Sorry Not Sorry

by Naya Rivera

  JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT SOMETHING DOESN’T MEAN IT’S A SECRET

  All our caution paid off—no one crashed the wedding, and it didn’t hit the press until we announced it. All the gossip sites acted like put-out babies because they hadn’t known about it in advance. The headlines called it a “surprise” or “secret” that “came out of nowhere.” They suggested that I’d kept the same wedding and just swapped out the groom, which truly is #triflin.

  Sean and I were supposed to get married in Santa Barbara, not Mexico, and Ryan and I didn’t get married on the same date—we got married on Ryan’s birthday. I had bought a Carolina Herrera dress for my wedding with Sean and wore Monique Lhuillier when I married Ryan. (Still trying to sell that Carolina Herrera dress, actually. DM me on Twitter if you’re interested. Good price, I promise.)

  What’s more—just because we didn’t send TMZ an engraved invitation doesn’t mean we were keeping it a secret. Everyone who mattered to us knew about it in advance, and many of them were there to be part of it.

  And it definitely didn’t come out of nowhere. The truth was quite the opposite—it was really four years in the making, and next to when my son was born, it was the best day of my life.

  2014 didn’t turn out so bad after all.

  SORRY:

  Falling in love with the idea of a person, instead of the actual person.

  Ignoring my intuition and staying in a relationship that I knew deep down wasn’t right.

  Putting someone on blast in a public way rather than talking about it one-on-one (a.k.a. showing my ass on Twitter).

  Getting snappy with my boss instead of just taking a deep breath and deciding to STFU.

  NOT SORRY:

  About that broken-off engagement. Best thing that ever happened to me.

  Praying with gratitude as opposed to just asking God to make the bad stuff go away.

  Trusting that every shit storm has a silver lining.

  Taking responsibility for my actions and apologizing to my boss.

  Planning a “secret” wedding that included all the people we cared about. And only those people.

  Laughing at the gossip instead of getting upset by it (same wedding dress, my ass).

  8

  WHAT ARE YOU?

  Finding the Beauty in Being an “Other”

  IT FIRST STARTED to dawn on me that race, and my race especially, was a complicated issue when I started to do Cabbage Patch doll commercials as a kid. I’d look around and see that the white girl was holding a blond doll, the Asian girl had an Asian doll, and I had the black doll.

  When I’d bring this up to my mom later, she’d say, “You know, back in the day, if you had a drop of black in you, then you were black.” And that made sense—I guess—and I started to realize that because my mom was half-black, to white America, I was black, or at least black enough.

  But really, I’m an “other.”

  My dad is half–Puerto Rican and half-German. His father, George senior, was born in Puerto Rico, and his mom, Anna, was born in Yugoslavia. Family rumors surrounding Anna abound—one of them being that her family’s farmland was taken during World War II, landing her in a working concentration camp, but somehow she managed to bust out. One of her legs was shorter than the other, so she always wore a boot (this is not a rumor, but fact). Her family was very racist, and after she married George, they never spoke to her again.

  My grandfather only spoke Spanish and my grandmother only spoke German, so who the hell knows how they communicated. They met in an ESL class, so maybe there was enough broken English between the two of them to get by. My dad and his brother spoke almost exclusively German, as well, until he was old enough to go to school. George senior was a Jehovah’s Witness but also a heavy drinker. When he’d had too much, which was often, he’d come home, take out his gun, and start shooting shit, or try to light the house on fire. Anna committed suicide when my dad was just nineteen years old. To say he’d had an unhappy childhood is a gross understatement, so immediately after his mother’s funeral he drove cross-country, to California, and never looked back.

  My mom, Yolanda, was born in Chicago to a fourteen-year-old black mother and an eighteen-year-old Puerto Rican dad. As a baby, my mom was anemic and sickly, and since her mom’s parents didn’t want to keep a mixed grandbaby, she was placed in foster care.

  She went to a home where several other foster kids were staying with a woman who was already in her forties. One by one, all the other kids were adopted or returned home to their biological parents, until my mom was the only one left. She was considered a ward of the state until she was eight years old, when she was legally adopted by her foster mom, and shortly thereafter they moved to Milwaukee.

  My mom didn’t know she was adopted until she was a teenager, when she found a letter from an adoption agency in the attic. Her adoptive mother and sister were black, and as my mom was dark skinned, she had grown up thinking she was purely African American. When she confronted my grandma about the adoption, Grandma denied it, and my mom decided not to push. She figured that Grandma had given her a really good life, and if she didn’t want to talk about it, then that was her right. Mom never brought it up again. To this day I view Grandma as a saint and know that, had she not adopted my mom, I wouldn’t be here.

  So cue 50 Cent here, because my parents met in da club. My dad was ten years older than my mom and had already been in California for more than a decade when he went to Milwaukee to visit his brother. They went out, and saw my mom and her best friend, Tracy, who’s white and still my mom’s best friend to this day.

  Dad’s brother saw the two girls standing there—Mom was nineteen, six feet tall, and gorgeous, so hard to ignore—and asked, “Do you want the black one or the white one?”

