#every single word spoken by a person of color in

A few weeks ago I gave a lecture at Yale University about race on film. In the Q&A portion a woman in the front row asked what I thought about Lena Dunham’s point that she didn’t feel comfortable writing a part for a woman of color because she herself isn’t a woman of color. (No, this is not an anti-Lena Dunham post. Here at Every Single Word we don’t point the fingers at people but at systemic trends and patterns). I’ve been thinking about this question ever since and didn’t totally understand why it bothered me so much. So I’ve decided to answer it publicly here.  

First, I had to find the real, full quote. It was from an interview Dunham had done on NPR in 2012.

“This show isn’t supposed to feel exclusionary. It’s supposed to feel honest, and it’s supposed to feel true to many aspects of my experience. But for me to ignore that criticism [about the show’s lack of diversity] and not to take it in would really go against my beliefs and my education in so many things. … Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting. If I had one of the four girls, if, for example, she was African-American, I feel like — not that the experience of an African-American girl and a white girl are drastically different, but there has to be specificity to that experience [that] I wasn’t able to speak to.” (Fresh Air, 2012)

Clearly Dunham was aware of the show’s criticism and offers a thoughtful response. I re-watched the Girls pilot. And I really enjoyed it. It lovingly and hilariously lampoons privilege, and captures the hope and despair of some people’s early twenties. Also, I was reminded of the strength of Lena Dunham’s writing. And yet, the quote still made me uneasy. In looking to unpack her idea that she didn’t have the authority to write a part for a non-white girl I was so busy looking for things I didn’t like about the pilot, that the real reason the quote didn’t sit with me was just the opposite: I did like the pilot. I, a person of color, identified with her characters.

Girls is about privilege and aimlessness, not about about whiteness. I know many women of color just like the show’s main characters. Women of color who are college educated, financially supported, brilliant, and questioning what fuck they’re going to do with their lives. The notion that Dunham couldn’t capture the “specificity” of a woman of a different race seems to be operating on the myth that there is a different way to be a person of color. Considering that these characters are written as privileged, not white, it would have been so cool to see a woman of color grapple not with her color but with her privilege.

The show that kept coming to mind was The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, specifically the Hilary character. She was so refreshing, not because she represented ALL black women but because she represented SOME black women. She was a materialistic valley girl, loveably out-to-lunch, and black. All three of those truths existed simultaneously. The gift of that show, aside from the immortal theme song, is that it complicates what it means to be black. Because being black is not a singular experience. 

Naomi Ekperigin, a writer for Broad City and a good friend, recently did a great interview with Marie Claire. She declares that her “next great push is for women of color to be allowed to be that flawed, to be potheads, and to be aimless. Aimless is the key word. We have all the women trying to find themselves. But, if you’re a black woman on TV, you better be running a damn empire, sleeping with the President, saving people’s lives, teaching people law. You have to have a very strong skill.” 

Let’s complicate what it looks like to be a person of color on screen. And yes, that means showing privileged, aimless people of color too.

Just like you, maybe, I saw the Vanity Fair portrait of Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler and I thought it was beautiful. Two straight men showing affection for each other. And just like you, maybe, I followed the online criticism that it sparked. Hundreds of comments poured in that seemed to fall into one of the following categories: (1) That’s gay. Get this out of my face. (2) Why does America need to keep emasculating Black men? (3) Don’t worry, this is brotherly love not the other, bad kind of love. (4) We should celebrate love because all love is beautiful. And just like you - maybe - I was prompted to wrestle, yet again, with the impossibility and absolute necessity of queer men of color on screen. Which is, of course, not to say only queer men of color but all diversity within color so that we avoid the danger of single stories and false paradigms. 

This is not about Michael B. Jordan’s and Ryan Coogler’s sexuality; it never was. It’s about what people feel when they see avatars of themselves doing something they’ve been strictly warned against. 

In 2014 Nate Parker, the writer-director-star of the Sundance hit The Birth of a Nation (the soon-to-be Best Picture nominee, not the deeply deeply racist 1915 movie), sat down for an interview with BET. He said that to “preserve the black man you will never see [him] play a gay role.” The video has since been taken down but, like an elephant, the internet forgets nothing; an article on Ebony and a now-defunct URL from Bossip have preserved this quote for posterity. 

