You Can't Touch My Hair

by Phoebe Robinson

  Letting out a passive-aggressive sigh that lets the person in front of you know that they are walking a little bit slower than you like, but it’s no big deal because no one’s perfect and besides, it’s pretty nice outside. Ooh, there’s a plastic bag floating in the wind. Very American Beauty, you think, God, this city is amaz—Yep, a stranger just shoved past you because you slowed down.—WELCOME TO NEW YORK, NOW GET THE HELL OUTTA MY WAY.

  Blurting out “Un-fucking-believable” at a couple strolling along, holding hands, so you have to walk around them. Now in front of the lovebirds, you turn back around and yell, “Ya won’t last!”—HAPPY FIVE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF LIVING IN BROOKLYN!

  Mentally plotting to become friends with attorney Gloria Allred for several years. Key parts of plan include brunch dates, sharing secrets, and attending her daughter’s christening. All of this is necessary because the next time a group of European tourists comes to an abrupt stop in the middle of the sidewalk that makes you change direction by a few degrees, they will breed a fury so irrational that you’re willing to murder this Euro family. And when you’re done, you’ll call Gloria and go, “Girl, it happened and I need your help.”—ULTIMATE NEW YORKER.

  Having lived here for fourteen years, I definitely fall into the last category. I’m aware that getting my blood pressure up like that serves no purpose, but I love it. Getting pissed that someone is slowing me down—don’t they know I have somewhere to be?!—instead of getting mad at myself for not leaving home ten minutes earlier is not only ridiculous but also very New York. We’re always running behind, overbooked, and missing the train all because some idiot (not us) made us late. “You gotta be frickin’ kidding me,” we’ll say to ourselves. Then when we meet up with the person who has been waiting for us, we’ll relay the story of a moron (again, never us) who is the cause for our tardiness. This “you gotta be frickin’ kiddin’ me” vibe followed by total lack of culpability is so quintessential New York, and anytime I do that, I feel like I belong.

  Wow, I can’t believe I shared with you my game plan of befriending Gloria Allred just on the off chance I murderize a European family who’s en route to see Hamilton. To be clear, the disbelief is not because I feel bad about this fantasy—‘memba this is a guilt- (and judgment-) free zone—it’s just that I didn’t realize we had gotten so close already. I guess that was bound to happen after I shared some of my “not-guilty guilty pleasures.” Truth is it’s kind of hard to stay acquaintances after I just told you that I’d voluntarily sleep with four fifty-plus-year-old white dudes. I mean, there’s no coming back from that, so I suppose the only thing to do is accept that this revelation is all a part of my journey and a part of who I am. And so are all the other things that made the cut on my “guilty pleasures” list. I’m not going to feel weird or embarrassed about them and neither should you about the things you love. Make it known that you like some occasionally bizarre shit because . . . so does everyone! News flash, we all like some occasionally bizarre shit because we are occasionally bizarre people. And that bizarre shit that we like is a reflection of us, so to feel guilty about those things is basically like feeling guilty about a part of ourselves. Screw. That. Let that freak flag fly, baby! Let’s stop apologizing for every kooky, random, left-of-center thing that melts our butter. Let’s own up to all the things we love and move the fuck on dot org. And when I say, “let’s,” that includes you, dear reader. Yeah, no. Don’t look at the person next to you. I’m talking to YOU. We’re all in this together, right? Great, because I just showed you my freak flag. Now show me yours.

  Welcome to Being Black

  In every black person’s life, there’s a moment when they go from believing their blackness merely serves as another descriptor, like “she has a slight overbite” or “he snorts when he laughs,” to their blackness and all the complications surrounding that identity becoming the number one thing that defines them. Remember in The Amazing Spider-Man when Uncle Ben told Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility”? And then Parker turned into Spider-Man and went on to be celebrated by society for his heroism? Well, realizing you’re black is exactly like that, except in the place of special powers, an uncle who is mad chill about your newfound special powers, and everybody high-fiving your awesomeness, there’s the following: coming to terms with being treated like the “Other,” accepting that a lot of people will view your actions as either defying or affirming preconceived notions about you, and figuring out ninjalike ways to escape the circle coworkers randomly form around you and another black person because they’re hoping a dance battle will pop off.

