One example of this is yoga, which is originally a Hindu tradition. But in America, I’m sure many think it was started by a white woman from Southern California who has a closet full of lululemon workout clothes.
Learning to appreciate that there are things that aren’t meant for you takes time for some. It’s something I’m still working on myself, and a lesson I was taught in a conversation with someone I admire.
I wanted to interview Tarell for the book not just because he’s a brilliant artist but also because he changed my life. Tarell is the writer of the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, which became the 2016 Academy Award-winning best picture Moonlight.
I saw Moonlight in theaters five times, each time bringing a different person with me to make sure they saw it. Every time I watched it, I cried. One of the times, I brought my best friend, and he cried. As a cisgender straight young man, I felt it was the most eye-opening queer story (and story in general) I’d ever seen.
It was such an important story to me that I bought DVDs when it released and gave them as gifts to people at holidays. I felt like Tarell and the director, Barry Jenkins, had spoken to me and other people who weren’t in the queer community and showed us why we needed to change, and how alike so many of our stories were.
I would sit in my house and listen to “One Step Ahead” by Aretha Franklin on repeat. It’s the only song that plays more than once in the film, and it is used during two pivotal scenes. I’d think about those scenes and others and try to dissect them, my feelings, my understanding, my community.
I’m actually playing the song on repeat as I write this. Feel free to play it on repeat as you read the rest of this. Rest in peace, Aretha.
The movie brought home to me the idea that all Black people are working to find ourselves, all experiencing pain and joy, regardless of our other identities.
I thought I heard the message loud and clear. But I was wrong, because there was never a message for me to hear, and that’s not a bad thing. As we will discuss in a bit.
It was my first time speaking to Tarell, and we were on the phone for about fifteen minutes, discussing things people shouldn’t do if they aren’t from certain communities. The time was filled with me asking questions and him answering brilliantly.
The entire time I was on the call, I felt like I was back in elementary school, nervous that I would say something to make the popular kid not like me, while also trying not to give away how excited I was about being given a chance to sit at the “cool table.”
Tarell then spoke about the power of words such as the n-word, and whether anyone should be able to use them.
TARELL: Words have power because we endowed them with power. Words, like dollars, don’t actually matter until human beings feel that they do or say that they do or socially agree that they do. And so I think a lot of the confusion around certain words and people’s cultures or outside of people’s cultures and how those words get introduced and how they live and how they’re reclaimed or not has a lot to do with where the power lies and who’s endowed with that power and who isn’t.
There’s often a question that is possibly too broad for its own sake. If I tell you, Fred, that you can call me T, then you call me T. You shouldn’t call everybody who you meet T. It makes no sense. Therein lies the root of the problem again, in that here’s one person taking one person’s consent, as it were, or even intimacy, and trying to do the same with a whole people, and that all boils down to power. No, you don’t have the power to be intimate with all folks, right? When someone invites you, they have a kind of intimacy to call them outside of their name. That’s between you and that person. And in fact, there are times when Black people call each other the n-word and a Black person says, “No, I’m not your n-word,” right?
Next, Tarell addressed the issue of people in communities who allow or welcome outsiders to do certain things, when many in the community think they shouldn’t have the right. Essentially, the idea of “not all skinfolk are kinfolk.”
TARELL: I trust all people to look out for their own self-interests at some point, and when they don’t, that’s a happy surprise. So I’d rather be happily surprised than shocked at my own understanding of what human nature is. I mean, I can only speak from my experience, but poor Black people have always been politically sophisticated in that way. What I’ve observed from the elders in the community has always been a distrust of anybody who doesn’t live in the community. And even within the community, there are folks who have varying degrees of understanding of what’s good for the community, what’s not, and that everybody won’t be on the same page.
At this point in the interview, I was becoming less nervous and more comfortable. So I decided to pivot the questions to focus on moments when communities created opportunities for outsiders to learn and grow. In reality, it was a selfish question. I wanted to talk about Moonlight, and to discuss my appreciation for him creating a story that helped people like me.
Expecting him to say yes, I asked whether Moonlight was partially a letter to people outside of the community it was about.
TARELL: Not sure I understand. Was Moonlight a letter to people, to not-queer Black people?
ME: To a certain extent. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
TARELL (quickly and firmly): No.
Like a self-centered person, I responded by saying “Really?” demonstrating my surprise that this queer Black man didn’t write one of the most important queer Black stories for a young heterosexual Black man.
It took all of two seconds for me to understand how wrong I was. But the deed was done, and Tarell was silent.
It was at this moment that I felt my heart drop to my shoes, and I started sweating.