“Preserve the black man.” “Emasculation of black men.” There is a clear parallel between Parker’s promise and the Vanity Fair portrait criticism: maintaining value through preservation of image.

We care about images of ourselves on screens, whether they are our own or similar to our own. Just as we check selfies to make sure we look good in them, or untag pictures of ourselves if they don’t represent who we want to be, we also care about the celebrities and roles that are meant to represent us. Pictures and celebrities are our avatars; they stand for us when we’re not there. They are our proxies in fantasy worlds and historical re-tellings and red carpet photographs. They are meant to be just like us. Maybe.

People of color have far fewer avatars on screen than our white counterparts. And with that comes a protectiveness of how our avatars are presented. I read Nate Parker’s promise to never play a gay character and the comments about the “emasculation of the black man” not as hate, but as terrified preciousness. The fear that one of the limited reflections they see of themselves will be devalued and shattered with the slightest wrong move.

Nate Parker is not the enemy. Nor are the commenters. Though their statements are hurtful, myopic, and couched in femmephobia, their unfortunate words are only symptoms of the problem. The real enemy is the system that has so disproportionately limited the options for The Other that all of us “Others” are left fighting over what it means to be a Good Other. Like Kerry Washington so brilliantly said, “we have been pitted against each other and made to feel like there are limited seats at the table.”

Part of the privilege of whiteness is the diversity of white avatars that appear on screen. There is less preciousness because there are so many options. 

Now let’s revisit that selfie analogy. It’s like white people were handed smartphones with unlimited storage and data and told to take selfies of themselves while people of color, all people of color, were thrown one disposable camera with the same instructions. All we can do is take 27 photos and hope - against all odds - that one of them will look just like us. All of us. Maybe.

Additional reading: Son of Baldwin|Jason C. Harris|Robert Jones, Jr. 

Last week the long-awaited Ghostbusterstrailer was released. To recap:

1. Trailer is released. 

2. Some YouTube commenters are upset about a female reboot of the franchise.

3. Some people express disappointment that Leslie Jones plays an MTA Worker. 

4. Leslie Jones responds to Backlash #3. 

Jones makes some great points in her response. She asks, “Why can’t a regular person be a ghostbuster. Im confused. And why can’t i be the one who plays them i am a performer.” Part of the fight for representation is making sure that all of us get to be represented on screen, not just some of us. In a recent roundtable for The Hollywood Reporter, Justin Simien said “There is an obsession with black tragedy. If you see a black movie… It’s people who are enduring these horrible tragedies, or they’re saintlike… You know what that says, very subtly? It says that we’re not human. Because human beings are multifaceted.” Yup. He totally nails it. 

Representation of POC on screen doesn’t just mean making more heroic Selma-like movies or more tragic 12 Years A Slave-like movies (although both were excellent contributions to film), it means making more roles where POCs are just normal, everyday people. The good news is that the Ghostbusters reboot seems to do just that. Leslie Jones plays an MTA worker! A normal, everyday person! So we’re good, right? This film isn’t racist and yay feminism and let’s just shut up and enjoy the movie, right?!

If your answer was an exasperated ‘yes!’ to that question you are welcome to stop reading. If you are curious about where that question mark can lead us, let’s do this:

The problem isn’t that Leslie Jones plays an MTA employee. She is a brilliant performer who got a great role in a huge studio franchise. (Congratulations, Leslie. I can’t wait to see you kill it up there. Also, MTA employees are the unsung heroes of our daily commute.) The problem is that the only Woman of Color in the entire movie plays an MTA employee. Wanna know the three other roles credited to women of color on the movie’s IMDb page?“Woman,”“Ghost Prostitute,”and “Higgins College Student.” Leslie is likely the only woman of color who gets to talk on screen. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us of the dangers of a single story. “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” Through no fault of her own, Leslie Jones’ character represents the only story for women of color.

I celebrate a Ghostbusters reboot with women in the lead. How fucking awesome. But why, even in moments of revolution, does whiteness continue to be the default? Does the fight for equality mean equality for all? Or just some?