  To be fair, these kinds of adjustments happen with every race, every sexual orientation, and any group that does not fall into the category of “straight white dude.” However, because of the centuries-long antiblack sentiment in America, it seems that some want to assign particular characteristics to blackness as a means of flattening or dehumanizing people. Blackness is not a monolith. There’s nerdy black, jock black, manic pixie dream black, sassy black, shy black, conscious black, hipster black . . . the list goes on and on. But some people don’t want to believe that, because if varying degrees of blackness become normalized, then that means society has to rethink how they treat black people. In other words, if you allow black people to be as complicated and multidimensional as white people, then it’s hard to view them as the Other with all the messy pejorative, stereotypical, and shallow ideas that have been assigned to that Otherness.

  And it can’t be understated that these ideas become internalized, no matter how hard you fight them. As a result of these negative labels, for example, I and other people wind up adjusting our behaviors to counter the negative stereotypes or to avoid becoming the butt of jokes. I’ll overtip to combat the stereotype that black people don’t tip well. Most, if not all, of my black friends have been mocked for speaking intelligently, yet if their diction were poor, they would have been dinged for that. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, as they say. In my apartment, I’m more hesitant to blast Missy Elliott than Sting for fear of my neighbors being like, “Of course, the black girl is playing hip-hop loudly like she’s on the set of Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.” So the peeps in 4A, that’s why you hear “Fields of Gold” on the damn repeat. Sowwie! Anyway, the point is this type of hyperawareness is taxing.

  Given that it’s such an important aspect of a POC’s identity, it’s interesting to me that I can’t remember the first time I ever realized I was black, in the sense of how the world viewed me. Normally, I would chalk up this blank space in my memory bank to nothing more than getting older, except there are other, slightly less life-defining things that I remember to a T. Like that time when I tastefully explained what the X-rated term hummer meant during dinner with my ex-boyfriend’s family, and somehow ended up charming everyone in the process. Seriously, I was breaking down a randy sex act to his family, and I was like “Jennifer Lawrence falling up the stairs at the 2013 Oscars” charming. I remember that moment so well, but the moment I truly realized I was black? I got bupkis. There was no aha moment, no “Ohhhhhhhhh, I see. The game. Done. Changed. For. Me. Moment.” Maybe because I’m a child of the ’90s, which was a much better decade to be black than the ’40s, ’50s, or ’60s, which were eras where the racism was so palpable that the moment when blacks recognized they were viewed as the Other would be firmly etched in their minds forever. Not that racism didn’t exist in the ’90s—hello, Rodney King!—it’s just that the kind of racism I might have been exposed to was less Little Rock Nine and more “after-school special where everyone learns a lesson.” So since I can’t remember when I realized that everything was changing, the next best thing is to recall the most recent time I was reminded I’m black. And like any story about funky behavior due to race, the setting for this tale is . . . a Michaels craft store in Manhattan.

  A little background: Michaels is where I go when I’m feeling like Martha Stewart, but my bank account is more like Fr
ench Stewart. #NoShade. I mean, I love me some 3rd Rock from the Sun, but that show ended more than fifteen years ago, and I’m sure all of French’s residuals from acting on 3rd are gone by now. Anyway, Michaels is where I go to get my arts-and-crafts fix and say phrases like “this really ties a room together” and “I’m not so sure this fits my design aesthetic.” You guys, it took me two months to unpack two U-Haul boxes in my apartment because watching TV is more interesting to me than finding a place for books I’ve bought to look smart in front of my houseguests but haven’t read yet (here’s looking at you, William Faulkner oeuvre that Oprah nominated as a Book Club selection in 2005). Safe to say, my design aesthetic is “lazy as fuck.” Nevertheless, I’m an interior designer at heart, so armed with decoration knowledge I acquired from TLC and HGTV, I walk the aisles of Michaels, imagining how I’m going to “transform my living space,” which mostly means throwing up some wall art.

