4a. You’re telling me that Slave doesn’t even want to sleep on the decision? Even take half an hour to think this through, which is still less time than it took for me to come up with my Instagram handle? I’m sorry, but no slave should be treating the concept of freedom as casually as the way I blow off reading the Terms and Agreements page on iTunes so I can buy old Boyz II Men songs ASAP.
4b. Does she not have any slave friends she can run this conundrum by? We have all experienced being blinded by the nookie/dickmatized, so I am willing to suspend disbelief just to entertain that. Yet I cannot and will not accept that Slave doesn’t want to Wingdings, Wingdings, Wingdings with any of the other slaves, who undoubtedly will be like, “You need to love yourself and leave.” I mean, I’ve told my friends that even for low-stakes situations when they’re drunk-texting me from a Carl’s Jr. about a $50 food order they’re about to make.
5. No slave is ever, ever, ever going to say yes to more slavery. There are no circumstances in which that would even make sense. Slavery is nothing but an endless cycle of physical abuse, rape, dehumanization, and mental anguish, so pretending as though turning down freedom is the same as someone turning down a job to work at the Chicago Tribune to stay in Bumblefuck, Iowa, with their boo is laughable.
6. Just so we’re all clear. The Slave and Slave Owner Daughter are not going to live happily ever after. The happy ending here is that Slave is still going to be a slave, who can also sneak nookie in a linen closet with her white bae from time to time. I mean, it’s not like the Slave Owner is going to sit down with his daughter and go, “OK, wow. So you’re a lesbian. You’re in an interracial relationship. You’re sleeping with the hired help. Cool, cool, cool. Congrats on that,” and then go back to being all rich, white, and evil. These two ladies are not going to be in a fair and equal relationship, and I resent the fact that the play is perpetuating an idea that the love of a white woman is more valuable than a black person’s freedom. Talk about putting white people on a pedestal.
When we finished reading the play, it was dead silent in the room. Though I wanted to react by yelling, “This play is deep-fried in ignorance,” I instead chose to do the whole angry black woman “measure twice, cut once” method. The first step: Overanalyze what you are thinking by weighing the pros and cons of saying your truth to someone who might not want to hear it. What were the pros? Standing up for black people and letting Rebecca know that this might be offensive to audiences. The cons? Telling her that what she wrote needed to be changed drastically would annoy her and, oh yeah, talking about the complexities of slavery within the confines of a short feedback session is uncomfortable and nearly impossible to do. Still, this play is kind of fucked up, I thought. So, I decided to forge ahead to the next step of the “measure twice, cut once” method.
Step two: Assess your surroundings. Done. Nothing but white people and me. Yowza. I knew that my surroundings raised the stakes, but since this classroom had always been a safe space for us to test out new ideas and give objective feedback, I gave myself the green light to proceed to the final stage.
Step three: Speak once (in a very nonthreatening manner, of course). Duh. I know how to do that. My mom is an accountant and my dad is in real estate, so they are experts in talking in a way that gets work done and closes deals. They didn’t raise no fool.
“Well, since I’m the only black person in the room, I guess I’ll go first,” I began. “I don’t think it really makes any sense that a slave would choose to remain in slavery because she fell in love with her slave owner’s daughter.”
“Well, it’s a story about love conquering all,” Rebecca responded.
Whoa, I thought, she’s not supposed to talk. It’s the number one rule of workshopping. I did not plan for this. You ever see a door at work that you’re not supposed to open, but there’s a little part of you that goes, Well, what if you did? So you do and then nothing bad happens? It’s just the room with electric wires and a generator and you’re like, That’s it? and then Kanye-shrug all the way back to your cubicle? Well, that’s what happened here. We all knew it was a no-no for the writer whose work was being discussed to speak, so none of us dared to do it. But then Rebecca did and . . . the world didn’t stop. She simply spoke, and then it was my turn to speak. Like any other conversation. Oh. This threw me for a loop.
“But it’s slavery.”
“Yeah, but this is a brave story about two women defying the odds to be together.”
