You Got Anything Stronger?

by Gabrielle Union

  I dutifully sit, and she places her hand to my face and smiles. “Don’t worry, Mommy.”

  “Okay,” I reply. “I won’t worry.”

  “Don’t worry, Mommy,” is her phrase for any perceived roadblock. Not only me doing without a chair, which is fine, but her refusal to share a cookie, which is maybe not as fine. Or me breaking it to her that we cannot build a snowman when there is no snow.

  As quick as she assures me, she takes off again for her play set, and turns back only to check on the dolls next to me. All four have to go everywhere with her, always in her line of sight. There is Baby—a little Black baby doll with hard plastic hair—and Chimmy, a yellow-hoodied puppy inspired by Jimin from the K-pop band BTS. Core to the group are Seal-ie 1 and Seal-ie 2, two lavender aromatherapy stuffed seals, tan and white with black whiskers.

  The four dolls can never be separated, but even in a group hug or sitting, the Seal-ies have to be tight together. We used to switch them out as one got dirty, but since she realized there are two, they always have to be together. I take this bond seriously, and I always think of The Color Purple’s Celie and her sister Nettie. “Nothing but death can keep me from her,” Nettie screams as Mister tries to tear them apart forever. Under Kaav’s watch, these Seal-ies shall never be parted.

  When we go anywhere in the car, she locks all four together in a seat belt. When she eats, they watch her. If she is swimming in our pool and a Santa Ana wind breezes through to knock one off their perch watching her, she gets out of the pool to right them so they don’t miss a stroke.

  “Watch,” Kaavia James yells to them now as she climbs the rock wall of her little house, and I instinctively turn to them to make sure they are.

  I was not a girl who played with dolls. When I first started getting toys for Kaavia James I steered away from dolls and “stuffies,” as I found out grown-ass people had taken to calling stuffed animals. I didn’t see the fun in them, so what was their use? They sneaked in as gifts, and she seized upon them. It turns out this girl who has everything loves most of all to play Mommy. Mostly she reenacts her own nighttime routine, and is constantly getting her four dolls ready for bed. You’ve never seen babies nap as much as these do. Constantly being woken only to be put back to sleep.

  “Shh, shh, shh,” she says, a finger to her mouth before a whisper of “Baby sleeping.” Kaav’s baby area is right next to where she plays Food Truck, which is a burger and taco stand play set. She’ll work while they sleep, and I feel a tinge of pride as I narrate her life. “She’s an entrepreneur! She’s a mom! She can have it all.”

  When Kaavia James began focusing on me in this Mommy stage she’s in, I actually wondered if it was because time with me had become a precious resource as I worked more. Mommy disappeared to go into her office or to a set, my version of working the Food Truck. It occurs to me now that I was looking for a reason for my daughter to love me, and had settled on a lack of me as the reason. What if she just loved me because I was? Who I am, where I am.

  Dwyane comes to sit next to me on the ground, putting his hands back on the grass. He talks about a flight he has to take to Atlanta tomorrow, but truthfully, I am only half listening because I am watching Kaav race around. I marvel again at how fast she is, and I see Dwyane’s exact running style, superhuman fast but with the slight pigeon-toe gait that some of the world’s best athletes have. My husband and Kaavia James hold their mouths the same way, their brows knit the same in concentration. How many times have I taken a picture of the same expression on each face, determined to capture the perfect side-by-side?

  Like a shot, she is beside us again, but goes to her dolls first. “Chimmy,” she says lightly, grabbing the puppy in a hug sweetly. Then, as she puts him back, her voice drops to the low bass of a fraternity brother greeting a beloved friend at a bar. “Chimmy.” This is one of the funny voices she has picked up from me in my unending quest to make her laugh.

  Because I will do anything to hear that laugh. In the same way that she says my name again and again to assure herself I really am right there—who I am, where I am—I need to hear that laugh over and over because it is my purest feeling of happiness. In my life, joy was something that was always snatched from me, so I never wanted to be caught looking for it. If it came, it came. And don’t hold it too close, ’cause if you show something is valuable to you, it will be snatched away.

