by Issa Rae
I woke up at six in the morning and went straight to cooking. Scrambled eggs, sweet potato hash, and . . . dry turkey bacon. It didn’t look like it did in all the food shows I had been watching, but now wasn’t the time to nitpick. When I took that first bite and closed my eyes in ecstasy, it was as if I had never left the meat-eating world. It was the best bite of food I had ever eaten in my life. But looking back, I think my pleasure could be equated with one of my longtime abstinent friends getting laid on her wedding night and exclaiming how amazing sex was, even if, in fact, it had been only mediocre. Deep down, I knew there was better in my future. My mother’s aversion to pork didn’t have to be my own. Immediately after breakfast, I went back to the Farmer’s Market and bought the real deal, pork-belly bacon. After that first bite, I began a new love affair with pork—I couldn’t understand why it had such a horrible reputation, and I didn’t care to.
Then the unthinkable happened. During my first month as a reformed carnivore, I lost eleven pounds—without even working out or dieting. I don’t regret my years as a vegetarian, by any means. Yet to think that the majority of my teenage and adult body issues could have been eliminated had I not been so faithful to the one dietary restriction I was ever disciplined enough to maintain is infuriating.
But like a lover you keep despite the mind games he plays, I can never stay mad at food for too long. In fact, I gotta go. I’m craving him now.
ABG Guide: Public Grazing
My fellow awkwards, once you step foot out of your own home, expect to be seen. It’s inevitable. It’s taken me two whole decades to acknowledge this horrifying fact, and so now I’ll trade the sweatpants for comfortable mom jeans and pat my ’fro down into a socially acceptable shape before leaving my apartment. It has nothing to do with self-respect, but rather a fear of being talked about, or snapped in someone’s popular @shittyppllooklike Instagram. My fear of walking in front of a group of teenage black kids1 has NOTHING on my fear of being watched while eating in public.
Living in New York slapped my fear of going out solo right out of me. I used to feel sorry for people eating alone at restaurants or going to the movies by themselves; I’d go so far as to pray that they’d find a companion to complete them. Then I moved to New York and witnessed millions of people content with doing things by themselves: grocery shopping, subway hopping, park benching, movie watching, restaurant dining. So many things to do alone without fear of any judgment. It was just the norm. I remember the first time I went to see “Ne le dis à personne” by myself at Landmark Sunshine Cinema. What an experience! I bought all the snacks I wanted: a medium popcorn, a vegan double-chocolate-chip-brownie cookie, Reese’s Pieces, and a Diet Coke. Then I sat at the end of the aisle of a partially filled theater and propped my feet up on the seat in front me—HEAVEN! No one to ask me questions during the movie, no one threatening to predict what was going to happen next, no one to dip their spit-tipped fingers in my popcorn—just me and the movie. After that, a whole new life of self-imposed isolation opened up to me.
Instead of ordering food to go at my favorite Indian restaurant and carrying it home to eat in my tiny closet-sized room, whose walls would absorb the curried cauliflower smell for three days minimum, I would instead eat inside the overtly festive restaurant.
“How many, ma’am?”
“Just one!”
Though it took me a while to fully adjust, I was soon enough content with my phone or the book I had brought to read.
I would take this newfound joy to Los Angeles with me. If anyone felt such pity for me as I used to pity my fellow solo diners, I was oblivious. In fact, in some ways, New York made me embrace being alone. Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t want to die alone, but spending quality time with myself 60 to 70 percent of the day is my idea of mecca.
However, just as singing in the car with your windows rolled up tricks you into feeling as though you’re truly socially isolated, it is very important to remember that even while eating solo, you are being watched. That offbeat dance you do in your car? Someone has laughed at you. That time you picked your nose in the park? It made someone gag. The way you shoveled food onto your fork with your index finger and then chewed it with your mouth open as chunks of spitfood fell back onto your plate prompted someone to regard you as a savage.
I don’t consume food prettily while alone. It’s all I can do to eat prettily in the company of suitors, when somehow I manage to keep it together just enough to keep them interested. When alone, I both surprise and disappoint myself with how fast I swallow food whole, sometimes to my detriment. Food frequently gets stuck in my throat and chest, often while I’m with company, at which point I lose the ability to talk, my eyes water, and I must go to the bathroom, stick my long, perfectly bulimic finger down my throat, and then cough it out. Then when my food-loving instincts kick in and send the proper “calm down, hungry, greedy bitch” signal to my stomach, I resume. If I’m lucky, this happens only once during the meal, and only when I eat dry foods like rice and poorly-cooked salmon.
If you share my fears and lack the social grace to eat, well, gracefully, practice being L.A.D.Y-like. L.A.D.Y. stands for: Loner Artfully Digesting Yummies. This means, sit in the corner of a restaurant, facing a window, with your back to the rest of the patrons (you’re doing them a service), and feel free to chow down. Be aware of the waiter coming to check up on you. Waiters see customers eat ugly all the time, but those people have nothing on you. That’s what the window is for. Take time out of your busy, disgusting chomping to check your reflection every once in a while and to make sure the waiter doesn’t sneak up on you while you have all the sanguine-colored condiments around your mouth and cheeks, like you’ve just ravaged a zebra carcass.
If this is too much for you to bear, and you can’t eat food without making a mess and drawing attention to yourself, then your best bet is to make use of the “To Go” option. You’re not ready to take advantage of the meditative quality of eating out alone just yet.