  “I’ll take the black one,” Dad said.

  And boom. The rest was history.

  If my parents had issues as a mixed-race couple, we didn’t hear about it. A lot of their friends were also in interracial relationships, and in California in the 1990s they didn’t face the same kind of discrimination that their parents had. But I knew I was an “other,” and exactly what kind of other, before I knew my address or my telephone number. At auditions, my mom would fill out the forms with all my basic information, and when it came to the question of race, she’d always check the “other” box, and then write out exactly what I was: one-quarter African American, one-quarter German, and one-half Puerto Rican (from two different sides of the family, no less). Mom made sure to instill my racial identity in me, as well. “People are always going to ask my kids what they are,” she said. “And it’s important that they know.”

  And Mom was right—to this day, I still get the “What are you?” question all the time—from reporters in interviews to people I work with to friends of friends I meet at a party. I’m always tempted to answer, “I’m fucking human,” but instead I give them the answer they’re looking for. The worst part is that after someone’s asked you this question, and you’ve answered it, there’s really no place else to go with this conversation. They’ll usually follow up with something like, “Oooh, so exotic!” or “Quite the mix!” like I’m a puggle. I always think I should start going up to white people and asking them, “So, what are you?”

  People always ask me what Ryan is, and I just laugh—he’s all the whites with a drop of Cherokee in there somewhere. We’re a biracial couple, and our son is half–all the whites, one-quarter Puerto Rican, one-eighth German, and one-eighth black.

  I’d like to believe that my children will have a better go of it than I did, but who knows? I’m still shocked by the number of mean tweets we get: “I can’t believe he’s with that whatever-she-is” or “What’s up with Naya got her a white guy to try to be white.” And people will @ us in these racist tweets!

  I guess that in 2016 people are just as racist and crazy as ever.
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  NOT FITTING IN—ANYWHERE

  While I may have been black enough for Mattel, it wasn’t that clear-cut once I got to school. I soon started realizing that I was too white for the black kids, too black for the Latinos, and just generally too all-around other for the white kids.

  From an early age, most of my friends were white just by default, as my whole school and most of our community was white. When I played Dorothy in the elementary school production of The Wizard of Oz, one of the only other nonwhite students in the school—a black girl named Christina—also got cast in the play.

  As Toto. All she did throughout the play was follow me around, and her only lines were to occasionally bark: “Woof, woof!”

  I remember my mom being pissed after the performance, though I was too young to completely understand why. “Oh hell no!” she said, slamming a drawer in the kitchen. “I wouldn’t let my black daughter be the dog at this white school.”

  Still, though, my mom could turn on the white like a party trick. No doubt that, in Valencia, it was a survival skill. At home she’d yell at us kids like, “Not up in my house, you don’t!” But then when she’d run into a neighbor on our cul-de-sac, her speech would be dripping with Waspishness. “Oh hi, Noelle,” she’d coo. “How are you?”

  If we tried to call her out on it, she’d always deny it—“I don’t talk white!”—and act like we were crazy.

  I picked up techniques, and which race I hung out with wasn’t so much about who I identified with the most but who would take me. By junior high, I was trying to be as white as possible because that was what needed to happen in order to avoid spending my lunch breaks alone.

  My brother, on the other hand, who was only four years younger than me, identified with black culture from an early age. He’s darker skinned, with features more like my mom’s, so he looks more African American than mixed. He also played football and went to schools where there were tons of other black kids, so it was easier for him to get in where he fit in.

  Our high school quad was an exercise in segregation. The KKK would have been proud, because there was no race mixing. One day at lunch, I was standing near the black kids when two of the girls called me over.

  “Hey,” they said. “You were in that B2K video, weren’t you?” It was an in, and I was taking it.

  “Oh yeah!” I said. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Anybody want their phone numbers?”

  They squealed in excitement. “Sit down and tell us everything! We love them. We love Raz-B. Ooh, you’re cute. You got great hair!”

  This was my first time really having black friends, and I felt like my eyes were opened to so many things. It even helped me get over my eating disorder, as they were always pointing out that I was too skinny and that guys really liked thick girls. No matter who I was hanging out with, though, it wasn’t long before someone pointed out to me that I wasn’t totally with my people. There was another girl we hung out with who was half-Asian and half-black, and my new friends didn’t think twice about making sure neither of us forgot that we weren’t “full black.” Eventually it turned into something of a joke. I’d try to laugh it off, but really I just felt like I couldn’t fully be myself with anyone.

  It often felt worse with the white kids, though—maybe that was just because there were more of them. Someone was always holding their arm up to mine and talking about how much darker my skin was than theirs, and yet people wouldn’t think twice about calling someone a nigger in front of me. I never knew how to react. Like, was I that great of an actress that now all these fools really did think I was white? Did they not see me standing here? Did they not know my mom is half-black?

  I wasn’t scared to call people out in the moment, and point out that what they’d just said was racist and offensive, but as soon as the dust settled, I’d be terrified that I’d overstepped my bounds. What if I’d totally outed myself as someone who was definitively not like them? What if that was the first step to not having any friends? When you feel like you can’t stand up for yourself, that’s pretty fucked up.

