The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae
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From The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae. Copyright © by Issa Rae Productions Inc. Reprinted by permission of 37 INK/Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. ! Leading Lady Several months ago, I was blocked on Twitter by a disabled, white stripper. It was the night of the Grammys. I had just left a viewing party/ get-together and was a wee bit tipsy. Having witnessed the many talented performers and sexy dancers throughout the night, I was feeling lackluster and was in a self-deprecating mood. So with this fresh on my mind I tweeted, “Sometimes I really wish I was 2 a stripper. But a respectable one. I would always start of wearing pantsuits and dance to [Queen Latifah’s] ‘U.N.I.T.Y.’ ” This tweet was earnest and, in my mind, harmless. Moments later, I scrolled my mentions, chuckling at the other rhythmless girls who felt my sentiments, before one tweet caught my eye. It 2 I only recently learned how to distinguish between “If I was” and “If I were” for the purpose of this book. Twitter does not merit such efort. Don’t judge! Rae_Misadventures_3P_MP.indd 35 10/16/14 1:36 PM 36 Issa Rae read: “Wow. How BRAVE. Not like all us gross disrespectable sex workers.” The hostility slapped me in the face, so I decided to check out the sender’s time line, to understand how my tweet might have ofended her. I read several of her tweets about how much she hates people, and how tired she is of everyone oppressing sex workers in our culture. I read multiple posts about how she was sufering from insomnia as well. As I continued to read through her hatred of all things human, I just knew that surely she couldn’t be placing me in this category of hate. She must have been sleep-deprived and misunderstood my tweet. I responded: “We should talk about this in the morning when you get some sleep, Grumpy McGrumperson.” And then she promptly responded: “We should talk about this when you get some empathy, you whore- phobic asshole.” And that’s when all hell and confusion broke loose, because I could have sworn that what I’d expressed ft the defnition of social media empathy. I had looked at her time line, seen that she was sleep-deprived, and responded to her. But apparently it was insensi- tive empathy—if that even exists. And then she blocked me and publicly added me to her ever- growing list of people that she hates. She compared the oppression of being a disabled sex worker to the oppression of being a person of color. What is the diference between my oppression and your oppres- sion? she asked. At frst I was amused. What an extremely unpleasant and delusional stripper, I thought. Does she make the men and women she entertains feel guilty for enjoying themselves, too? Geez. I went to bed that night thinking, I doubt I could have learned any twerk tips from her anyway. And then the more I thought about it over the next Rae_Misadventures_3P_MP.indd 36 10/16/14 1:36 PM THE MISADVENTURES OF AWKWA RD BLACK GIRL 37 couple of days, the more her ofense and her general anger got under my skin. Why was she so mad? What was it about what I said that triggered her? And what did we have in common, if anything? As I perused her time line from another, unblocked account (haha, loophole!), I noticed how upset she was about the representa- tion of “sex workers,” as she called them, in the media. In all, it seemed she just wanted an accurate, fair representation of her feld of work, as opposed to continuing to be the butt of jokes in televi- sion and flm. At the very core of her anger was a desire to see a respectable refection of herself. I immediately thought of my absolute favorite Junot Díaz quote. He said: You guys know about vampires? . You know, vampires have no refections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have refections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have refections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any refection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself refected at all. I was like, “Yo is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?” And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mir- rors so that kids like me might see themselves refected back and might not feel so monstrous for it. Isn’t that the realest shit ever? — Rae_Misadventures_3P_MP.indd 37 10/16/14 1:36 PM 38 Issa Rae The frst screenplay I ever wrote was called Judged Cover, about a chubby, unattractive, black high school girl who gets her frst breakout role in a movie. She deals with an unsupportive mother, starts hanging with the wrong Hollywood crowd, turns to drugs, and eventually commits suicide. It was shitty and sad, but I was so proud of it. I remember giving it to Monique, one of my best friends, to read, and the next school day she came back and asked, “Are you going to play the lead?” I planned on it. The script wasn’t autobiographical by any means, but I could relate to feeling too un- attractive to play a leading lady. Also, the fact that she recognized that I could play the pathetic character I had written only confrmed my insecurity. Ten years later I saw Precious, and I remember thinking it was Judged Cover on steroids. WHO THE FUCK’S LIFE WAS THAT?! I sat in the theater with my two best friends, Jerome and Devin, fuming as the fnal scene played. Not because I disliked the flm, not because I couldn’t relate to the story, but because Hollywood was so fucking excited about this movie. I remember turning to my friends after the flm and saying, “From now on, I’m going to end all of my complaints with, ‘. but at least I’m not Precious.’ ” We spent the rest of the day grateful that we were not Precious. But then I thought, is that was it takes to create a sympathetic black female lead character? I could imagine the boardroom meeting. She has to be obese! She has to be super poor. She has to be illiterate! She has to have an abusive mother who molests her. She has to be a rape victim of her FATHER! She has to be teenage and pregnant. Rae_Misadventures_3P_MP.indd 38 10/16/14 1:36 PM THE MISADVENTURES OF AWKWA RD BLACK GIRL 39 She has to be HIV positive. She has to have a baby with Down syndrome! Now we care about this lead character. Oh my God, she’s so tragic. Oh my God, the ghetto. Oh heavens, what a cautionary tale! Oh to be black and poor in the ghetto. No wonder they’re so mad and defensive all the time. Precious was the anti–Tyler Perry, Tyler Perry–co-produced black flm of the year and one of the many straws that broke the camel’s back (my camel is a masochist). While I was grateful for our introduction to the amazing Gabourey Sidibe (Senegal, stand up!), I needed to see more from my movies than the extremely tragic black woman, or the magic helpless Negro, or the many black men in dresses. You could say I have an entertainment complex. It stems from growing up during the golden age of nineties television. I look back and realize what a huge and amazing infuence it was to have an array of diverse options to watch almost every night of the week. The Cosby Show was a variation of my own family—my doctor dad, my teacher mom, and my four siblings. A Diferent World made me want to go to college, talk about smart-black-people stuf, and fnd my own Dwayne Wayne. (As an aside, I looked for Dwayne’s double shades forever, and when I fnally found them in the late nineties, nobody was checking for me. Their loss.) The nineties produced The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, All That, Living Single, Kenan & Kel, New York Undercover, Martin, All-American Girl, Moesha, and Family Matters (Does anybody know what the hell happened to Judy? She went upstairs and literally got grounded for life.). Nine- ties television produced a plethora of images of people of color, and don’t even get me started on all the diferent flm options we had. It was encouraging. Back in the nineties, we were relatable. Audiences cared about what we had to say and studios recognized our value, at least as far as ad revenue was concerned. Rae_Misadventures_3P_MP.indd 39 10/16/14 1:36 PM 40 Issa Rae Then as the decade made way for the new millennium, cable ex- ploded with its own original content and flm studios began to obsess over international box ofce sales. Somewhere along the line, we became unrelatable and invisible to the Hollywood system. Our im- ages and diverse portrayals just weren’t worth the dollars and efort anymore. The images I had grown up with and grown so accustomed to seeing slowly disappeared, and it seemed to happen all at once.