* * *
1 Having been a teenage black kid, I know firsthand how much we loved to laugh and talk shit about people, especially when sitting idly. I didn’t always participate, but I recognized it as a form of entertainment and bonding. Knowing how ruthless some of my friends were and how haphazard I can be in my appearance, I tend to cross the street when I see groups.
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 was2 a stripper. But a respectable one. I would always start off 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 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 offended 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 suffering 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 whorephobic asshole.”
And that�
�s when all hell and confusion broke loose, because I could have sworn that what I’d expressed fit the definition 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 insensitive 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 difference between my oppression and your oppression? she asked. At first 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 couple of days, the more her offense 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 representation of “sex workers,” as she called them, in the media. In all, it seemed she just wanted an accurate, fair representation of her field of work, as opposed to continuing to be the butt of jokes in television and film. At the very core of her anger was a desire to see a respectable reflection of herself.
I immediately thought of my absolute favorite Junot Díaz quote. He said:
You guys know about vampires? . . . You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected 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 mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.
Isn’t that the realest shit ever?
* * *
The first screenplay I ever wrote was called Judged Cover, about a chubby, unattractive, black high school girl who gets her first 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 unattractive to play a leading lady. Also, the fact that she recognized that I could play the pathetic character I had written only confirmed 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 final scene played. Not because I disliked the film, 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 film 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.
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 film 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 influence 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 Different World made me want to go to college, talk about smart-black-people stuff, and find my own Dwayne Wayne. (As an aside, I looked for Dwayne’s double shades forever, and when I finally 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.). Nineties television produced a plethora of images of people of color, and don’t even get me started on all the different film 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.
Then as the decade made way for the new millennium, cable exploded with its own original content and film studios began to obsess over international box office sales. Somewhere along the line, we became unrelatable and invisible to the Hollywood system. Our images and diverse portrayals just weren’t worth the dollars and effort anymore. The images I had grown up with and grown so accustomed to seeing slowly disappeared, and it seemed to happen all at once. When I was in Potomac as the sole black girl, these shows were my access to black culture in some ways. When I moved to Los Angeles and the kids said I talked white but had nappy hair, I found a sort of solace in knowing that Freddie from A Different World and Synclaire from Living Single were napped out, too. I could be worse things.
Right around the time I moved to Los Angeles, my passion for writing increased. I was in the hub of film and television and felt a need to take advantage of this, as quickly as possible. Also around that time, the new Cosby show came out on CBS. Since I related to the first show so much, I decided to write a spec script and send it to CBS. The episode, called “The Tongue Ring,” centered around Cosby’s character coming to terms with his daughter’s suggestive new piercing. (It was 1996 and I was eleven, so tongue rings were still very controversial.) I showed the script to my grandmother, who happens to be very computer savvy, and she encouraged me to submit it, so I did. It took nothing but a general internet search to find the address and BOOM, my talent was out there. Not wanting to put all my eggs in one basket, I wrote another television pilot, called Ronnie, a high school dramedy about gang violence, kind of like the short-lived television show South Central. I looked up NBC’s address, wrote a cover letter about how much I enjoyed their programming (Saved by the Bell, California Dreams, and City Guys), and sent it off. Though I got no response, I continued middle school content that I’d tried and optimistic that I’d have plenty of other shots in the future.
In high school, I developed a new love: acting. I went to a predominantly black and Latino school in Compton and, outside of television, this was my first true immersion in black culture. I had an inspiring drama teacher, a Jewish man who found the most amazing, hidden plays of color. There was On Striver’s Row, a
play about an upper-middle-class black family in Harlem. Maricela de la Luz Lights the World, a fanciful and mystical Latino drama by José Rivera. And so much more. Every year for four years I was introduced to new diverse works, all while working with a multicultural cast. I only wish Hollywood could take a lesson from Compton.
The last great black film made in the nineties (released in April 2000) was Love & Basketball, a beautiful love story shot in my neighborhood. Even as I watched that movie at my friend’s sleepover, I was completely aware that it was shaping my mind and changing my life. It was the very first time I had seen a woman who was just “normal black” on-screen. Though Sanaa Lathan was absolutely beautiful, she played an around-the-way girl, a tomboy like me. I felt as if I could be her.
So began my fixation. I watched the film again before I left my friend’s house, then set out to buy it on DVD. The ultimate game-changer for me was when I discovered that it was written and directed by a black woman, Gina Prince-Bythewood. I had never cared to listen to a DVD commentary for any other film prior, but I listened as she discussed the behind-the-scenes trials of making her film. I listened as she discussed Spike Lee’s involvement and was inspired and grateful that he had played a role in making this film happen. Most important, I set out to write my own movie, Judged Cover.
While I was writing the screenplay, I realized it was five years since I had written anything original. I found the letters I wrote to CBS and NBC and decided to write to Gina Prince-Bythewood. Maybe she would have interest in my screenplay? How amazing would it be if she directed it? I grew excited. I typed her a letter and to this day I don’t remember how or where I got her address. I wrote her about how much I loved the film, how much it inspired me, how I watched it every day for inspiration (I really did), and then I told her about Judged Cover and asked her if she would consider directing it. I didn’t send her the script, because I hadn’t finished it, and knew that was inappropriate to do so without solicitation. I waited.