“But the white woman is not sacrificing anything and the black lady is giving up everything. She’s choosing slavery. No one would choose slavery.” And with that the nonthreatening speaking manner turned into a low-key version of John McEnroe’s “You can’t be serious!” I didn’t raise my voice, but my tone was definitely one of incredulousness. I couldn’t believe I was being forced into a situation where I had to explain that slavery is not a choice anyone makes.
The classroom was tense, like they were watching a ping-pong match between us. I don’t remember much else of what was said, as I was juggling all sorts of emotions. I was upset, yet trying to make it seem that I was totally fine. I also worried about Rebecca’s feelings because even though she was completely misguided, I related to her as a writer and knew how tough it was to hear the flaws in your work and not take it personally. More than anything, I was very aware that if I made one wrong step, this situation was going to turn ugly and we were headed for angry black woman territory.
What seemed like hours later, the professor stepped in to open up the room for more discussion. Thank Black Jesus, aka Gayle King’s wig collection. Some other classmates chimed in and gently said that maybe slavery was not the best setting for her story, and Rebecca got visibly upset. After a few comments, she interrupted.
“I feel like I’m being picked on.” Her voice trembled as she stared at me. Even though other people essentially said the same things I said, I was apparently the problem. She held the stare so everyone in class could see she was looking straight at me. “It’s not fair.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “You didn’t even try to see what this play was trying to do. You just saw slavery and made up your mind about it and now you’re picking on me.” Never once did she break eye contact with me as the tears flowed. The message was loud and clear not only to me but to everyone in the room: Phoebe is a bully. She is a mean black person. She is an angry black lady who made the white girl cry. She is a living stereotype.
I didn’t say anything back; I didn’t know what to say because all I could think was Oh, no. I made the white girl cry. I made the white girl cry. You’re not supposed to do that. What is everyone going to think? You see, I’ve spent my life learning that I am, at all costs, supposed to care more for a white person’s feelings than my own. That if I hurt them or they decide that I have hurt them, that I am to feel guilty. And even in this situation, when it was so abundantly clear that I was not in the wrong for objecting to the romanticizing of slavery, for someone using the hundreds of years of pain and misery for my people as the backdrop for a love story, I was still being painted with the angry black woman brush. In that room, in that moment, I felt the most alone I had ever felt during my college experience.
Some of my fellow writers came up to me after class to reassure me that the points I made were valid. But what they said didn’t matter. There was no one in the room who looked like me, who would truly understand what I was going through, who would know how embarrassed I felt. How shocked I was that her crying was more important than my having to sit through and participate in what essentially was a mockery of slavery. How disheartened I was that in 2006, it seemed that the whole messiness of slavery and race could be seen as just a problem for me and my people to untangle ourselves. How desperately I needed a look that could tell me, “Don’t worry what the white people are going to think.”
I don’t know about other black people, but that Greek chorus of “But what will the white people think?
” has been a constant in my brain for much of my life. “Man, I truly am going to be late, not because of CPT but because of traffic. But what will the white people think?” “I really want to order certain food off this menu at dinner. But what will the white people think?” “I want to speak out about some injustice I just witnessed. But what will the white people think? That I’m a troublemaker? Guess I should keep my mouth shut.” Do you know the amount of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years that have been wasted second-guessing each and every behavior because I was wary of how I was going to reinforce or dismantle certain stereotypes? How often I shut my mouth and bit my tongue to avoid the “angry black woman” label? How draining it is to constantly scrutinize and edit all your actions before making them? That’s not truly being alive; that’s living on someone else’s terms. And it sucks. But when you feel like that is your only viable option because the alternative—being even more misunderstood than you already are by society—is unbearable, what do you do? You cope with it until you figure out a plan. And for me, I found some relief through humor.
