“Why didn’t you teach me to speak Spanish? Why didn’t you ever bring me to this place?” I asked my mother.
“You have always been so American and had sports, Carmen. I didn’t want to confuse you or take you away from your responsibilities,” was her reply.
But the confusion only grew when I became the only kid in my family to attend college. At the time, I felt applying to college was my only way to start fresh. But this didn’t come easy. My parents had just finished paying for a funeral and couldn’t afford to pay my tuition. I had to work while in college to cover the cost—all while feeling homesick and grieving my sister. And the confusion didn’t stop when the school kept pushing papers in my face asking me to check the box every single time: Hispanic—a term I have never identified with.
College was supposed to be where you open your heart and mind to new experiences. But in some ways, that first semester, I felt my world becoming shrunken and confined. Someone in the leadership of MEChAI on campus informed me I wasn’t really Mexican after all, because I couldn’t speak Spanish. And I kept learning new terms and labels that were applied to me and my experiences in a way that made me feel like an alien. Besides Mexican, I was a person of color who had grown up a latchkey kid. And I even learned there was a term for what used to happen with my brothers getting hog-tied at gunpoint by the cops: racial profiling.
There was also a word to describe me and my girls back home. Apparently, our overlap of cultures, races, and “social disadvantages” had an academic title: intersectionality. It’s a big word that sounds as made up as it does heavy. But I didn’t want to run from it. I wanted to embrace it, because it felt like a word for something I’d lived my whole life. It sparked a new feeling of pride in me for myself, Patricia, and the relationship we had with our extended neighborhood family. Far beyond a textbook word used by academics, my friends and I were a living, breathing collective of people who experienced a magical level of togetherness in our multicultural neighborhood. We were unified for life. We weren’t just a bunch of separate ethnic groups that correspond to boxes you check on an admissions form. We weren’t just Mexican, Korean, Pacific Islander, or African-American. We were intersectional. We were the kids who didn’t know we were supposed to be labeled and divided, who instead collided—and generated our own power.
And even though people always tell you that collaborating with people from other walks of life is complicated—a pipe-dream even—for us, in Oxnard, California, coming together was easy, natural, and real.
This, I realized, was my gift. To take my pain, my knowledge, and my unique experience of intersectionality and to figure out a way to help people with it. This was how I could change the world. I was one of the lucky ones who made it to college and had encouraging mentors. I had the self-motivation and inspiration to live for my sister when she couldn’t, to speak for my mother when she couldn’t, to bring what I knew to the movement and make it stronger.
So even though I had considered going back to Southern California after college and coaching with Pat Bell, I decided to take my place in the movement for social justice. And because I grew up side by side with people from so many backgrounds, races, and religions, my heart was already in it. I already spoke the language. My first meaningful cultural exchanges had happened long ago, when I was a little kid and didn’t know any different. So I fit right in with the community of people working intersectionally to fight for social justice. I’d been organizing my entire life. I already feel so connected and parallel to marginalized communities. I don’t need to be black to care about Black Lives Matter. I don’t have to be locked up to care about incarcerated people. My intersectionality and empathy became my power, and Coach Pat’s five values are still my secret weapon.
He always taught us that having heart wins games. Grit, determination, and family will get us through. He was right. My diverse family of basketball teammates has always gotten me through. I am still close with most of those girls. They mourned with me a few years ago when Coach Bell died on the basketball court at the age of forty-four. And because of them, I have never forgotten where I came from. They continue to remember Patricia with me. They continue to remind me that out of tragedy and hardship can come blessings and change. They remind me of our shared humanity, no matter our backgrounds or differences. They help me understand that our liberation is bound together.
They were my strength on my seventeenth birthday at Patricia’s funeral, and they were my strength exactly twenty-three years later—to the day—on my fortieth birthday in Washington, DC, when I took the stage at the Women’s March and asked five million people to help me change the world.
* * *
I. Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán
With her own unique flare and infectious sense of humor, Issa Rae’s content has garnered millions of views online and two Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress for her hit show, HBO’s Insecure. Issa’s web series, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, was the recipient of the coveted Shorty Award for Best Web Show and her first book, a collection of essays, is a New York Times bestseller.
Issa Rae
WHEN I WAS SEVENTEEN, I decided to celebrate Ramadan for the first time. After a lifetime of telling my Muslim dad and extended family, “I love y’all, but I’m not fasting,” I finally decided to celebrate it too. And by “celebrate,” I mean starving during daylight hours for a full month. Good times.
Except not. I decided to do Ramadan, and I did Ramadan wrong.
My whole life I had lived in fear of it. Not because it was foreign to me. My dad is from Senegal—where almost everyone is Muslim. I grew up visiting Senegal and even lived there for a short period of time as a very young child. It’s more that I just don’t like being hungry or checking off a list of things I can’t do. And when it comes to Ramadan, you can’t eat, drink, have sex, or even think ungenerous thoughts for an entire month. You also have to pray a lot. Which I didn’t do, outside of “I pray they don’t serve Domino’s for lunch, Lord Allah, because I may be tempted.” Ramadan is a beautiful tradition, but I had not grown up developing the strength or discipline to properly celebrate it the way so many of my family members had.
