You Can't Touch My Hair

by Phoebe Robinson

  All writers are tortured. Case in point: A friend told me about New Year’s Eve yoga, which is a regular yoga class that culminates in a kombucha toast, and I actually said, without any sense of irony, “That sounds amazing. I should do that.” I’m not a tortured soul; I’m a white neighborhood gentrifier trapped in a black person’s body, and my neighbors of color have no idea. The phrase The call is coming from inside the house? It’s about assholes like me.

  Writers are seductive, great in bed, impeccably dressed, and live in loft apartments that are expertly decorated. This stereotype exists because pop culture has tricked us into believing this nonsense. Take, for example, the rom com Alex & Emma. In it, Luke Wilson plays a struggling novelist who allegedly has no money, yet he has a bomb-ass crib and he’s always dressed like he’s on his way to pose with a goddamn golden retriever for an L.L.Bean photo shoot. No. Just no. People who look like the wickedly handsome Luke Wilson do. Not. Write. Books. Luke Wilson is too busy being all Luke Wilson–y with a “totes casual” hotness that makes ladies do the “happy baby” yoga pose in his presence. #YogaCallback. So, no. Writers are not like Luke Wilson. Writers are like me: clothed in pajamas and writing while covered in blankets/hunched over a desk with sleep breath and Cheez-Its crumbs that have somehow worked their way inside the crotch of their underpants.

  So the writer life is not cool or glamorous, OK? Now that’s out of the way, what else can we talk about? Oh, right. It’s in the title of this essay. The angry black woman. That’s why we’re here. Heh. I know. I know. I’m stalling. And I’m stalling because I’ve been on this planet for thirty-one years, and I don’t really know how to discuss the topic without feeling conflicted. If someone were to ask me, “Are you an angry black woman?” I would reflexively respond, “No. I’m not,” without flinching or taking any time to truly think about what is being asked, and that’s troubling. After all, if I can spend forty-five minutes deciding what tapas restaurant to go to, then shouldn’t something like whether or not I’m an Angry Black Woman—and all the baggage that comes along with that phrase—be carefully considered?

  Angry. Black. Woman. Just three little words, but combined, they become a scarlet letter, tarnishing its wearer as hateful, irrational, emotional—someone to avoid at all costs. This trope, which seems to haunt every black woman on the planet, was popularized back in the 1930s thanks to a character on the radio show (and subsequent TV show) Amos ‘n’ Andy. Sapphire, the emasculating, domineering, and nagging wife of George “Kingfish” Stevens, gave birth to the notion that black women were ungrateful and hard to please and created a mold for which lazy TV writers could cook up other stereotype-laden characters, from Aunt Esther on Sanford and Son to reality TV shows like Basketball Wives. Despite its preeminence in pop culture, scholars Dionne Bennett and Marcyliena Morgan suggested in their 2006 paper “Getting Off of Black Women’s Backs” that social and cultural researchers who spend careers studying trends don’t even bother to investigate the idea of the angry black woman:

  The stereotype of the angry, mean Black woman goes unnamed not because it is insignificant, but because it is considered an essential characteristic of Black femininity regardless of the other stereotypical roles the Black woman may be accused of occupying. These stereotypes are more than representations, they are representations that shape realities.

  I don’t have official empirical data to back up this claim, but based on my life experiences, it’s hard to refute what Bennett and Morgan wrote. The concept of the Angry Black Woman has affected how people view me. Take this instance. A few years ago, a white male comic introduced me by saying, “Do you guys like pussy? Well, this next person has one.” After my set, I walked off stage and politely told him what he did was inappropriate and unacceptable. He responded loudly so everyone in the audience could hear: “WHOA! Calm down. Don’t need to get all angry black woman on me. But that wouldn’t be the first time that happened to me.” Huh? I mean, I approached him with “white lady dealing with unsatisfactory customer service” speak, which is just one notch above “baby giggles while farting” on the Innocence Richter Scale. Still, all he saw was a feisty black woman who was flying off the handle and causing a scene. Yet while his outrage at how I rejected his objectification of my body was upsetting—guess what?!—I couldn’t actually get angry because if I did, then everyone in the room would think, See, she is an angry black woman. He said it and she just proved it.