TARELL: Moonlight was a letter to myself. I wrote Moonlight when I was twenty-two years old. My mom had just died, and I needed to remember moments with her and our life. When Barry adapted the original screenplay into Moonlight, there’s no part of me that didn’t know that his central focus was to make a love letter to Liberty City, which is where we both grew up. And all the people, queer or not, who existed there, who lived there, to the crackhead, to the crack-addicted mothers that we both had, to the drug-dealing, surrogate fathers or coaches that we had, to the Kevins, to the Chirons. Certainly he was writing to them. And I think other folks came in and saw that and thought, “Wow, this is a really intimate letter that I’m being let in on.” But they weren’t the audience; it wasn’t for them.
I felt like a complete a**hole. In all my time thinking that I was waving the flag of this story and understood its impact, I didn’t realize I was centering myself in someone else’s story, someone else’s world, someone else’s community.
While it meant a lot to me, and even changed me, it wasn’t for me.
“Some sh*t is just for us.”
I gathered the pieces of myself off the floor and asked Tarell a question that I didn’t realize would end up creating the second moment in which he changed my life.
I asked Tarell what his thoughts were on the importance of storytelling and how it can help change people’s perspectives and lives. Especially in relation to young white people reading this book.
TARELL: I can’t really speak to it. I’m not from a white community, and even though I work in and around white people, I rarely see young white people. I hear about what their communities are going through in the newspaper. I don’t know their trials and trauma. I’ve seen Euphoria, and maybe that’s a window into the suburbs. I don’t know. I mean that in the most earnest way that I can, and that I don’t engage in that way. However, I will say that the purpose for storytelling for me, and what I try to do, is specific.
I walk out of the door and most times I’m in a neighborhood now that doesn’t look like me. So the first story I’m being told is I’m alone.
And then I’m socialized through that the whole day, and then I kind of fight really hard—and they don’t even know that I’m fighting really hard—with people to make them understand my poin
t of view. Make sure I’m heard, make sure I’m treated with the delicacy and the kind of roughness that is needed in my community for growth. And that’s exhausting. So I tell stories for people like me. It feels good to sit in a room and sit down in front of an MBJ [Michael B. Jordan] film or television show. It feels good to sit down and go, yes, yes. To be reminded that I do exist. I’m reminded that there is a community that comes from a place like me. Even if it’s not exact. I’m reminded, I’m allowed to know, that I am not alone and that I do exist. Those are the stories I want to tell.
Tarell helped me understand two things. One: Whether it’s clothing, foods, words, anything, it’s important that people not only understand that some things are historically off-limits to noncommunity members, but that “some sh*t is just for us” also means creating new sh*t sometimes that belongs to the community.
Which leads me to the second thing I came to understand: Like our foods, words, and clothing, our stories are also ours to keep in our communities as we decide to do. Our traumas, our struggles, our joys—they are ours. This book is part of not only my story, but my community’s story.
Tarell’s story wasn’t for me, and like many other things, it didn’t have to be. Maybe it’s best that it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean I can’t watch it, enjoy it, and learn from it. It means that it was made with a very specific community in mind, to make them feel seen, to help them feel loved.
It’s a testament to how powerful Tarell’s story is: even being on the outside looking in, I still learned to love a community more than I did before and in the process became a better person. Which is the same thing I often want for people who aren’t from my communities, people like many of you.
Just because it isn’t yours doesn’t mean you can’t still treat it with love and care.
I actually had another revelation while talking to Tarell. (That’s three, for those keeping score.) The idea of doing things for your own community made me want to make a point to my white readers that I haven’t made yet.
While this book is meant to be a guide for white people to understand and be better, it’s important that white people also understand that it isn’t the duty of Black people or people of color to explain things. I’m doing so because I hope it can ultimately make change for my community.
But it’s important to understand that this book is a gift, not an obligation.
The gift is in the form of an opportunity. It’s an opportunity that I thought was my duty to give, but it’s not.
That’s what makes this book special. It’s an opportunity to learn, grow, and share where many may otherwise never have the chance.
It’s me hoping that you’ll understand and appreciate that much of what you’re reading is normally some sh*t that’s just for us.
We’re friends now. Well, at least, I’m hoping we are.
I think people become friends by sharing moments. By laughing together, hurting together, learning together. I feel like by this point in the book we’ve done that.
I’ve shared some of the worst moments of my life with you, and some of the best. All in an effort for you to learn to trust me. Because when there’s trust between friends, they can have hard conversations.
We’ve had some of those conversations already, as I and other people I know have been talking about how white people can be better. But the conversation we are about to have is probably the most difficult.
This conversation is about making change instead of just wanting change. As the chapter title says, being accomplices instead of allies—which is a concept that I first heard used by author and activist Mikki Kendall.
