You Can't Touch My Hair

by Phoebe Robinson

  Wait. What?! This is not how white guilt works! Where’s my new Macklemore song? White Director’s white guilt straight up rope-a-doped me into thinking that he was remorseful, when in actuality he was really concerned about his well-being. I want a refund! And I also wanted to cuss this guy out, yet for some reason, I didn’t.

  Maybe because my mama raised me better than that. Maybe because I was on my way to a stand-up show, and I didn’t have time. Or maybe because I simply didn’t have the strength to yet again explain why eradicating racist behavior is more pertinent than being called out for doing the racist action, or how even minor things like calling someone “uppity” is poisonous to their psyche, or how just because one does not lead a lynch mob or scream nigger doesn’t mean that they don’t have ugly preconceived ideas, thoughts, and opinions about different races, only to then explain all this over again after the next transgression because, of course, there will be a next transgression. Perhaps I ought to be more patient, I’ll own up to that, but maybe White Director and other people like him could retain any of the things I, and other people of color, try to tell them about race. And maybe they don’t because they’re under the misapprehension that because I talk about race a lot, that I must love talking about it. I don’t. And I’ll let you in on a little secret about what other black people rarely say: Explaining your life to a world that doesn’t care to listen is often more draining than living in it. And that day, on that phone, I was tired of it, so instead I chose to feel sorry for him.

  I felt sorry that he cared more about someone thinking he’s racist as opposed to correcting the behavior that would lead someone to feel that way. I felt sorry that after asking two black people to explain why what he did was wrong, he learned nothing from either of us. And most of all, I felt sorry because he was so self-absorbed, he will, most likely, do something like this to someone else—and that person might not be able to handle it as well as I did. And when I couldn’t feel sorry anymore, I just wanted to laugh because this bizarre rite of passage of being called “uppity” wasn’t even mine to claim at this point, because he had made it all about him. I was just a witness to his emotional breakdown. I was also concerned: Since there were more episodes to shoot, how would the dynamic change on set? What would happen if I left the show? How would that affect the crew? How would my character’s absence be explained in the remaining episodes?

  After a while, I told myself to stop with the questions. I could no longer be concerned about how standing up for myself was going to impact someone who didn’t care all that much about belittling me. At the same time, though, my thoughts kept returning to the rest of the cast, which was, by far, the most diverse one I had ever worked with. Who knew when I was going to get an opportunity like that again? After all, acting with a cast that was intentionally designed to depict POCs and gays as regular people is something that doesn’t happen all too often. So I weighed the options: finish what I started or tell White Director I was moving on. I chose to shoot my last episode, which not only allowed me to spend more time with the sea of brown faces in the cast, but, in a stroke of luck, also turned into a paid gig. WD felt guilty enough to compensate the entire cast for the first three episodes we had performed in, marking the first time in history that reparations happened faster than the time it takes to have an item shipped to your house via Amazon Prime. In all seriousness, it turned out that being a team player paid off, literally, which was nice, but I didn’t care about the money, even though I was thrilled my making a stand benefited the rest of the cast. What I cared about was my Sidney Poitier–esque stoicism that was on full display during the showdown with the reality TV judges had morphed into something different. More powerful, direct, and better.

  Don’t get me wrong; remaining steadfast and not letting others see you break is one version of noble. One form of brave. And perhaps given how brutal the world is, this stoicism may even be necessary and the only reliable protection one has. This protection seems to be something that comes preinstalled in me and possibly in the souls of all black folks. It allows us, much like the adamantium that courses through Wolverine’s skeleton, to be self-healing in the face of the daily micro- and macro-aggressions, to remind us to carry on, my wayward son. But it turns out for me that carrying on isn’t enough. Holding my head high and rising above doesn’t make me feel strong or fierce. It makes me feel stifled. Almost as if I’m choking on a tiny injustice and that one of these days, the right injustice in the right shape and size is going to lodge itself in my throat and take my voice and my very last breath. Therefore, the only reliable protection for me is to speak up. On that day with that White Director, I made the choice to never again be quiet, to never again suck it up. I challenged him. And I will do it again. If that makes me uppity, so be it. At least people know I’m no longer a vessel that they can use to act out their racist feelings. They will know that I think I’m worth fighting for. They will know that I have a fire burning inside me. They will know that I’m alive.

  Casting Calls for People of Color That Were Not Written by People of Color

  When I was a teenager, TV and movies were my closest friends. Sure, I had homies at Gilmour Academy—whaddup Krystle, Sheena, Brian, and Wil spelled with one l, but in a nonpretentious way!—and we would get into little PG adventures, like impersonating our teachers when they were within an earshot of us, taking long “bathroom breaks” from any and all science classes, and seeing the movie Pearl Harbor in theaters on opening weekend because 2001 was a world in which paying full price to watch Josh Hartnett act was a thing teenagers blindly did.* But my true besties? The people who I felt understood me the most? The guys I wanted to exist so they could date me? The women I wanted to be? They lived inside my TV screen.