  But Kaav’s laugh fills every moment, every “now,” with abundance. Why be miserly or fearful about joy when we have so much here in this second? It is here now—use it, study it, hug it close, or hand it to someone you love, but do something with this moment, because you have it. We have it. The immediacy of a two-year-old’s needs and joys—the perpetual present tense of childhood—will remind you that this is the moment that matters.

  Kaav turns quickly from her dolls and leaps at Dwyane and me. She puts her two arms around our necks, almost knocking our heads together Three Stooges style. She falls on top of us, as only a two-year-old can, knowing the people who love her the most will be a soft, if groaning and creaking, place to land.

  “Oof,” I say, flat on my back, looking up at the blue, cloudless sky above us. She laughs, and we laugh with her as she hugs my body like a pillow to rest on.

  “Don’t worry, Mommy,” she says.

  “I won’t worry,” I promise, meaning it in this perfect now.

  20

  Standards and Practices

  A Tragedy in Three Acts

  During the slave regime, the Southern white man owned the Negro body and soul. It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body.

  —Ida B. Wells, The Red Record, 1895

  Last summer, when Ida B. Wells won a posthumous Pulitzer for her investigative reporting, I sat down to read Southern Terrors and The Red Record. Respectively, they are her 1892 and 1895 accounts of the racial terrorism of the lynching of Black people in the three decades after Emancipation. I had read excerpts of Wells in college, but never the full texts. I downloaded them on my phone and was again struck by her detailing of the massacre of Black men and women in the South, often successful businesspeople who competed with white neighbors, and the desecration of their bodies in death. Ida B. Wells pointed out that the murder of Black people could be indiscriminate after Emancipation because they were no longer property. Black bodies belonged to nobody but themselves, so harming them was no injury to another white man. However, it was still in the interest of oppressors to dwarf Black souls through systematic terrorism.

  The torture Wells described was beyond horrific, and she could recount these murders so well because white publications reported every grisly detail to serve as a warning and taunt to Black people. The vivid prose of violent death, the more lurid the better, could reach an even wider audience than the one witnessing the Black body left desecrated in a town square. The detail was not a taunt of “Look what we did,” but a louder, sterner warning to all Black people: “Look what we can do to you.”

  So, we know of Richard Neal. On February 11, 1893, Mr. Neal became the fourth documented Black person lynched in Shelby County, Tennessee, within a fifteen-month period. Wells quotes the Memphis Scimitar, which detailed Mr. Neal being brought for identification to Mrs. Jack White, who said she was raped and was almost certain he was the man. “If he isn’t the man, he is exactly like him.”

  The newspaper recounts Mr. Neal being lynched by two hundred people, “the best people” of the surrounding neighborhoods, who acted “without passion or exhibition of anger.” These details are not striking to any Black person today, who knows that our existence is probable cause for violence and that whatever results, there will be “fine people on both sides.”

  But it was this sentence from the Memphis Scimitar that stopped me: “The body was perfectly limber when the Sheriff’s posse cut it down and retained enough heat to warm the feet of Deputy Perkins, whose road cart was converted into a hearse.”

  I sat with that, and it stays with me. A dead Black man
used for heat. That warmth, and the soul that inhabited that Black body, had no value until it could be used by Deputy Perkins for comfort. And isn’t that the story we’re still told? Anything Black—an idea, a rhythm, a style, our souls—can be put to better use by a white person.

  A feeling of danger crept up on me as Ida B. Wells connected the dots in the 125 years between us. The souls of Black folk are still being dwarfed and snuffed out, and our bodies still ravaged for our parts. To get laughs or get ahead, white people try on our skin, our curves, our voices . . . anything is up for grabs. They take the things Black children are taught to hate and change about themselves: our color, our hair, our ass, our speech, our experience. We’re supposed to get rid of all that. We are encouraged to adopt whatever is equated with whiteness, exchanging our features, language, or value system.