  I remember once in high school, two of my girlfriends (both white) and I drove down to Hermosa Beach with three white guys from our school. We were sitting at a gas station, when one of the guys told a joke. It was something stupid that didn’t even really make sense—like, “What does a nigger say to a parrot?”—but it was also obviously offensive.

  I blacked out with anger and started yelling at him. “Are you really that ignorant that you think something like that is funny?” I asked. “Because I’m not laughing.”

  He apologized, but it had totally killed the mood. Except nobody seemed to think it was his fault for telling a racist joke in the first place. Rather, it was mine for reacting to it. As soon as us girls were alone, one of them sighed. “That really wasn’t a big deal,” she said. “You shouldn’t have gotten so worked up about it.” And with that, I was the other once again, and an outcast for the rest of the trip.

  IT’S A HAIR THING

  Even if I’d just been mute every time one of my white friends made a racist comment, I still wouldn’t have totally fit in. My hair blew my cover.

  I didn’t have classic African American “nappy” curls, but I still had curls, and lots of them. Whenever I’d do shoots as a kid, the stylist would always ooh and aah over my hair and tell me how great it was, but I hated every strand of it. As soon as I was old enough to compare myself to the other girls in my class, I wanted straight hair, but Mom wasn’t having it (probably because she knew how much work it was). So instead, I went to extreme measures to try to tame my mane.

  My days started each morning at six, when my alarm would go off and I’d get up and take a shower. I washed my hair every day, because I needed it to be thoroughly wet, and the only time I could get a comb through it was in the shower when it was slicked with conditioner.

  As soon as I got out of the shower, and when my hair was still soaking wet, I’d drench it with gel. At this point in the nineties, the scrunch look was in—super grateful for that, because I could rock the scrunch look. I couldn’t do any rescrunching throughout the day, though, because each lock of hair was so crispy with gel that it just bent in half.

  I shopped for hair products in the ethnic and white aisles at Target. I was down to use whatever worked, and I wanted it all. I used Pink Oil Moisturizer Hair Lotion, which is a classic ethnic hair product, and since I used so much of it, I’d buy the cheapest gel I could find.

  I also tried to use all the products my best friend, Madison, was using, figuring that maybe if I used white-girl products, my hair would come out looking white. No dice on that, though. Bed Head After Party Smoothing Cream sure did smell great, but didn’t do shit on my hair.

  Whatever product concoction I was using, though, I always made sure to finish it off with a heavy layer of Aqua Net Extra Super Hold hair spray. If there is a hole in the ozone directly above Valencia, California, it’s probably my fault.

  On days when I’d oversleep, or somehow didn’t have the energy for all the upkeep, I’d just slick it back into a bun. Either way, my hair was always sopping wet when I left for school in the morning, because I wanted to make sure that I was frizz-free for as long as freaking possible. My shirt had a constant ring of water down the back, and on particularly cold mornings I was freezing.

  My life would have been so much easier if I’d just carried my product arsenal with me, but for some reason I never thought of that. Instead, I just dreaded PE with every ounce of my being. PE ruined everything.

  On picture day, in sixth grade, my mom had actually made my hair look really cute. It was down and curly but not so voluminous that it completely took over. But then—the horror and the injustice—my time slot to get the photo taken was right after PE!

  I was having a meltdown in the locker room, because an hour of dodgeball had rendered me a frizz ball, when my friend Kelti offered to help.
“My sister’s half-black,” she said. “I know how to do this.” I instantly trusted anyone with a biracial sister.

  She marched me over to the sink and just dunked my whole head under the faucet. As soon as my hair was sopping, she twisted it up into a wet bun. In the photos, it didn’t look that bad, but it didn’t really look that good either. It just looked wet. Still, I was eternally grateful to Kelti for showing me the way, and after that, I dunked my own head every day after PE.

  The day of my junior high graduation was the first time my mom let me straighten my hair, and she even did it for me. At this point, we were well into the twenty-first century and hair straighteners had been around for at least a couple of decades, but somehow this news hadn’t made its way to my mom. Instead, she went about as old school as you could get, using a hot comb that she had to heat up on the stove each time before she raked it through my hair. The whole process took hours, and I was stiff at the end of it from trying to hold super still to make sure I didn’t get burned.

  Soon after, my mom bought me a real straightening iron so I didn’t have to use the hot comb anymore, and every night I wrapped my newly straightened locks up in a scarf and put a bonnet over my head, like I was a 1960s-era southern housewife.

  This was a trick I’d learned from Tia and Tamera Mowry. We’d gone to their house one day after church, and they were barely in the front door before they’d wrapped their hair. I’d never seen anyone do that before, and they explained to me that this was how they kept their straightened hair soft and silky.

  This was when Tia and Tamera were on Sister, Sister, and they’d just gotten a joint Lexus for their eighteenth birthday. I thought they were the shit, and if they were wrapping their hair, then I was going to do it too. “Mom,” I said as soon as we left, “buy me clips!” After that, whenever I wasn’t out in public, my hair was wrapped.