  UGH! This sort of thing happens all. the. time. Something completely disrespectful will be done or said, and black women have two options as a means of response: 1. Suck it up, or 2. Hulk-smash everything because the mistreatment is only happening because the person(s) refuses to see black women as humans—and more than anything, we just want to be seen. But if we Hulk-smash, then we’re forever known as the angry black woman, who is to be avoided at all costs or placated with a “there, there” tone that’s used on Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan. Who wants option two? So, the answer to the question “Are you an angry black woman?” is no, I am not. And no, that was not an angry denial of my being angry. See? This is why I have been stalling. Because this question and this label unfairly positions a black woman at a disadvantage, where she becomes either flustered or unintentionally defensive.

  Now that I think about it, the relief I feel when I deny the label is a little suspect. It seems to come less from a place of truth of evaluating whether I’m angry and more about my need to avoid that evil stereotype that some people assume I am. Oof. That was rough to admit. Let’s investigate this a little more. If I am not an angry black woman: Why not? Society doesn’t exactly make life terribly easy for black women—and yes, life is hard for everyone—but black women have their own unique battles, a Molotov cocktail of racism and sexism. We have to combat the stereotypes of being at once hyperemotional and stoic, we have a shorter life expectancy than white men and women, we’re paid less than men and white women, we’re three times more likely to be incarcerated* than white women, have a higher poverty rate than other women* and, perhaps, most important, getting our hair done takes as long as the run time of the BBC’s six-episode miniseries Pride and Prejudice. So how do I, or any black woman for that matter, come up against these types of obstacles and remain in mint condition? Not even be the slightest bit perturbed? That doesn’t seem possible. I mean, no matter how idyllic one’s life is as a POC, there always appears to be some BS right around the corner. I’ll use myself as an example.

  My parents have been happily married for thirty-five years. I attended a phenomenal private high school and a well-respected liberal arts college. I live in New York City. I’ve been in love. I have a thriving comedy career. When I order things from Amazon Prime, they always end up getting delivered a day early. When I pause Netflix for a really long time, it asks me if I am still watching, and I think it’s just swell that Nettie checks in on me. Clearly, life is pretty banging right now. Yet despite all these kick-ass things, I still:

  Lose out on jobs because of the color of my skin

  Have men condescend to me in the workplace because I’m a woman

  Experience sexual harassment from both strangers and colleagues

  Have guys call me a See You Next Tuesday on my Facebook page

  Receive private messages from dudes attempting to shame me for expressing any frustration I have with how I am treated as a black woman

  Receive messages from others implying that because I have self-love I most definitely am a racist and hate all white people

  And the list goes on and on

  Oof! Just writing out these few things made me a little ‘turbed. So perhaps I’m a black person who happens to be a woman and who happens to be a skosh angry or a skosh angry person who happens to be black and female. That’s maybe like saying, “I am flour who happens to be mixed with baking powder, salt, butter, and buttermilk and all that happens to be—”

  “A biscuit,” someone might i
nterrupt. “You’re a biscuit.”

  “No, I am flour who happens to be mixed with baking powder, salt, butter, and buttermilk and all that happens to be—”

  “Girl, you are bis. Cuit. You are such a biscuit, with a two-piece and some green beans flanking your sides while that black lady from the Popeyes commercials stands behind you, talking about Louisiana cuisine.”