Merriam-Webster defines an ally as “someone that aligns with and supports a cause with another individual or group of people.”
This is someone whose friend is a person of color. One day they are in class, and one of the white students uses a racial slur toward their friend. They feel bad, but they watch and do nothing. Later they ask their friend if they are okay.
Merriam-Webster defines an accomplice as “a person who knowingly, voluntarily, or intentionally gives assistance to another in the commission of a crime.”
Now, I’m not asking you to commit crimes. I’m asking you to focus on the first part of that definition: “a person who knowingly, voluntarily, or intentionally gives assistance to another.”
An accomplice is a person who actively participates in some way.
This is someone whose friend is a person of color. One day they are in class, and one of the white students uses a racial slur toward their friend. They know it’s wrong, so they decide to do something about it. They might step in and say something to defend their friend, tell a teacher or administrator about the incident, or let their parents know and ask them to do something.
This is the difference between someone who is hoping for change and someone who is trying to make change. An ally versus an accomplice.
I’m asking you to be an accomplice. I’m asking you to make change for the boy in the stories you’ve been reading about, and so many children like him.
That’s why I wrote this book, why so many people agreed to share their thoughts, and why I wanted us to become friends—for change.
Not just for white people to change, but for all of us to change. I had to change from high school to college, and from college to adulthood. From being a hurt and confused boy to a man trying to figure out how to stop the things that hurt and confused me from happening to others.
During those times, I’ve grown frustrated, tired, and angry. That was often the sum of my experiences you’ve read about, and many others’: anger.
I think we deserve to be angry. As you’ve read, it would be an extreme understatement to say that being a Black person in society is hard.
There aren’t words that can explain the generations of trauma and pain that Black people continue to deal with, not just in this country but around the world.
Much of the same could be said for people of color from almost any group.
People like me who have dealt with enough trauma to last a lifetime before they were a teenager. People whose parents and grandparents dealt with all of that and worse. People who are tired and have every right to be.
For so long we have fought and lost not only our battles but also our lives, while just trying to create a world where people of color are treated fairly and equally.
Yet here we are, still dealing with many of the same issues, and some worse than ever. Being tired is understandable.
Many people have asked me why I was even writing this book. Some have called it pointless and a waste of my time when I could be “making actual change.” Honestly, there have been times when I’ve felt the same way.
When I started this book, I asked myself one question: “If I show people how they’re hurting others, will some of them be willing to change?”
There have been many times while writing this book that the answer was no. Times when people have gone online and called me a nigger or threatened my family. Just because I want better for people who are tired.
But I kept writing. Because frankly, I don’t know what else to do. This book isn’t filled with new conversations, new ideas, or an academic analysis. I didn’t want it to be.
All I wanted was to talk to you, and let you get to know me, and see if you were open to being friends. Because friends not only hear each other; they listen.
I’ve already lived through the moments that you’ve read about, and countless others that you haven’t. But my little brother hasn’t, my niece hasn’t, and neither have the children I hope to have one day (but am also scared to have one day).
They are the reason I wanted you to listen to me. The reason I’m asking you to help me make change.
The reason I have one more story for you. A story that I haven’t told anyone.
A story for my friend, to help you understand the importance of being an accomplice.
I’ve known I was Black since I was a kid. Once I started obs
erving the world, it was hard not to know. For better or worse, my world was different. I was treated differently from my classmates, my family was different from the families I saw on TV, and I had to act differently from how I saw other kids acting in public.
My mother and grandmother also made sure I knew I was different.
I didn’t understand why they had to tell me I was a Black kid every time I pretended to play cops and robbers with an imaginary gun. Why they’d ask if I understood what Black kids couldn’t do when we’d see white kids play pranks on strangers. Why they’d make sure I remembered that police weren’t always nice to Black kids, and to stay still and be silent if I was around them.
I didn’t know why things were different for Black kids; I just knew they were, and I hated it.
I respected my mother and grandmother, so I listened to what they told me, but like any child, I also tried to get away with what I could.
Most of the times that I did things I was told not to, it was because I was trying to fit in. It was hard enough being an unpopular kid, but being an unpopular kid who also couldn’t be careless and fun made other kids like me even less.
Which is why by the time elementary school was over, I was tired of being unpopular, tired of being bullied, tired of being alone.
The beginning of middle school started pretty much the same as elementary school had gone.
I was still me, and kids still treated me like crap for being me.
But middle school was worse than anything I had dealt with, because it wasn’t just about being dorky anymore. We were all about eleven years old, and now kids were starting to judge one another by new things, like attractiveness and how much money your family had.
Based on how my level of bullying increased, I guess I was poorer and uglier than I was dorky.
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