin’s death, I went to the campus doctor’s office. The pain had become so unbearable that I couldn’t even get up for class. A blond nurse in her late thirties examined me on the table. “Does this hurt?” she asked each time she pressed on my stomach, and each time I said “yes,” the pain lingered, even after she moved to the next location.
“Do you drink? Maybe when you’re out with your friends?” she asked.
“Yes, but only socially,” I said, wincing at her fingers digging into my upper belly.
“How many drinks would you say? Do you drink pop as a mixer too?”
I paused. I had never counted how many drinks I was having. I replayed a typical night in my head: two, five, seven, eight. I thought about more recent nights: eleven, twelve. “Eight to thirteen a night. With pop as the chaser,” I sputtered. She quickly removed her gloves and looked at me, almost impatiently.
“Honey, you have gastritis,” she said. “It’s the inflammation of the lining of your stomach, and binge-drinking makes it worse.”
“I’m not a binge drinker,” I pushed back.
“You’re drinking well above the recommended number of drinks for a woman your age. I see this all the time, it’s quite common among students.”
Stress was the main factor in my gastritis, she told me, not the actual drinking itself. “What are you so stressed about? Identifying it would help you work on how to manage it.”
I thought about how I would explain it to her: how does someone deal with the kind of stress that comes with feeling unwelcome and unwanted? When your grades are slipping because it’s easier to spend hours getting drunk to forget about how misunderstood and hated you feel in this city and on this campus? How about when your ex is haunting you and you’ve made yourself a doormat for the men you’re seeing, and everywhere you go you’re reduced to a body part or a racist joke? Or when the only good friend you have, your anchor to home, doesn’t understand any of this and is slipping away, and the only time you talk anymore is when the night comes? What about when you can’t tell if you need cognitive behavioural therapy to stop thinking that you’re going to get assaulted, or if that’s actually your new reality? What kind of remedy is there when you’re in such a dark place that you’re afraid for yourself—of yourself? How, Doctor, should I aim to manage that kind of stress?
“I’ve just had a hard time adjusting to my second year,” I said, and she didn’t ask questions. She prescribed me some medication, told me to lay off the booze, stress, and acidic foods, and sent me on my way.
To deal with my own binge drinking, I first had to make peace with the term. I was a binge drinker. I drank past my limits, past the discomfort in my stomach, to have a good night or to forget a bad one. I drank to feel numb and to cope with the rejection I felt at school and during our nights out.
Gastritis is a chronic issue, sentencing me to a lifetime of pain if I didn’t get it under control. During the first few weeks after my diagnosis, I still went out with Taz at night, sipping water, but I often succumbed to a drink or two, which I deeply regretted when my stomach reacted angrily. After class I researched how to manage gastritis and what foods to avoid. I cooked my own meals instead of filling up on the spicy curries and greasy pizza we usually ate after the bar. To manage stress, I went back to yoga, which helped with the worrying thoughts that were out of my control. And when I craved the spoils of my old lifestyle, the thought of living with this immobilizing pain for the rest of my life was enough to keep me on track.
Without a drink in my system, I got to see the inner workings of the bar scene, the ways white men took up space, jumping up and down on the dance floor, pushing and stepping on people, spilling their drinks on girls. The way they goaded each other and drank until they were puking on unsuspecting patrons. How they pulled out a joint in the middle of the dance floor with ease, only sometimes ripped from the crowd by a bouncer. How groups of white men schemed before sending one of their friends over to talk to the token woman of colour as the others laughed. Do you date white men? Where are you really from? I’ve never talked to a Black girl. I was repulsed by the swaying, glassy-eyed men who approached me, some of whom just stood in front of me, staring, smirking, leering.
Nightlife is one of the main places young white men try out their privilege and entitlement. In this show of heterosexual dominance, they perform for their other straight friends, harassing and targeting the groups they see as inferior—women, LGBTQ2S+ people, and bodies of colour—to maintain the respect and friendship of other men.
Sober, I watched men slip their hands up women’s dresses or grab the drunkest woman that walked by. I saw men feeding drinks to women already well past their limit. In the alleys and on the sidewalks, women lay incapacitated from alcohol and roofies, sometimes alone and crying, other times unable to cry out as the arm of a sober-looking man held them too close, promising that he’d get them home safely.
When Taz and I saw a girl who was under the influence, wandering around on her own or unable to even stand, we’d get her a cab, or at least back to her friends. It would take some time for me to understand that some of those women hadn’t just had too much to drink but had their drinks spiked. I don’t how many women’s lives I witnessed being forever changed in seedy bars.
Nightlife is dangerous for women, but it’s also dangerous for anyone who isn’t a straight white man. Over the years I’ve received messages from all kinds of nightlife-goers in London: from queer people who had been beaten and harassed by bouncers and patrons, and Black people who weren’t let into bars because of their attire. Former bouncers told me their managers asked them not to let Black people in because they don’t buy drinks. DJs at popular bars shared stories about their bosses demanding they not play hip-hop because it attracts “trouble.” Meanwhile, white guys started fights that spilled into the streets, kicking and head-butting each other, covered in dirt and blood. They openly groped women. Nobody thought they were violent or rowdy. Nobody thought they were trouble.
People of colour know they don’t have the luxury of blaming alcohol for acting foolish at a bar. We know that our bodies and our behaviour are always being policed. We don’t get an automatic welcome to the party—we are constantly having to prove that we deserve an invitation. Even then, we know it can be revoked at the first slip-up. For many of us, the misinformed message of respectability—trying to show that we aren’t a stereotype and that our values and currency are on par with white people’s—is reiterated by our p
arents, churches, and communities. If we achieve this, we are told, we will be welcomed by white people. If we act more like them, we will get half as far. Being respectable means that as a child and a young adult, acting foolish isn’t an option. We must act right, talk right, keep ourselves grounded, even as our white counterparts dance on a bar, or jump up in the air and push each other during their favourite EDM song like they’re in a mosh pit. We know that one wrong move will undo all our hard work. One wrong move could be labelled “suspicious.” It could get us taken down by bouncers. It could get us arrested or tasered. It could get us killed.
When white people behave badly, it’s an individual trait. When people of colour misbehave, it’s a problem with the entire race. White people get the green light to be hedonistic, carefree, flawed. Our culture loves to romanticize young, beautiful, and brooding drug-and-alcohol-addicted white people. There’s been a boom in addiction memoirs by white women—Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life, Jowita Bydlowska’s Drunk Mom, Lisa F. Smith’s Girl Walks Out of a Bar, Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today, and Sarah Hepola’s Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. Can you imagine a woman of colour writing a memoir about being passed out drunk in the bushes and then still having a job to go to in the morning? How about a Black mother who leaves her child unattended to drink without having them taken away by Children’s Aid?
We know we’re not afforded that privilege.
Films about university and Greek life are not missing from our cultural repertoire: American Pie, Accepted, Neighbours, Van Wilder, The House Bunny. Coming to Western, I wanted the type of experience I’d seen over and over again in films and TV shows and on Instagram feeds. But I now knew that it wasn’t a coincidence that those experiences were always about white students. When white people get wasted in public or do drugs, they’re having fun or finding themselves. Or, they’re poor souls from a good family who deserve sympathy and redemption. When Black people do it, they’re criminals who deserve to do hard time.
They Said This Would Be Fun Page 12