  As a teen, my weekends were spent alternating between watching the shows I recorded on my VCR, like Ally McBeal, Martin, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and renting VHS copies of movies from the library. And since I was a paranoid, well-behaved teenager that respected authority—which is the best kind of teen to be, by the way—I lived my life vicariously through these characters. Their lives were so much more exciting than mine! They got to do the things I would never do (be a gangster, like in The Godfather), the things I was looking forward to doing (as with any character in any movie who was having sex), and the things I was too afraid to try, but I always wanted to do (act, like in Singin’ in the Rain). That last one was important. Watching these movies and shows instilled something in me—some desire that said, Hey, I could do that, right? It doesn’t look that hard. I mean, I entertain all my friends. Then, just as quickly as those thoughts appeared, another voice in my head would chime in: But you’ve never taken an acting class. You’ve never even been in a school play. You live in the suburbs of Cleveland. How the hell are you going to get to Hollywood?

  Uh, I’d fly there. On United Airlines. A-doy, I would snap back in an “I’ll show you” tone. (When you’re a teen from the Midwest, and you have never flown before, you literally think any airline is super fancy. #NoShade, but if United Airlines were a person, it would be Mischa Barton, just real basic AF.) Then the snark part of my brain would start up again:

  Girl, bye. There is no clear path for you to be an actress. You’ve never tried it, so how do you know if you’re any good? And why haven’t you tried? Because you’re scared.

  True, I’d say dejectedly. And then I’d turn on another movie and get swept away, never telling anyone—not my parents, friends, or high school guidance counselor—what I really wanted to do. I just kept this reoccurring conversation going in my head throughout my time in high school, hoping that one day, I would go to bed, wake up, and magically do something, anything, different with my life.

  Now that I’m older, I suspect the main reason I kept this dream to myself is because the scariest part of working in entertainment isn’t doing all the work it takes to build a career, or even failing—it’s wanting that dream in the first place. You have to take the
leap and put the work in and go all in. And being all in means there is nowhere to hide. You just have to stand there, Scott Stapp–style with “arms wide open,” and accept the good and the bad that comes from trying and failing and trying and failing. You have to be vulnerable. I didn’t like the idea of that; I was far too scared to own what I wanted. But that didn’t stop that desire from roiling beneath the surface. It’s why I watched The West Wing with the closed captioning on, so I could memorize the dialogue. It’s what fueled my love of award shows. It’s why I watched every single episode of Inside the Actors Studio, mentally taking notes and imagining what my answers would be when James Lipton asked me something from the Proust Questionnaire. (Least favorite word? Easy. When someone is called “Daddy” in a sexual manner. Whenever I hear that, my vajeen dries up like an endangered lake that Morgan Freeman is going to provide narration about in a documentary.) But because acting didn’t present itself as a reasonable option at the end of high school, I decided to take a more practical route: go to college in New York City and become a screenwriter or producer. Be behind the scenes. I started applying to writing programs at various Big Apple colleges, but because I was such a slacker, most schools saw my transcripts and reacted the way I do when I’m on a first date with a guy and he uses a Groupon: “LOL. No.” Pratt Institute, for whatever reason, accepted me into their creative writing program, making my plan of moving to New York a go.

  Though I said I wanted to be behind the scenes, deep down, I still held on to the dream of being on stage the way Gollum holds on to the ring in The Lord of the Rings. That’s what happened, right? I have no idea; I never saw the movies because I spent the aughts watching Vitamin C’s “Graduation (Friends Forever)” music video on the repeat and wondering why all the “high schoolers” in it looked like they were twenty-seven and three payments away from paying off the lease on their Audi four-door sedans. In short, the 2000s were wonderfully ridiculous and so was my freshman year. I didn’t end up performing, but I wrote a lot of short stories and garbage poetry that was angsty for no reason—I mean, how hard was life if I was lip-syncing to Vitamin C in my dorm room?—and fawned over a dude who talked about philosophy all the time (barf) and wore green army pants on the regs.

  My sophomore year, though, the idea of performing became a reality. Lindsay, a fellow screenwriting major, told me about an on-campus improv group she had joined and invited me to come check it out. I, like a lot of people, was familiar with improv because of Whose Line Is It Anyway? And I, unlike a lot of people, was like, It must be really cool to hang out with Drew Carey. I wish I could hang with him. #ThingsVirginsSay. Anyway, I went to one of their shows, and it seemed like fun—everyone was goofing around on stage, making one another laugh for an hour and a half. It seemed like the opposite of Hollywood; it was low stakes. So I joined the team: “The Up Top Playerz.” “With a z!” We always made sure to tell people that because when you’re a bunch of middle-class people, changing an s to a z is your version of a Crip walking next to a dude you just beat up. (We were also kicking around the name “Touched by an Uncle,” a play on the Della Reese religious show Touched by an Angel, which marked the first time in history when an insensitive molestation joke was inspired by octogenarian must-see TV.) Anyway, the Playerz was where I first found an outlet for my sense of humor, and where I found a group of friends outside of my classmates. There was going to improv parties that consisted of one-upping and the occasional girl-on-girl smooch, attending shows at the famed Upright Citizens Brigade and getting taught the basics of the art form by Chris Gethard, performing in the Del Close Marathon, and embracing the creative outlet I had been avoiding for so many years. I was hooked, but at this point, I still wasn’t open about my desire to pursue a career in performing. I felt I had to stick to the plan: be a writer and eventually, maybe, somewhere down the line, put yourself in one of your scripts.

