You Can't Touch My Hair (eBook)

And Other Things I Still Have to Explain

Phoebe Robinson (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
356 Seiten
Jacaranda Books (Verlag)
978-1-914344-00-8 (ISBN)

Infos

A hilarious and timely essay collection about race, gender, and pop culture from comedy superstar and 2 Dope Queens podcaster Phoebe Robinson Being a black woman in America means contending with old prejudices and fresh absurdities every day. Comedian Phoebe Robinson has experienced her fair share over the years: she's been unceremoniously relegated to the role of 'the black friend,' as if she is somehow the authority on all things racial; she's been questioned about her love of U2 and Billy Joel ('isn't that...white people music?'); she's been called 'uppity' for having an opinion in the workplace; she's been followed around stores by security guards; and yes, people do ask her whether they can touch her hair all. the. time. Now, she's ready to take these topics to the page-and she's going to make you laugh as she's doing it. Using her trademark wit alongside pop-culture references galore, Robinson explores everything from why Lisa Bonet is 'Queen. Bae. Jesus,' to breaking down the terrible nature of casting calls, to giving her less-than-traditional advice to the future female president, and demanding that the NFL clean up its act, all told in the same conversational voice that launched her podcast, 2 Dope Queens, to the top spot on iTunes. As personal as it is political, You Can't Touch My Hair examines our cultural climate and skewers our biases with humor and heart, announcing Robinson as a writer on the rise.

Phoebe Robinson is a stand-up comedian, writer, producer, and actress. She is best known as the co-creator and co-star of the hit podcast and series of TV specials 2 Dope Queens. She's also the New York Times bestselling author of You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain and Everything's Trash, But It's Okay. Additionally, Phoebe has starred in the movies Ibiza and What Men Want, and was moderator on Michelle Obama's international Becoming book tour. Most recently, Phoebe launched Tiny Reparations, a production company under ABC Signature, whose first project is a talk show entitled Doing the Most with Phoebe Robinson that premiered April 2021 on Comedy Central.

Textauszug

Introduction

The other day, I was thinking about the first time someone of a different race gave me a lady boner. It was more than seventeen years ago—February 24, 1999, to be exact—and I was watching the GRAMMYs. Let me give you a little bit of background about myself during this time. I was a fourteen-year-old movie nerd and an “everything schoolrelated” slacker. I’d often refer to myself as a “tomboy,” until I learned that liking and watching sports but not actually being good at them does not make you a tomboy, it makes you a human. So, yes, I was a fourteen-year-old sports and movie lovin’ person/nerd who thought that watching award shows was the bomb.tumblr.com, probably because I’d never won anything. So seeing people at the height of their artistic achievements was the ultimate fantasyland for me: I cried along with Hilary Swank as she graciously accepted a best actress Oscar for her performance in Boys Don’t Cry. I pretended I was up there with Lauryn Hill when she did a touching and intimate rendition of “To Zion” right before snagging a GRAMMY for Album of the Year. And I laughed when Italian actor Roberto Benigni (‘memba him?), who was so overjoyed at winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film that he walked on the backs of people’s seats to get to the stage. Award shows gave me hope that maybe I would also do something equally impressive with my life, that I could have a future outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Nothing against the Cleve, but I just had a feeling something cool outside those city limits awaited me. Watching these awards shows was my way of preparing for my future successes, I told myself, and was way more interesting than, say, studying for chemistry class. And in my eyes, there was truly no greater award show than the 1999 GRAMMYs. During this golden age of pop culture achievements, Hill was the belle of the ball, Madonna was killing it in her “Ray of Light, earth mother phase,” and Will Smith won Best Rap Solo Performance for “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It.”

I know. Looking back on it now, it’s kind of ridic.edu that out of all the songs nominated, including Hill’s “Lost Ones” and Jay Z’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” that Smith won Best Rap Solo Performance. But the ’90s were full of bad choices, OK? Like guys in boy bands wearing golf visors when they weren’t golfing, the movie Battlefield Earth, Lou Bega and his “Mambo No. 5” bullshit, pizza bagels, the Gulf War, Utah Jazz point guard John Stockton wearing short shorts on the basketball court, and me spending three weeks trying to memorize the lyrics to Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week”—after those twenty-one days, all I got down was: “Chickity China, the Chinese chicken.” Three weeks, guys! That’s all I got! The point is, in the ’90s, mistakes were made. Lessons were learned. And thanks to Ricky Martin’s “The Cup of Life” performance at the 1999 GRAMMYs, I learned that my vajeen is capable of quaking over non-black dudes the way the glass of water did in Jurassic Park when dinosaurs were nearby.