  As much as I love interior design, framing is not a lifelong passion of mine. In fact, I didn’t get into framing until I turned thirty years old. Wow, I think I just unlocked the key to drying out your own vagina like a negligee on a clothesline. Just utter the phrase “I didn’t get into framing until . . .” and poof! Bone dry. Anyway, I’ve grown to love framing, which seemed to happen right around the time I started doing things worth framing. Not that I didn’t achieve anything in my twenties, but it’s all ordinary stuff, like “I didn’t go home with weird guy at bar and instead went home and watched a movie alone” and “my paycheck direct deposited at the same time my rent check cleared.” These are the sorts of things that say, “Yeah, you’re an adult . . . but you’re not a real adult until you do your laundry before you run out of underwear.” I am slowly morphing into the latter kind of adult, and part of that process means I now frame things instead of duct-taping them to the wall. The most recent thing I wanted to trick out was a New York Times profile that was written about the stand-up/storytelling podcast show 2 Dope Queens that my work wife, Jessica Williams, and I do for WNYC. This article, which ended up on the front page of the Arts section, is hands-down one of the coolest and most surreal moments of my career. I felt like I was being baptized in Oprah’s titty sweat, which I believe is how you know for certain something should be framed.

  So I ordered the frame job from Michaels and went to pick it up a few weeks later. It was shortly before Christmas, but the framing department was practically empty, save for two employees, one white and the other racially ambiguous, or as it’s called in the biz: Liberal Arts College Pamphlet Face. They were tapping away at their computers at the counter, seemingly just going through the motions of a typical workday; meanwhile, I was excited because I was about to see my career achievement in a frame. I approached them all smiles . . . and, nothing. No acknowledgment. Under normal circumstances, that would be ominous, but since this happened in NYC, the rudeness is standard-issue. A few minutes passed, though, and both employees had walked past me multiple times to get printouts, frame parts, etc., and had still failed to address me. I was slightly annoyed by that point, but I was on that “new year, new me” ish early, meaning I stopped approaching life as though my finger was on speed dial to Al Sharpton. This is not to say I had been wrong in those previous instances; I wasn’t. However, constantly being on guard for racism can make one age in “old black people during the civil rights era” years. It’s similar to aging in dog years except that you say, “Lord, I’m weary,” all the time, and whenever you’re at a wedding, you always ask the DJ to interrupt the dance party and put on a Nat King Cole slow jam. Anyway, despite my annoyance, I made sure to remain calm. This is messed up. I know they see me. I’m a five-foot-seven black woman with a red weave, I told myself, but I’m going to rise abo—HOL’. UP.

  A white lady wearing striped socks with wooden clogs—a style I normally think is incredibly stupid, but on her, looked hella cute—waltzed up to the counter and in less than ten seconds was helped by Liberal Arts College Pamphlet Face. I thought this was weird, but I tried to not take this personally, and I hoped that now the white employee would acknowledge me. She did not. Still, I said nothing because I wondered how long I was going to have to wait to get service. Turns out, quite a bit of time.

  Several minutes pass. A white dude who looks like Justin Theroux minus the talent approaches, and the white lady employee damn near trips over her ovulation calendar to help him. She finishes with him and then goes and sits back down at her desk to, I don’t know, answer casting calls for Yoplait commercials. In short, she is basic as fuck, and I’m STILL waiting. Finally, I go up to Yoplait Face and ask, “Can you please help me? Because I’ve been waiting ten minutes, and y’all refuse to see me?” She apologizes so quickly that I can tell she didn’t hear my complaint at all. Her sorry was totally reflexive based off my displeased tone.

  I wasn’t happy with her nonapology, and so I tell her it was ridiculous that I had to wait so long. Yoplait Face apologized again, claiming that the delay was because it gets hectic during the holidays. Y’all. Y’ALL. The frames section at Michaels was barren as the convenience store in I Am Legend. I was the first customer to show up at the counter, so how did I end up being helped third? And why did she think I would fall for such a moronic lie? Like a Stepford wife, she wrapped my frame up, plastered a smile and vacant stare on her face, and said, “Happy holidays,” as if she thought I was going to say it back to her. Like she expected me to do anything other than what I actually did, which was let her bullshit season’s greetings hang in the air like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible.