  What I’m getting at here is that to a lot of folks, it doesn’t matter that I’m multilayered like an Au Bon Pain parfait and have unique qualities, because as a black woman, I’m not allowed to embody various personality traits without an ugly label being slapped on me. This is completely unfair, world, and news flash: There is a distinction between the “angry black woman” label that society has used to silence and shame black women, and being a black person who happens to be woman and who happens to be a skosh angry, which, by the way, is usually what we refer to as multidimensional . . . unless that’s reserved for white dudes in prestige TV. LOL. Like all black women, I am a complex person who feels the full range of emotions—happy, sad, confused, nervous, mad, curious, aroused, helpless, and so on and so on—therefore, the latter classification of black and female and angry seems more in line with who I am. Either way, the result is the same: I find myself double- and triple-checking my behavior. The idea behind the old adage of “measure twice, cut once” applies to black women except the wording gets changed to “overanalyze what you are thinking by weighing the pros and cons of saying your truth to someone who might not want to hear it, assess your surroundings (are lots of people watching you, and more important, are white people watching you?), and speak once, in a very nonthreatening manner, of course.” Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Truly, though, there is a Predator-like mental scan that black women have to do before speaking, and even after we’ve done the risk assessment, things can still go astray. I learned this lesson a decade ago and haven’t forgotten it since. Let me explain.

  You know how when an aunt of yours is getting ready to spill the tea to your mom about their mutual friend Deborah by saying, “Look. Deborah? I mean, she is a sweetheart. So nice. Her parents? Wonderful people. But last week, Deborah was acting like a little shit”? Well, I’m going to do that here. Pratt Institute? I mean, a very good liberal arts college that I attended. The writing program? Wonderful program. But once during my senior year, things got pretty shitty. One time, during my thesis class, a classmate wrote a play in which a black female slave said “hard pass” to escaping slavery via the Underground Railroad because—get this—she fell in love with her slave owner’s daughter.

  Let’s go back to 2006, a time of Big Momma’s House 2, the International Astronomical Union downgrading Pluto from planet status—#WayHarshTai—and me being too into the Pussycat Dolls. This was apparently also the time where this lesbian slave tale just needed to be told. After three years of reading critical theory and writing short stories and bad angsty poetry that would even make the band Dashboard Confessional go, “I’mma need you to chill,” my classmates and I entered our senior year and finally, finally, we could apply all the skills we acquired to write a collection of short stories or creative nonfiction, a screenplay (that’s what I did!), a play, or a big, fat, stinkin’ pile of poems. Whatever tome we submitted, it was supposed to best represent who we were as artists. Kind of like how on every season of American Idol there was a week where the contestants had to choose the song that represented them and inevitably someone would pick Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” which made viewers go, “Is this real life?” That’s what my senior class did; we all wrote a bunch of “All Star”s because we were twenty and twenty-one and had no idea who the heck we were, so our great works were not so great. But there’s a difference between a young goober and finding your voice and writing a slavery love story that you expect everyone to cosign, no matter how ludicrous it is.

  To set the stage: The woman who wrote this slave play is white, and to protect her identity, let’s call her Rebecca. A big part of this class was workshopping our material so we could get in the habit of being accountable for what we write. Meaning, a lot of beginning writers have a tendency to write a piece and then defend it by saying, “Oh, well, what I meant here was this.” “What I was trying to say was that,” giving people a “director’s commentary” of what their work was supposed to be, rather than letting the work stand for itself. To avoid this, our work would be read aloud by someone else (or in the case of plays and screenplays, parts would be assigned to everyone except the person who wrote the work), and then we’d receive feedback from our classmates. The creator of the piece, though, was not allowed to say anything during the critique; we just had to take it in. Humble thyself, I think was the lesson here. So on this fateful day, Rebecca passed out her work in progress and explained that it was a lesbian love affair set during the slavery era, which was meant to serve as a commentary on race and sexuality today. O . . . K. Guys, this sort of thing tends to happen at liberal arts colleges. Kinda like when a woman on What Not to Wear goes clothes shopping after her first talk with the stylists and is like, “Oh! They want me to be more trendy, so I’m going to get high-waisted velvet skinny jeans, sneaker wedges, a combination of seventy-two rings, a silk top with cutouts that is layered over a gray cashmere sweater, and a yarmulke on top of a fedora.” LOL. WUT. You are doing the most when doing 75 percent less would be 200 percent much more appreciated. And at liberal arts schools, people want to be so bold and so complex that they want to tackle every single hot-button issue at once instead of just tackling one thing really well. This was clearly what Rebecca was doing.