When I gave it a shot, I really truly wanted to feel like I was putting my whole being into it (for reasons I’ll get to later). My initial failings were due to straight laziness for the most part. I had trouble waking up in advance of the sunrise, which is when you are supposed to get out of bed so you can have your food and water for the long day ahead. Then once the sun was up I acted nasty and hangry all damn day till the sun set, at which point I would grossly overeat to make up for lost time and calories. Which isn’t really the point of the fast. The idea is to focus on what you can sacrifice and give, not what you wish you had more of. And I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to turn your thoughts to how to sneak boys into the house and get them to go down on you, but that’s what I did the whole damn thirty days. Because that shit is hard. And I have deep respect for Muslims who see it through every single time. I remember I kept telling myself, “Damn Jo-Issa, your ten-year-old cousins are doing this, so your seventeen-year-old ass can do it too.” I think the first week, I was drinking water during the day because I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to because what kind of dehydrating shit is that? And then my Muslim classmate was like, “What are you doing? You know you’re not supposed to drink water, right?” And I was like, “Girl, I know. I was just rinsing my mouth out. Chill.” I presented it to my friends all wrong too, like I was tackling a new diet, as opposed to being connected with my Senegalese side. They were mildly impressed: “If you’re not eating during the day, can I get your lunch tickets?”
Looking back, I am not proud of how I did Ramadan wrong. I am not telling this story to make light of Ramadan or to pat myself on my weak-ass back. It was not my finest moment. But it was a rare moment in my life where I was seeking religion. My mom is from New Orleans, and she won the “debate” about which religion m
e and my four siblings would be raised in. So even though my dad never let us forget that we were Senegalese, we grew up attending Christian churches. Despite being raised Catholic herself, my mother was heavily involved in the church and made sure we were too. I never wanted to be there on Sunday mornings. Most kids and teenagers don’t. It was not fun. And I wouldn’t call myself religious today. Of course, looking back I can see how the church rooted my family and gave us community. It also gave “younger me” an audience. My mom’s church is where I put on my first play. Church is where I was standing the first time I said something into a mic that I had written myself. It’s where I found my creative roots. That meant a lot to me. Plus, they don’t make you fast, so . . .
Spending time in Dakar, Senegal, growing up, sometimes my visit overlapped with Ramadan. It’s a monthlong holiday that is based on the lunar calendar, so it doesn’t happen in the exact same month every year. One year it might fall in June and another year it’s in April, so sometimes it would creep up on me. And I was always disappointed if my time in Dakar was shadowed by Ramadan. I know that sounds selfish or disrespectful, but I was a kid—away from her regular home and school life—in a place where I got to have fun. All the rules were different there. The age limit at the clubs was only sixteen, which felt too good to be true. But during Ramadan everything would shut down. You couldn’t go out dancing. You couldn’t even go to restaurants. It was so irritating. Those teenage summers were supposed to be all about me living my best adult life—and then Ramadan had to get in the way. And my cousins did not play when it came to maintaining it—which I couldn’t really be mad at. As a culture, everyone was united in being hungry and bored together. Even if you weren’t celebrating it, you had to respect it.
But then when it’s over, you get to wild out. Imagine that almost a quarter of all the people on the entire planet are on their best, foodless behavior for an entire month. They’ve all been celibate, quietly fasting and focusing on spiritual matters and now they get to feast (and feast, o-kay?!). It has a real exuberant vibe. There’s food and gifts and music and parties. In Senegal, they wait a little while after Ramadan has ended to kick off the holiday called Tabaski.
People get dressed up, do their hair, and, for weeks, you see them fattening up the goat or sheep they’re going to feast on for the big day. It’s a celebration honoring Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael to God. As the story goes, at the last minute, God provided a sheep instead of asking Ibrahim to take his son’s life. People at my mom’s church were also all over that biblical story (except Christians call them Abraham and Isaac), but they didn’t actually reenact the slaughter/eat/party part the way they do in Senegal.
I still remember my first Tabaski experience. I was about five years old, but the memory is pretty vivid. You don’t soon forget the sight of a live goat’s throat being slit. It played like a horror movie. Except everyone was watching and cheering. Just gathered around while the poor goat lay there bleeding his little goat life out. That goat had been hanging around for the month prior, just chilling with us. To five-year-old me, he was our pet. We named him Martin le Mouton and everything (RIP Martin). After they had finished butchering the goat to prepare it to be cooked, my older cousins, who smelled my fear, would come at me with a severed goat leg and chase me around the yard. I had nightmares about the whole thing, and in following years, actively decided not to watch the killing go down. And every damn year, I would get too close to that goat. I’d give it yet another name and allow myself to get attached while fully knowing our time together would be brief. Pretty soon his head was going to be floating in a soup that I was supposed to get excited about eating.