  And while we throw away the things that make us Black, white people are waiting in the wings with catcher’s mitts. Ready to take whatever we cast off.

  These parts, like the body of Mr. Neal, are then freely used, whether that takes the form of persistent use of blackface, or through blackfishing, the appropriation of our culture and physical features to access wealth and opportunities. Meanwhile, we are slaughtered—in our streets, our cars, our homes—and our bleeding, asphyxiated bodies are recorded and packaged into quickly consumed trauma bites of entertainment that we cannot escape. Modern versions of the newspaper articles that Wells compiled to reveal as scare-tactic taunting of Black people.

  To confuse us, these practices are disguised as serving the interests of Black people. Modern blackface, we’re told, is used as a “critique” of racist tropes, blackfishing is a “celebration” of our features, and the video loop of brutalized Black bodies is “information” used to stir the conscience of white people. If you feel some type of way about it—if these three things actually feel like dehumanization, exploitation, and defilement—then you’re too sensitive.

  So, the violence continues. State the facts, I hear Ida B. Wells say across the years between us. “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

  Lights, please. Let the show begin.

  ACT ONE: BLACKFACE

  On the benefits of playing at—and with—Blackness, unless of course you’re Black

  I had no idea cuss words were so important before I started producing TV. As an actress, I was aware of the last-minute script changes that came down from a network’s Standards and Practices department. But it was only when I was more involved in the creation of those scripts that I understood the horse-trading of curses and storylines involved in enforcing FCC regulations protecting the eyes and ears of American audiences.

  “Well, they’ll give us two ‘shits,’” a showrunner on Being Mary Jane would say, “but we have to cut the ‘fuck’ if it’s meant in a sexual way.” My character could say it if she burned her finger baking, but not if she was expressing desire. I vaguely remember that we had an unlimited number of “bitches” to use.

  I respected these decisions, or at least understood that the people in Standards and Practices feared FCC fines. Like what happened to the PBS affiliate that did an afternoon airing of Martin Scorsese’s documentary film series The Blues, in which one too many Black musicians swore one too many times. If they came after PBS, what hope did BET have? Best to play it safe, and cut anything that might offend.

  I thought back to all the hoops we went through for Standards and Practices on Blackface Amnesty Day. That’s not what it was actually called, but in the summer of 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests against systemic racism, an urgent call went out among network execs and creatives to destroy evidence of the use of blackface in their shows. The racism was quickly removed from streaming and on-demand services. These shows that used blackface were not Amos ’n’ Andy reruns with Kingfish working a scheme in black and white. Blackface or brownface was used on five episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, four 30 Rocks, three Scrubs, and single episodes of The Office, Mad Men, and Community, among others. All of these streaming cash cows carried the accolades of television’s finest offerings. The list of popular sitcoms and dramas undergoing edit and deletion was so long that news sites ran lists of specific episodes leaving streaming and syndication: Like Pokémon for racism, “gotta catch ’em all.”

  I have to ask, Standards and Practices gave me two “shits,” but never gave one about the racism of blackface? They had a scientific formula to how much of a butt cheek you should show, but there was no consideration of harm whatsoever for people shellacking their faces and putting on Afros to make a visual joke of my features. Because these instances of blackface didn’t just happen. TV takes a lot. You first have to have the blackface idea, bring it to the writers’ room, put it to paper, get the makeup, wigs, and prosthetics, light the different skin tone, perform the racist bit, get the blessing of Standards and Practices, edit it, and send it out. There was no one empowered, at any of those steps, to say, “That’s racist”? No one noticed?

