Birthday 2022
Last year I said that 36 was going to be good and I was not wrong. While I had started to resent being called resilient, I think this year, especially towards the end I finally allowed myself lean in to the fact that I actually am resilient. I have started to allow myself to really come out of my shell and I’m super proud of that. Truly understanding that my value is inherent and not earned is where I live today. I will admit that I had the smallest moment of feels around turning 37, luckily they didn’t last thanks to some help from a good friend. While 35 gave me clarity of what I wanted and 36 gave me the courage to start to really go after it. 37, we’re going to the moon. Let’s go! 🚀
True Potential
Love untapped with grace
Filled with overwhelming ease
A home I needed
That was always here
Laura, Ashley, Kim, and Whitley
They say your purpose is borne from your pain. I was a child deeply influenced by the media, specifically television. I loved TV! The characters were regulars in my life I could count on every week. I loved the stories and how it shaped my imagination of what the world was really like outside of Metro Detroit where I grew up. Oh I used to pretend to live out the opening sequence of TV sitcoms. Before the TikTok trend I was in the mirror pretending to do something turn and smile to myself earnestly. The joy! My earliest memories of Black girl magic on TV were Laura Winslow, Ashley Banks, Kim Reece and Whitley Gilbert. These girls, the first two in particular, were slightly older than me and I definitely wanted to be like them. I wanted to be as cool as Laura, I wanted Ashley’s hair (we can get into hair politics later), I wanted to be as brilliant as Kim, and as obnoxious as Whitley was there was something I loved about her. My first visions of young Black womanhood came from these characters. While they represented a range of shades and experiences the one thing they all were was skinny.
I realized I was abundant in body (shoutout to Amber J. Phillips) when I was in 3rd grade. The kids in school were talking about how much they weighed. I remember coming home, going into my parents blue bathroom closing the door and stepping on the scale. The number on the scale was bigger than everyone else’s. 100. That was the first moment I knew I was different. I then began to learn what being Black and fat meant. What did my life mean if I was also fat? I wasn’t seeing any fat girls with love interests on tv, let alone on TV period. When they were on TV they were loud, aggressive, and boy crazed. For this shy, sensitive nerdy, romantic, empath none of that resonated. I internalized all of that imagery of abundantly bodied Black girls and it did a number on my psyche.
It was in college that I started learning more about the different tropes of Black folks in media that I really started the process of excavating where my own internalized self hatred came from. I did my senior thesis as a comparative analysis of both film versions of Imitation of Life. I was in deep. I loved (and hated) understanding the journey of how WE ended up on the screen. I was constantly analyzing the characters on screen and seeing how those old categories of characters still lived on. I thought my career was going to be in academia and even considered graduate programs to keep studying. I somehow ended up in LA working as a lawyer and later a media founder actively working to bring more authentic stories to the screen.
I recognize how lucky I am to have had Laura, Ashley, Kim and Whitley when such a relatively short time prior the only one of us you could see on TV was Claudine. I’m grateful for the continued evolution of us on TV from Living Single to Insecure, indie darling Sexless to Harlem. I do still long to see more stories that all versions of me resonate with. That’s the work I’ll continue to do.
Hey Extraordinary
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ex·traor·di·nar·y
/ikˈstrôrd(ə)nˌerē,ˌekstrəˈôrdnˌerē/
adjective
very unusual or remarkable.
"the extraordinary plumage of the male"
My personal definition of extraordinary is to be free from the constraints of society that makes us feel like our only option is to be ordinary.
When I was young I made the decision that what I wanted to be when I grew up was extraordinary. What did extraordinary mean to my adolescent mind at the time? To be special. To be the exception to the rule. I fought with a vengeance to not be held back because of what society said I should be. A young Black, fat midwestern girl with big dreams. I wanted to live a life that wasn’t stifled by grown up obligations. I wanted to do something different.
I look back at this now and think it’s so interesting how I lived in the dichotomy of trying to do everything in my power to not stick out and also was an overachiever. This manifested in me trying to downplay my Blackness and the size of my body. I made myself smaller and more palatable. I wanted to be accepted. No, I wanted to be loved. Not because I wasn’t loved by my family, but because I wasn’t loved by myself. So I wanted to soak up all the love and admiration from everyone and everything outside of me. Assimilation was the name of the game. Now as I live in this 36th year of life, I’m breaking down and questioning every single part of why I am me. What ways have white supremacy, fatfobia, and patriarchy informed how I view myself and what I believe is available to me in my life. I'm reinvesting in myself and breaking all those old agreements. Most importantly I’m leaning in to all those parts of me that are truly extraordinary and no longer hiding them.
Burn It Down: Why Hollywood’s Influence Must Be Overturned
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Everything is intentional. Our world and views often are shaped by several factors; our families, our communities and what you see on that picture box you keep in your home. Franklin Leonard rightly stated on Twitter, “It is WELL past time for Hollywood to begin to grapple with the extent to which it has and continues to mythologize, valorize, and reinforce white supremacy.” Hollywood has built, sustained and profited off of white supremacy. Brain washing the masses to believe that white cis-gendered heterosexuality is right and everything else is wrong. The way that the media decides to depict Black and brown bodies informs how those Black and brown bodies are to move in this world. The moment that movement does not fall in line with what is “allowed” by the white gaze - there is hell (or life) to pay. Are we inherently dangerous? Are we your sassy best friends guiding you through life? From Birth of a Nation to the nightly news reports showing the long simmering unrest erupting in our country, the interpretation of who we actually are in real life has been poisoned. I’m talking to the white folks at home who have a “Black friend” and just don’t get why all of this is happening? I’m talking to the white folks who can’t see a problem with calling COVID-19 the “Chinese flu.” But the poison of that power structure has extended into something much sinister causing other people of color to hang-on to whatever glorified position they think they hold within the societal social stratus and attack others. White supremacy breeds misogyny and cis privilege, which is what encourages people like Hill Harper to disgustingly think it is appropriate to intentionally misgender Zaya Wade under a birthday message written by Gabrielle Union.
We have to tear down white supremacy on all fronts. For me, I’m focusing on dismantling those Hollywood systems that uphold those old power structures one brick at a time. Fighting to get more stories told from Hollywood to our living rooms from the people who should be telling our stories: us.
What can you do? That’s for you to decide. Just know that it’s something.
None of us are free until we all are free and every single one of us has something we can do to get us there.
This essay came out of the BLM protests during Summer 2020