So I got a rough start with Tabaski, but it didn’t take too long for me to look forward to it. My dad’s very favorite thing was to take us to Senegal, and my mother was just as enthusiastic about it. She was already fluent in French by the time she met my dad in college, and over the years she learned to speak Wolof and even learned how to cook Senegalese food, thanks to my dad’s sisters. The food in Senegal (pet goats notwithstanding) is 100 percent my favorite thing to eat. They used to try to teach me to cook there too, and I skirted that responsibility/privilege for a long time.
“Oh, y’all make it so perfect, you don’t want me messing it up!” I’d say, and backward tiptoe out of the kitchen.
I remember my aunt saying, “Oh, Issa, you will have to learn to cook for your man. Get in here!”
The gender roles are real there. And yet, my mother never felt so respected and regarded as she did in Senegal. She was born in New Orleans in the fifties, and my grandparents moved her and my aunt to LA when she was four. But her parents had been brought up in the time when you had to slip under the radar if you were black. They were afraid for my mom when she would speak her mind in any way. Even though they lived in the more liberal California, they still didn’t want her to wear her hair in an Afro, much less discuss civil rights. I’m sure my mom has all kinds of stories about being a black woman of her generation and all the obstacles that came with that. But both of our experiences in Senegal were loving, warm, and welcomed respect for black women—all women really. It’s a culture that has gender roles but feels to me that it pays due respect to all the roles. I can understand why my mother was very attracted to it.
I have so many good memories of being there and feeling connected to something that I couldn’t fully explain—it just felt right. And it was also hella fun. Not like the kind of fun you expected to have in the United States as a kid in the nineties—here in America we’re always on a phone or a computer. Kids spend their time playing video games and going to the mall to buy shit. But in Senegal, most of what we did, even as kids, was sit around and . . . talk. There was never anything good on TV there (when the TV actually worked). I remember when they first got Wi-Fi at my aunt’s house in Dakar because it was a pretty momentous day—not that it really changed things for us. The internet only worked in my aunt’s bedroom and it was hot as fuck in there, so you had to ask yourself, Do you want to be hot on the internet or catch a breeze and talk to Grandpa? When I would make the mistake of asking what we were doing today, I got blank looks because my cousins were basically like, “That’s on you, bruh.” Boredom was not a thing to complain about there. Parents weren’t always scrambling around figuring out how to entertain us. It was just Go play, or Go sit outside and talk. So we played a lot of games and did a lot of talking.
We would make up games to entertain ourselves. There were always so many kids, babies, and toddlers around that you had to kind of invent an activity that would be good for all ages. I excelled at this (probably my need to entertain, or just my inherent geekiness). There was the game “questions in a hat,” where we’d rip up small pieces of paper and write anonymous, naughty questions for each of us to pull out of a hat and answer (I’ve since turned it into a drinking game with my friends). We made up dances to show off in the club. We’d play characters and perform skits for one another. We were all the entertainment we had and it was glorious.
You’d think as I got older, this environment wouldn’t hold as much appeal for me. But Dakar was so dope, and I felt like a queen. I’m not trying to be conceited, but I was beautiful there. The first time I ever got catcalled in my life was on a street in Dakar. I was so excited that I turned around and answered the guy. It wasn’t a clapback either. “Hey, girl, where you going?” Wherever you’d like to go, boy. “Oh . . . uh . . . never mind.” My older brothers, who were so used to me being completely safe from any sort of sexual interest from men on the streets of Los Angeles, had not learned to be protective of me in any way, shape, or form. They were not wrong to assume that no one would ever sexually harass their sister. But in Senegal, there was a new girl in town, and she was fly.
One of my Senegalese cousins had to pull me aside and say in a very gentle way that it was not a good idea to respond to random men who yelled things about my body out in public. “Tu es trop façile,” he told me, f
rustrated, which meant I was too easy. He told me that I should have more respect for myself because I deserved better. I wanted to cry happy tears. I was so touched, because not only did men here think I was hot enough to whistle at, they also thought I deserved respect.
This was a very empowering and exciting feeling as a teenager. By this time, I had become a well-established awkward black girl back in America—a progression that had come to light at the beginning of middle school. When I was in sixth grade, I moved across the country from a mostly white, gifted school in Maryland, where I was one of the only black girls, to a predominantely black middle school in Los Angeles, where I was berated for “acting white.” Being a young adolescent is hard enough. Being black is hard enough. But I had awkwardness in the mix too. Yet somehow in Senegal this awkwardness got lost in translation.
I had this amazing currency there because I knew more about pop culture and I lived thirty minutes from Hollywood in America. By the time I was a teenager, I started bringing over VHS tapes and CDs to show my cousins all the latest American TV shows, music videos, and songs. One of the few American shows they already had over there was Beverly Hills, 90210 and we’d all watch it together, and then I would field questions about all the cast members.
“Have you ever run into Dylan, walking around on the street, Issa?”
“Oh yeah, yeah, me and Dylan have crossed paths,” I’d say without missing a beat.
“Whoaaa. What about Donna and Kelly?” (I love that they knew exactly what was up and didn’t care about wack-ass Brenda either.)
American Like Me Page 8