  As these episodes were deleted, creators dashed off sentences of “we know better now.” But most of the blackface mentioned was shown at least a full two years after a February 2006 interview in which Dave Chappelle—the most influential comedian of that era—went on The Oprah Winfrey Show and called blackface “the visual personification of the n-word.” I want to assure you that blackface has been offensive since its creation, something that has been said repeatedly by Black people. There’s not one of us who has ever said, “You know what’d be fun here? Some blackface.” But these white creators also knew it was offensive, and I point to the Chappelle moment as a marker of time: what he said could not escape the notice of anyone working in comedy or TV production after 2006. Still, 30 Rock relied heavily on blackface, using it in 2008, twice in 2010, and again in 2012.

  As these episodes were disappeared, creators either offered no comment or crafted tortured sentences apologizing for the pain these images caused. I am struck that these “images” and “tropes” are apparently walking and talking, bursting into writers’ rooms to wreak havoc with their violence. “I’m sorry you were hurt,” says the creator standing above you with the machete. “It was this darned knife.” The apology is only for the pain the jokes have caused, blaming the knife for the murder.

  Because this is not just about hurt feelings. Blackface goes beyond humiliation to the point of violence. To not understand the insidious nature of racism as violence is to not understand that you have fucked Black people over for years. There should be a real consequence, in the same way that we have suffered real consequences from your shit.

  The intention, we are told, is humor. But what the fuck was so funny? I have to ask: In that moment, what were they laughing at? Even if the joke is the absurdity of this person doing that? And who, exactly, is tickled by the violence of blackface? I would really like to know. If I walked around that set with my Black-ass skin, I wouldn’t think it was funny. No, the few Black people who make it into those creative spaces go home and say to their loved ones, “Today they thought Blackness was a joke.”

  Because those white spaces, these shows with predominantly white execs, white stars, and white writers, still have Black people on the outskirts. I am thinking in particular of the scenes from a series that occasionally broadcast live, because I have been in that shooting space. I have been the one Black “talent” on the set of places just like that, when the only people I saw who looked like me were a guy at the loading dock or a cleaner. In one of the scenes, an actor does an Amos ’n’ Andy homage, appearing from a door to say “Here I is, Alfie,” in exaggerated blackface with an Afro and dirty overalls. Just on sight the audience went wild in an explosion of laughter. On another live episode, the same actor plays a person with a hand transplant, the hand coming from a recently executed Black prisoner. The joke is that the Black hand has a mind of its own, reaching up to strangle him. They demonized and criminalized the hand, and furthered the stereotype that all Black
people are plotting to kill whitey—even when their body parts are separated from their souls. It’s in their nature, you see. What has struck me is that was the East Coast broadcast, and maybe they lost their nerve about showing racism to the West Coast, since the joke is that it’s now a white woman’s hand, one that sexually assaults him.

  Between scenes, when the actor walked around in blackface, did he see a young Black worker on set? Did he maybe blush under his shoe polish, and stop to explain to her why it was funny? How it was part of a bit, and she had to understand this was not him? Yes, they were two human beings who happened to be sharing space for a moment when one was humiliating and dehumanizing the other, but it wasn’t real. She shouldn’t believe her eyes, she had to trust him. Did the writer come over to them, to vouch for the actor and the script and assure her this was funny? Did the producers chime in? Tell the young Black woman that if it caused her pain to see in the moment, then at least that hurt was in service of something greater: a bit?

  Because the bit had an intention, right? When I talked this out with people who hadn’t seen the blackface, one woman said, “Well, what was the intention? Intention is important.” So, what was the intention? When shows repeatedly do blackface, what are the creators saying? And what is the intention when Standards and Practices does not find racism harmful to the audience?

  These are smart people who know that blackface is rooted in oppression and pain. They cannot plead an ignorance of the context that this strips us of humanity. So yes, they want us to know something by repeatedly mining our pain for laughs, but they don’t actually want to have that conversation. I ask them: What is it that you want us to know but are afraid to say to our faces? Because you feel like we might punch you in your face? You want us to feel less than? Perhaps we’ve made too much noise about being oppressed. You want us to always feel maligned and made a joke of? Or is it that you want us to be harmed?