  But graduation was nearing. I had no camera equipment. I had no short film scripts that I could show someone or enter into a contest or get funded. I had written one feature-length script, a drama, but I needed a job if I was going to stay in New York, and doing improv was taking up a lot of time. So I quit improv, telling myself, That stuff was just for fun. I need to pay bills, so I need to get a job in an office. I’m going to be an adult. Hmm. Reading that sentence now, I wonder how many other people believe that being an adult and having fun are mutually exclusive. To be fair, I understand that mentality. I, too, chose the “safe route” and did administrative work at a few film companies after graduation, telling myself I was still close to the entertainment world. But the truth was, I was unhappy. Making copies and answering phone calls was not as exhilarating as performing on stage. And when I got promoted to a more demanding job—executive administrative assistant to the president of Picturehouse Films—I was working fifty, fifty-five hours a week, with a terrible commute, and so I had no time to do anything. No writing. No going to UCB to even watch improv shows, let alone perform in them. It wasn’t until Lindsay (I swear, this girl is an angel) suggested that we take a stand-up class together that the idea of performing came back into my life. I mean, what a good idea, right?! Of course I was going to be like, “Hells to the yes”?

  Nope. “Stand-up is dumb,” I said, and went back to emotionally eating Entenmann’s crumb cake and watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Don’t get me wrong; I had watched stand-up specials by Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, and Dane Cook before, but it never seemed like a career to me. When I watched those comics, I had a good time, but I never felt Ooh, I wanna do that. I always was like, “That was great. I laughed a lot. Now, back to the real world.” Stand-up was just something I would occasionally enjoy, like alcohol, or an episode of Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. But then Linds hit me with some real talk.

  “What do you have to lose? You hate your day job. This is going to be fun! Just like our improv days. And if you don’t like stand-up, it’s just another thing to add to the list of things you hate.” Ouch, but she had a point. I was straight up Sad-tharine McPhee, which is what I call former American Idol contestant Katharine McPhee because she has an incredible voice and is stuck acting in that boo-boo CBS show Scorpion, where she plays a waitress with street smarts (and zero book smarts) that helps a bunch of genius yet nerdy white dudes solve crimes. Like, really? She can’t be their intellectual equal and have a working-class job? Anyway, I was Sad-tharine McPhee because I had all these funny chops and I was stuck in an office job that I didn’t see any way out of, so when Linds dropped the truth-bomb, I knew I had to do something. And that something was getting on the phone with my parents and asking them to pay for my Carolines comedy club stand-up class as an early birthday present.

  The second I touched the microphone, I knew stand-up was what I was meant to do with my life. It felt like second nature, even though I had never told a written joke before in my life. I held the microphone with confidence and told my jokes loudly and proudly, and it felt exhilarating. Fear knew to fuck off forever, because I was about to go all in. I soon submerged myself in the world of stand-up: I went to open mics, wrote constantly, watched stand-up specials, did bringer shows (when you bring audience members like friends and family in exchange for stage time), you name it. I was having a blast, and all my friends could see how much happier I was. I was no longer just waking up and going to a corporate job and then heading straight home. I was more social, I was dating, and comedy was snowballing. It led to me freelancing for pop culture sites online, writing sketches on MTV’s Girl Code, doing background work in friends’ web series, and taking acting classes. After five and half years of working a day job, I was able to quit and pursue stand-up and acting full-time.

  And best of all: I wasn’t scared. Honestly, I wasn’t. I was calm and confident like 2000s Prince when he showed up to award shows with his perfectly coiffed Afro, a cane, and a stank facial expression that said, “All y’all’s grandmas know my corn bread and pinto beans recipe is better
than theirs, so they need to stop trying and just live out the rest of their days talking about that one time they tried to smash Harry Belafonte at a civil rights rally.” I was that confident.

  Now, before you think this is some happily-ever-after BS, let me be straight here. Just because I’m confident doesn’t mean I’m not constantly fighting a sea of others to land roles. As a comedian, you have to be hungry. I’m talking like one level below Augustus Gloop’s greedy behind. Just gobbling up every opportunity to get seen. For examps, even though my agents send me on plenty of auditions, I also have signed up for a few mailing lists that send out e-mail blasts on the regular about other auditions. The more the merrier, right?

  These e-mail blasts go out to any kind of actor who signs up for them and are generally a catchall. They include notices for background parts like being a partygoer at a club or small parts with five speaking lines or less, or they are looking for folks with an uncommon talent like knowing how to shoot a bow and arrow or anything else that might be useful if a zombie apocalypse might go down.* Anyway, these blasts seemed to be directing me to what appeared to be pretty decent roles that could keep me afloat financially, and every once in a while, there would be roles for meatier, “everywoman” types. No longer are women just required to play the hot chick, the sassy chick, or the girlfriend without a sense of humor. Yay! But then . . . then I would read the entire description. Let me take the opportunity right now to say the following PSA to any and all casting directors reading this: