The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl

by Issa Rae

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  Contents

  Introduction

  A/S/L

  FAT

  ABG Guide: Public Grazing

  Leading Lady

  ABG Guide: Connecting with Other Blacks

  When You Can’t Dance

  Hair Hierarchy

  ABG Guide: The Hair Advantage

  Public Displays of Affection

  African Dad

  Dating Lessons & Summer Lust

  ABG Guide: Black Women & Asian Men

  Musical Ambitions & Failures

  The Struggle159

  Halfrican165

  Fashion Deficient

  New York, NY

  ABG Guide: When Co-workers Attack

  Acknowledgments

  To Mom, Dad, Amadou, Malick, Lamine, Elize, Memée, and Papa.

  Introduction

  My name is Jo-Issa Rae Diop and I’ve always wanted a nickname. For the first twelve years of my life, none of my friends were lazy enough to shorten the pronunciation of my name, or affectionately bold enough to replace my name with an entirely new word, like Cocoa or Jollyrancher. Because every cool person I knew had a nickname, I decided not to wait on anyone to do me the honor. So in the fourth grade, when a substitute teacher came to take the place of Ms. Osei, I took the opportunity to publicly anoint myself with a new lovable identity. I waited as the teacher called roll, for once excited about the impending mispronunciation (if it wasn’t my first name, it was always my last name). She couldn’t get to the Ds fast enough. This time, I’d not only correct her, but I’d intervene with a name that was both easy to pronounce and fun and adventurous, just like me.

  “Joe-EYE-suh . . . uh, DIE-OP?” she asked, pretending to look through the sea of white kids to find my ethnic ass.

  “Here! It’s Jo-EEE-SUH JOPE, but my friends call me . . . Sloppy Jo.” I chuckled as I looked around the class, waiting for the high-fives and acknowledgment from my classmates that never came. All that accompanied my announcement was my own laugh, and two seconds of silence as the teacher looked at me and nodded, processing the ridiculousness of my suggestion.

  “Right. Jo-E-SUH,” the sub continued. “Sarah Dotson?”

  “Here,” Sarah said.

  Hot with regret at my blatant attempt to rebrand myself, I sat, defeated, as the teacher continued down the sheet of names. I had conceived my new nickname the previous Friday, after a delicious school lunch. One part self-depreciative humor and one part clever wordplay, the name seemed perfect. Now that nobody had so much as looked in my direction after my made-up proclamation, I just felt silly. Who wants to be “sloppy” anyway? That teacher probably saved herself from a lawsuit. Can you imagine calling the sole black girl in the class “sloppy”? Good for her indifference. I’m thankful for it. What an absolutely stupid and embarrassing nickname from a painfully childish mind. (If I could go back in time and slap all of the idiocy out of my mouth, I would be a busy time traveler.)

  Where my first name has been an individual struggle, my last name has, appropriately, been a family battle. Having spent some of my youth in Senegal or around Senegalese people in America, I never could have imagined that my monosyllabic family name would have so many alternate, incorrect variations. There’s “DIE-OP,” “DEE-OP,” “DIP,” “JIP,” “JOP,” and my personal favorite, “DEE-POH.”

  In high school, I found no burden in correcting people. It wasn’t their fault that they didn’t know, and there was no harm done. My annoyance would emerge when people would take it upon themselves to correct me in the pronunciation of my own name! It would go something like this:

  “DEE-OP?”

  “Oh, it’s pronounced ‘Jope,’ as in ‘rhymes with hope,’ ” I would say with a smile.

  “But . . . it’s spelled D-I-O-P. ‘Dee-op,’ ” they would say with confused indignation.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s still ‘JOPE.’ ”

  “Oh . . . kay,” they’d hesitantly resign.

  This happened way more frequently than it should have, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Until one person I went back and forth with for far too long maintained that her doctor’s last name was the same as mine and he pronounced it “DEE-OP.” I rolled my eyes. “Just forget it,” I would have said, except her doctor was none other than my father. What the heck, Dad? Family pride, much?

  My dad is a mini-celebrity in South Central, on account that his Inglewood clinic has his name in big white letters on the rectangular brick building that lines Manchester Boulevard, one of the major streets in the area (my high school bus actually passed the building on its route). I went to high school in South Central, on the border of Compton and Watts, where many of my classmates claimed my father as their childhood pediatrician.

  “Oh, are you related to Dr. Dee-Op on Manchester?”

  “Dr. Diop? Yeah.”

  “No, Dr. Dee-Op.”

  “It’s Diop. And yeah.”

  “Oh . . . kay . . . If you say so . . .”

  I confronted my dad about this one day after school.

  “Dad, why are you telling people our last name is Dee-Op?”

  “Because they’ll mess it up anyway,” he said with a shrug.

  “But you have to correct them!”

  “I got tired of correcting them,” he calmly retorted.

  I shook my head. How could I properly defend my name if the man with the accent himself wouldn’t co-sign it?

  I did eventually get that nickname I so yearned for, though it came much later, in my early twenties. I was wall-to-wall chatting on Facebook with Kisha, one of my good friends from college. After four years of friendship, she randomly decided to address me as “Issa Rae” with no warning whatsoever. After my dear Aunt Rae passed in January of 2008, I had changed my name on Facebook from “Jo-Issa Diop” to include my middle name, Rae, in her honor. Kisha had no idea she had given me both a new way to honor the memory of my aunt and an alter ego for my creative endeavors, though I didn’t realize it until I was brainstorming names for my blog and the name Issa Rae flashed before me. Initially, I wanted a clever name, like “JoDi” (a rap alias I used with my younger brother) or “FloJo, the Filmmaker.” But I also needed a name that could house all of my creative work, films included. Issa Rae as an alias was just the thing, as it was way cooler than Jo-IssaRaeDiop.com and would protect me, in case I ever needed to get a “real” job. All the trash I talked online would be traced back to Issa Rae and the HR departments would be none the wiser. Plus, the name “Issa,” though still easy to mispronounce, was way more visually digestible than “Jo-Issa.”

  All this to say, in this book, you’ll see my government name referenced a lot. I only started referring to myself as Issa Rae in 2008, and so all stories prior to that will reference my birth name. Deal with it.

  Here’s something else you’ll have to deal with: My family moved around a lot and I switched schools every two years until high school, so don’t even bother trying to keep up; I don’t blame you for your confusion. Just know that each school switch represented a new opportunity for me to try, again, to be less awkward, to be a little bit cooler, to be a little bit smarter and wiser. “Try” being
the operative word.

  As for the stories, I’m coming clean with all the awkward, the embarrassing, the disappointing, the frustrating moments that have made me me, many of which have turned out to be teaching moments—which is why I occasionally throw in an ABG Guide for awkward situations in which you might find yourself, such as “Public Grazing,” an aid to eating in front of people, or “When Co-workers Attack.”

  Whether you’re an awkward black girl or a confident white guy, my hope is that you’ll learn from my mistakes and, at the very least, laugh at my misgivings.

  Awkwardly yours,

  Issa Rae

  A/S/L

  At only eleven years of age, I was a cyber ho. Looking back, I’m embarrassed. For me. For my parents. But oddly enough, my cyber social debauchery is indirectly correlated with my current status as a so-called internet pioneer. It all started when I began catfishing—creating characters and transmitting them over the internet—though back then people just called it “lying.” Had my father not signed my entire family up with America Online accounts for the computer in our modest Potomac, Maryland, home I don’t know that I’d have had the tools to exploit the early ages of the internet.

  Two years earlier, my oldest brother, Amadou, had gone away to college at Morehouse, freeing up the coveted computer, which was housed in the basement, for my use. Before he decamped for college, I would spend hours at a time watching him type the commands into MS-DOS that would transport us to the magical kingdom of Sierra’s King’s Quest VI on our IBM. I never had a strong desire to play the game myself—I always assumed I wasn’t smart enough to play it on my own—until Amadou graduated from the house and I no longer had anyone to excitedly observe. I looked up to my oldest brother as the epitome of intelligence. He knew everything, though he was too humble to be ostentatious with his knowledge as I would have been had I been as smart. So I simply observed. At eighteen, he was an official adult, and he had a duty to selflessly spread his intelligence to the world, other people’s younger sisters included. His absence left a void in my heart and in the basement, particularly where the use of the computer was concerned.

  I wasn’t next in line for the computer, but my second-oldest brother, Malick, was too preoccupied with football, girls, and high school to care. He’d occasionally make use of it for term papers and Tetris, but otherwise, it was mine for the taking. Using the computer wasn’t foreign to me, by any means. I had an old Apple computer in my very own room (a double source of jealousy for my younger brother), where I played Number Munchers and self-published my stories on perforated paper from an excruciatingly noisy printer.

  “Jo-Issa, are you wasting paper again?!” my mother would yell from her makeshift home office, tipped off by the mechanical snitch. When alone, and mom-approved, I actually loved to hear the robotic crunching and whirring that the printer made while laying to ink my very own written words. But the computer in my room paled in comparison to the one downstairs, in the basement. For one thing, the large floppy disks—I think they were actually called hard disks, what the f%4# 90s?—were becoming extinct, and rightfully so, since the data on those things could be lost with the smudge of a finger. And since my computer took only the “hard” disks, my game choices were limited to nerdy learning games and text-based adventure games with no visuals. BLECH. BORING. BOO.

  The other reason my computer wasn’t a huge triumph for my preteen self-discovery was because it lacked a modem, which meant no dial-up internet for me. But AOL changed my life. Specifically, it changed my social life. To be more precise: AOL gave me a social life. It ignited my social development and expanded my concept of sexuality. Because of AOL, I had imaginary friends that weren’t imaginary. I had elaborate conversations devoid of awkward silences. And, perhaps most valuable of all, I could actually talk to boys. At my command!

  Before my parents caught wind of frightening news reports of child predators, I spent my days and after-school evenings in chat rooms, learning to speed read, talking to kids my age who were also ahead of the curve. Or pedophiles, who were remarkably creative and persistent in their forbidden pursuit. Pedos actually had it made in the mid-nineties, before the media exposed them. Talk about the glory days.