I’m not the first to claim this, but finding humor through shitty situations is the genesis of many comedians’ careers. Whether it’s being funny to make home life tolerable, or using wisecracks to win friends like I did way back in middle and high school, we all learn pretty early on that comedy is our mode of survival. Some people have their looks or athleticism or book smarts; we comics have our yuk yuks. It’s our get-out-of-jail-free card. I mean, if I expressed my hurt in a clever, joking manner, no one can take offense then, right? No one can call you an angry black woman if we’re all laughing, right? That was the tactic I took in my senior thesis class after the Rebecca incident. I made sure to diffuse with humor. When reading other friend’s writing, I would pepper my feedback with jokes before giving my feedback. If a guy said something douchey to me, I would smooth it over with a quippy one-liner. If I had a disagreement with my goth roommate who would leave her Tamagotchi pet behind when she was gone for days at a time partying, which then forced me to “feed” and “play” with it, I would tease her about how she was an absentee parent out of an after-school special. And, sure, the teasing and joking made it so no one ever truly got mad at me, but it also prevented me from fully expressing myself.
Being on the charm offensive all the time will win you friends and help avoid conflicts, but it also leaves you feeling stifled and exhausted. At least that was the case with me. Trying to make sure everyone else was feeling OK was taxing, and it made me feel dishonest because I was sugarcoating everything I was saying. I felt like I wasn’t being me but a version of me that was as nonthreatening and inoffensive as possible. But that’s the thing. Being true to oneself shouldn’t be considered threatening. And it certainly isn’t with white dudes when they speak up, so why was it with me? Oh, yes, the ole angry black woman thing. Hmm. OK, well, I can let that stereotype dictate my life or I can live my life, I thought. So I eventually chose the latter, with a sprinkling of comedy, of course.
When I started doing stand-up eight years ago, I found a confidence in myself that I didn’t have. If I can stand onstage for twenty minutes at a time and command an audience with ease, then there is no reason I should be concerned about speaking up offstage. Slowly, I’ve become fearless in conversation and social media and have realized that I could slip my real opinions in about certain things among the jokes. Now, that doesn’t mean that everyone loves this about me. I’ve gotten e-mails and messages claiming that I’m creating drama when it comes to race and gender issues. That I should just be happy with the way things are because I have Facebook, so how hard can my life as a black woman be? That I’m nothing but a thug, a whore, a cunt, and an animal. That I am just supposed to shut up and not make anyone feel bad about their careless and reckless behavior. That if I offer these opinions with no apologies and not enough J/Ks, then clearly I’m an “angry black woman.” You know what? They can go ahead and think that. Really. I’m fine with it. You hear that? There’s no Greek chorus in my head going, But what will the white people think? anymore. I am no longer concerned with that. What matters is that I know who I am. I’m a black person who happens to be a woman, and who happens to be a skosh angry from time to time about some pretty crappy things, and who happens to make some jokes when talking about those things I’m a skosh angry about. Ya know, a gahtdamn human being. So take that, Sapphire.
People, Places, and Things That Need to Do Better
If you haven’t been able to tell by now, tons of stuff in this crazy, crazy world really burns my toast, so I want to, for once and for all, turn my attention to the people, places, and things that need to pull a Channing Tatum and Step Up. OK, OK. I know that if I’m going to namecheck anything in Tatum’s canon, it should be the Magic Mike series, which was clearly designed to create world peace/cure all diseases/prove to the world that air humping is a lost art right up there with speaking Aramaic or prank calling in the days before caller ID. But this essay is for the purpose of reading, not sending you down a rabbit hole of GIFs and YouTube vids of Tatum the shirtless wonder. We don’t have time for that because there is a more important item at hand: calling out all the stuff in culture that is “turrible,” as Charles Barkley would say. Since I’m about to offer up some tough love, I don’t want any of the following people, places, and things to feel like they’re being attacked. I’m not perfect, so I’m happy to turn the spotlight on myself first. Examine some of my own flaws. For instance:
I am the worst at remembering names, which is probably due to the fact that I have a ton of useless information in my head. For instance, did you know that on the show Roseanne, Becky was played by two different actresses—Lecy Goranson, aka the OG Becky, and then Sarah Chalke pre–Scrubs fame? Or that an American urologist bought Napoleon’s penis for $40,000 at auction? You see, both these tidbits are very important and must be remembered forever, so unfortunately, there’s no way I can make room to remember the name of, say, the production company executive that I had lunch with yesterday. Ugh, basically, my brain is an iPhone that doesn’t have enough storage on it anymore because I used it all up to take poorly lit photos of omelets.