  Now, getting shitty customer service at the frames department in an arts-and-crafts store is pretty much the crux of #MiddleClassProblems, especially in comparison to how black people were treated fifty years ago. But just because this slight by the Michaels employee doesn’t register high on the racism Richter scale doesn’t mean it’s something to ignore. Micro-aggressions like this accumulate over days, weeks, months, and they shape my experience as a black person. And this is not to say there aren’t many wonderful things about being black. There are, and a lot of them have been absorbed by pop culture—fashion, music, food—but still, there are tons of things about being #TeamMelanin that blow.

  Like how if I leave the race/ethnicity box empty on a site like Monster.com, I’ll get more job inquiries from employers than if I were to check “black.” Or how if I go apartment hunting solo, landlords tend to be ruder to me than if I bring a white friend along. Or those reminders that I’m not welcome to audition for casting calls via the following stipulations: “No braids, no twists, no dreadlocks, only natural hair color allowed.” Riiiiiight. Because the casting directors are totally going to turn away every brunette white actress who shows up with blond hair. All those things and many more reinforce the idea that who I am is the problem. And in the case of the Michaels incident, it seemed the universe was using this to say, “In case you forgot, I’m here to remind you. Welcome, once again, to being black.”

  There are many methods for coping with this reminder. Venting on social media and getting support from friends. Canceling dinner plans to spend the evening doing a Google image search of Michael B. Jordan. Daydreaming about having a white nanny who I put through a series of high-pressure “race tests” like “sing a pitch-perfect rendition of Stevie Wonder’s version of the ‘Happy Birthday’ song” or “make sweet potato pie for my judgey-ass parents this Thanksgiving.” You know, stuff that is fun for the whole family. But my personal favorite? Wishing that white people could, even for a day, experience both the subtle and not-so-subtle racism that black people (and all POCs) go through, just to understand how a lifetime of this kind of treatment changes you. And no, I don’t mean pulling a C. Thomas Howell in the 1986 “comedy” Soul Man, which is a film so ludicrous, misguided, and racist in its attempt to show people what it’s like to be black that when the KKK goes on retreats, they probably watch this on movie night. Seriously, Soul Man is just that bad. Wait . . . I can’t
just drop that reference and move along. Excuse me while we take a brief detour through this fuckery.

  Here is the plot: CTH plays a rich kid named Mark, whose dad decides not to pay for his tuition after Mark has been accepted into Harvard Law School. So Mark comes up with the brilliant idea to reapply to Harvard Law as a “black” guy to get a scholarship that is for African-American students, so he rubs a melted Hershey’s bar all over his face takes “tanning pills” to darken his skin and begins donning a curly wig. He lands the scholarship and assumes that life is going to be pretty easy as a black person because Cosby (cringe alert!) has a TV show. Ridiculous enough yet? Let’s pause because I need to address a couple of things. One, it’s hilarious that Mark thinks racism died because ONE black dude had a successful TV show. I guess Mark forgot it was the ’80s, a decade in which black people spent 93 percent of their time going, “Hey, President Reagan, can you stop funneling cocaine into our neighborhoods?” But, sure, rich white kid, being black is totes a breeze. Secondly, I can’t show up CPT (Colored People’s Time) to Au Bon Pain and get breakfast at 11:30 A.M., but Mark can CPT his way into Harvard? LOL. Why is this movie acting like Harvard is a Sugar Ray concert in 2015 that you can show up to day-of and get a ticket?

  So, Mark is living that black life on campus, which is basically just him playing basketball and jive talkin’ (shoot me in the face). Then he notices that people are mean to him because of the color of his skin! How mean? At one point, a white dude refers to him as a “black Negro,” which sounds like an option on a US Census form from the 1890s but is supposed to be scathing. Are you kidding me??? C. Thomas Howell is wearing blackface for the majority of this film, and that’s fine, but the movie’s producers draw the line at a peripheral white character calling him “porch monkey” or “nigger”? I probably shouldn’t write this, but I’m going to anyway: If you’re going to be racist, which Soul Man certainly is, then you have to be INCLUSIVE with your racism. Don’t pick and choose pieces of racism like it’s IKEA furniture.