  My friends at school, other fifth graders, didn’t seem to relate when I mentioned “chat rooms” and “profiles” or when I sang along to the dial-up internet song I made up in my head. It seemed that, for a brief moment, only I was privy to this alternate American universe that lived online.

  By the time my family moved to Los Angeles to join my dad, a pediatrician, who had seized an opportunity to open his own family clinic there, my relationship with the computer had grown immensely, much to the dismay and irritation of my mother.

  “You’re always on the computer! Go do your homework.”

  “I already finished.”

  “Well then, go outside and play!”

  She just didn’t get it. Only recently, in my late twenties, did she come to realize that my excessive computer use is what led me to becoming the self-employed, almost-focused career woman I am today.

  By the summer of 1996, more of my friends from Maryland had adopted AOL. It helped us bridge the three thousand miles between us. By then, I was already over the handwritten letters of yesteryear. That was a form of communication of the third world, reserved for pen pals from Ghana and Spain. Besides, the “You’ve Got Mail” greeting was way more exciting than the dead silence of receiving a letter. Exclaiming, “I’ve got mail!” in the foyer to yourself isn’t the same—trust me.

  It was through electronic mail that I’d tell my friends back home about my Hollywood adventures. Never mind the fact that I lived in Windsor Hills, thirty minutes away from Hollywood, and that I was struggling to make friends. Or that my sense of style was horrendous, and my middle school had done away with lockers so the authorities could better monitor drug use. ALL I EVER WANTED WAS A LOCKER! I felt robbed of the middle school experience I saw on Boy Meets World and Doug, but my friends didn’t have to know that. I led them to believe I was on the brink of stardom, just by breathing in the recycled smog of other celebrities around me. Plus, I lived down the street from Ray Charles’s old house. I was famous by association.

  Our move back to Los Angeles also fulfilled a dream I’d held on to for five whole years: we were finally reunited with my father. He’d visit us in Maryland once every two to three months for an extended period of time, but for the most part, I spent my elementary school years without him and, in his absence, had constructed a superheroic, Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque Father of the Year image of him in my mind. My dad was the man, and whenever I’d tell my teachers my father was a doctor who was too busy to come to Back to School night, their surprised and delighted “Oh!” always gave me a sense of pride. I didn’t speculate then that they were making an assumption about my family’s income and placing my blackness into a Huxtable category. To me, their reaction implied that a doctor was an important profession, which meant my dad was important. And I wanted to be just like my dad.

  I so longed to live with him and see my family complete, I neglected to figure out that the reunion meant double supervision. The only computer in the house was in my dad’s home office, and now internet activity was being monitored without my knowing it. Going through puberty during the dawn of the internet could have left me unscathed if my dad weren’t so annoyingly tech savvy. If only he, a native African, were like the tribal stereotypes I read about in my middle school history books, I would have gotten away with so much more. Instead, I found myself sneaking to look up “sex” in the encyclopedia and then cross-referencing my findings with the Yahoo.com search results. Also, unbeknownst to me, my dad had added a kid-safe image blocker, so I was always limited to boring text-only definitions.

  I was wrought with hormones and obsessed with finding a boyfriend. All I knew was that boys cared about sex and I didn’t know enough about it. I was too embarr
assed to ask my peers. They were already über-judgmental about my naïveté to all things black after I accidentally exposed myself when Tupac died. “Two-pack died? What did he sing?”

  Normally, I would have been spared from middle school humiliation by asking my two older brothers directly. They would have happily explained who Tupac was and I would have happily plagiarized their responses and relayed their feelings about him as my own. But my second-oldest brother had by then also graduated from the house to go to college and I was left as the oldest in the house. If I had trouble attracting the boys at my school before, my ignorance about Tupac destroyed any remote chance I might have had.

  All I knew was that I had all these developing feelings for boys and that I wanted desperately for them to notice me. They did, but for reasons that didn’t help my quest: my nap-tural hair; my underdeveloped, seemingly concave breasts; my white-girl accent, and my tomboyish appearance. The prototype of lust for the boys my age was a light-skinned girl with long hair, and I just didn’t fit that profile. But I didn’t want to believe that. So I would imagine instead that I held the interest of all the boys and often convinced myself of that. All the while, I remained the continued object of disdain from my peers. I often found myself emboldened whenever a guy would show me any attention at all, i.e. “Ay, you did the homework? Let me copy,” or “You got ten cents for the vending machine?” I blame any misread social cues on Saved by the Bell. Zack and Kelly’s romance was something I wanted so badly to emulate.

  My first-ever junior high school dance was approaching and, with the help of a Saturday morning marathon of Saved, I built up the courage that Monday morning to talk to Remington, an eighth-grade-looking sixth-grader who I’m pretty sure had been held back (though nobody talked about it). He had thick facial hair and muscular, athletic arms. He loved women, and frequently expressed his sexual desires in a way that hinted at experience. In my eyes, he was the answer. And I had so many questions. One of them, I worked up the courage to ask in front of his friends. I approached him right after our Environmental Studies class was dismissed, casually, waiting for him to pick up his only school supply, a single folder.