I’m also terrible at buying cards. Every year around Mother’s Day, I think to myself, Mama Robinson deserves to receive the best card from her loving daughter. And every year, without fail, I wait until the last minute and then all the Mahogany and In Rhythm brands of Hallmark cards are sold out. All I’m left with is a bunch of white-people cards, where I have to color in the faces with a brown magic marker and write some Maya Angelou–sounding shit on the inside to offset the fact that the cover shows a Brady Bunch–looking blond girl in cuffed overalls who’s skipping rocks across a lake. My mom certainly deserves better than that.
Hm. I wish I had some juicier stuff to share about myself. The truth is, I’m a pretty low-key person. I’m not hiding anything maj. Just your run-of-the-mill stuff like mentally spiraling into despair over my career or love life to the point where I lay in bed for hours crying as I feed myself milk chocolate–covered graham crackers. Is that relatable? Enough to make you feel a little sad for me? Maybe make it a little easier for you to swallow the fact that I’m going to start calling people out? Alright, good. Now that’s off my chest, I’m ready to tell everybody and everything else to “Do better, y’all!” First up . . .
1. The NFL and Its Treatment of Women
Y’all, the NFL is about as American as apple pie, fireworks, and pretending that only the Olympic events we’re good at are the ones that matter. And since I was born in the Midwest of ‘Murica, it’s pretty much my destiny and duty to be a lifelong football fan. There’s just one problem. The NFL’s relationship with women is bad. Like final season of Dexter bad. This is hugely disappointing because female sports fans want to be the Bonnie to the league’s Clyde (the Bey and Jay edition, obviously), the Scully to its Mulder, the Harold to its Kumar. In other words, women are ride-or-die for the NFL, yet the s
port doesn’t seem to care how poorly its players treat women.
Of course, there’s an argument to be made that the NFL doesn’t even care about its players a whole heck of a lot either, considering its attempts to suppress Dr. Bennet Omalu’s research on the brain damage (chronic traumatic encephalopathy, aka CTE) caused by football-related head trauma. While it is certainly problematic that the league disregards the health and safety of its players, let’s set that aside for the moment. Players are now aware of CTE and have known for quite some time that footballers, on average, have a shorter life expectancy than other athletes, so if they decide to keep playing the sport, they are doing so with full knowledge of the risks. But the women who were abused or sexually assaulted by NFL players? They never signed up for that, and the fact that the NFL consistently turns a blind eye to this problem is deeply disheartening and disturbing.
In case you need a refresher on some of these offenders, allow me to do a roll call: Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Rice. Former Cleveland Browns’ player Johnny Manziel. Dallas Cowboys’ Greg Hardy. Tampa Buccaneers’ Jameis Winston. Pittsburgh Steelers’ Ben Roethlisberger. Chicago Bears’ Santonio Holmes. San Francisco 49ers’ Ahmad Brooks. Philadelphia Eagles’ Jordan Hicks. Buffalo Bills’ Richie Incognito. NY Jets’ Brandon Marshall. These are just a handful of players who have been accused of sexual and/or physical abuse. In 2015, there were forty-four active players who were accused of some sort of assault against women. And except for Ray Rice and Johnny Manziel, none of these men have faced real consequences, outside of a few instances of game suspensions and five-figure fines. Winston was still drafted number one overall in the NFL draft, despite the civil suit that his alleged rape victim filed against him and there being overwhelming evidence pointing to how Florida police officers on the case intentionally bungled the investigation from beginning to end to protect the star player. Hardy continued to start for the Cowboys even after Deadspin.com published photos of his battered and bruised ex-girlfriend after he assaulted and threatened to kill her. (The team owner, Jerry Jones, stated that he wasn’t aware of Hardy’s domestic violence until after he signed the cornerback to the team, so, whoops guess it’s too late for Hardy to be properly reprimanded?) And then there’s Roethlisberger, who has been celebrated as a hero of the game and is bound for the Hall of Fame, despite the allegations that he raped two women between 2009 and 2010. I mean . . . WUT?
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