  Now, Rebecca had just recently discovered that she was a lesbian, which is amazing—live your truth, girl!—and I’m guessing she also discovered that, like, slavery is a real bummer, and probably would’ve been better if slaves worked a little less and could just Greg Louganis into some muff. Honestly, with the way her play was written, if it got adapted to the big screen, it would be nothing more than a zany rom com with Katherine Heigl as the slave owner’s daughter and Kerry Washington as the “all work and no play” slave who could loosen up if she just had a little bit of love in her life. P!nk’s “Raise Your Glass” would play in the background and the music would cut out just as Kerry Washington’s character falls while trying to lift a heavy stack of cotton. #BecauseWomenAreKlutzes #BecauseHollywood. I’m exaggerating for effect, of course, but Rebecca’s play was embarrassingly tone-deaf. As I was reading the part of the slave aloud (YEP. FUN.), it became clear that I wasn’t the only person in class that picked up on that. The sound of people shifting in their chairs was audible as the play was being read, particularly when Slave Owner Daughter and Slave had a meet-cute. A MOTHERFUCKIN’ MEET-CUTE. DURING SLAVERY?! #BecauseWhyNot.

  As you probably noticed, my lovely readers, meet-cutes generally happen between two people who, I don’t know, both have their rights?? If both parties have their rights, you can meet-cute until the cows come home. But when one party legit does not know how to read and is whipped more regularly than Land O’Lakes butter, YOU. ARE. NOT. MEETING. CUTE. That woman is only meeting your ass because your daddy BOUGHT her.

  My senior thesis class was small, about fifteen people. All of them are white except me, which is literally the story of my life. Clearly, CLEARLY, everyone realized this play is absurd, and as I’m reading, I caught some of my classmates and my teacher sneaking looks at me, as if they want to know whether I was going to blow my lid. I did not, because, again, the whole angry black woman thing. So I kept reading and a bunch of other stupid-ass things happened, which I forget because after class, I went to the same doctor Jim Carrey did in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and promptly had most of this fuckery extracted from my brain. The job was not done thoroughly, though, so as a result I have also forgotten how to ask where the library is in Spanish and anything above middle school–grade math, but that is the price one must pay when wanting to erase the memory of being subjected to the idea
that a few nights of scissoring is all that is required to right that whole slavery thing. But the details about the middle of the play don’t even matter because, here, it’s all about the ending.

  Slave and Slave Owner Daughter are fully in love, but Slave finally gets the chance to escape. She tells bae what her plan is and Slave Owner Daughter is like, “Nooooooooo, we’re in love, though!” Slave is like, “But Massa is gonna rgre;grehtwirlht. We can’t ppwutpwuew, Wingdings, Wingdings, Wingdings,” because the Slave is also super dumb and can’t speak eloquently. “True,” Slave Owner Daughter says. The slave, seeing her precious white bae crying precious white tears goes, “rghre;gjpoj wr;f[owef m,” aka she’s going to tell the other slaves to go without her because she’s going to stay a slave so she can be near her boo because love conquers all. Wingdings, Wingdings, Wingdings, guys. What in Harriet Tubman satin-bonnet hell is this foolishness? I’m sure you get why the ending of this play is utterly ignorant, but let’s break it down, shall we?

  1. Slaves did not just go around giving their owner’s kin TMZ exclusives about plans to escape from the never-ending hell that was slavery.

  2. If you are a white person, do not write some garbage story and heavily pepper it with words like massa and think that I am, as the only black person in the room, going to happily read that mess aloud like I’m gunning for Meryl Streep’s spot as the Queen Bee of acting. I am going to skip over every single one of those massas like Luigi jumping over turtle shells in Mario Bros.

  3. “Go without me”? Go without me is something I tell my friends when they want to go to the Jersey Shore for the weekend. It is the most cazsh (short for casual) way to decline an invitation for a low-stakes situation. Slavery is the opposite of cazsh, so someone re-upping for more slavery real chill, like it’s a T-Mobile cell phone contract, is insane in the membrane.