Martin may now be considered a slightly cheesy performer whose music is only played as a throwback jam at a wedding or bar mitzvah, but think back to ’99. Martin was gorgeous, he sang with passion and swag, and he commanded the stage like he knew this set was going to be his breakout moment into the English-speaking music market. He was so dreamy. And it didn’t hurt that he could work those hips. Simply put, I was stunned. I was in love, but I was also surprised—I was never really drawn to a non-black guy like this before. Not that I was ever anti-non-black dudes; they just never really were on my radar because they didn’t look like me. And I think that most folks would agree with me when I say that it’s human nature to be drawn to people who look like us, especially when we’re younger and not very exposed to the world. So that first time I felt attracted to someone outside of my race, it felt, for a moment… transcendental. As in, I, Phoebe Lynn Robinson, had transcended past race! That I was capable of seeing people and not their skin color. In other words: I was (drumroll, please) postracial. Yeah… No.

Look, dude and lady boners can do a lot. They help create babies, embarrass their owners for appearing at inopportune times, and make people overlook flaws in others—such as having a boring personality or being a DJ—because the boner is too busy giving a thumbs-up to an attractive person the way the Terminator does at the end of T2 when he is drowning in hot lava. But existing as a signal of postracial living? Nice try, but no. Sexually desiring someone who does not share your skin tone is not some grand sign that society is becoming postracial, no matter what anyone tells you. The truth is, people love throwing the term postracial around. Americans are so anxious to move on from the sins of our forefathers that we’re on the lookout for any and every symbol that our national nightmare of racism is over. And finding someone who has a different complexion than us hot is a quick way of saying, “See? We did it! Racism solved!” But sexual attraction is just the tip (heh) of the iceberg. It seems like we’ve been looking for our “get out of jail free, we’re postracial” pass for quite some time.

Even though the term postracial is everywhere these days, it’s actually been part of our lexicon for a while. It was first used in a 1971 New York Times article titled “Compact Set Up for ‘Post-Racial’ South,” which claimed that the topic of race was going to be usurped by concerns of population increase, industrial development, and economic fluctuations. Ever since then, postracial has been marched out fairly regularly anytime something positive happens for POCs (aka people of color). Taiwanese-American basketball player Jeremy Lin being an NBA star? Postracial! Mexican cooks at a Jamaican jerk-chicken restaurant? Postracial! My bestie Jess (who you met in the foreword) and I being upgraded to the front row at a Billy Joel concert just because?* Postracial! A white makeup artist rubbing my legs down with lotion to prevent me from getting ashy. She knows what ashy is?!?!** Postracial! You get the picture. And to many, there is no greater symbol that the postracial era is upon us as when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. No matter where you stand politically, there’s no denying that in 2008, we were coming off the heels of a presidency that left the country disillusioned thanks to 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, and Hurricane Katrina. So when Obama appeared on the national scene with a message of hope, change, and “yes, we can!” much of the country happily got sucked into this tornado of positivity, and it seemed like anything—like a postracial society— was possible. I totally understand the reasoning behind this line of thinking. His election is certainly historical, and along with it came a sense of hope and change. But as a nation, we are far from the “everyone holding hands in racial harmony” that we assumed would happen once Obama was ushered into office. In fact, throughout the Obama years, there has been, at the very best, resistance to change, and at the very worst, a palpable regression in the way the country views and handles—or more accurately, refuses to handle—race.

We only have to turn on the nightly news to witness the significant uptick in police brutality toward black men and women. Eric Garner. Trayvon Martin. Sandra Bland. Laquan McDonald. Rekia Boyd. Yvette Smith. Shereese Francis. Timothy Russell. Malissa Williams. Sean Bell. Oscar Grant. Miriam Carey. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. MappingPolice Violence.org states 37 percent of unarmed people killed by police last year were black, even though blacks only make up 13 percent of the US population. And these types of deaths are happening with such frequency that it’s almost impossible to keep track of each individual case and mourn the loss of life before another victim appears. Oof. Unfortunately, this is not just an American problem. This sort of police brutality is a worldwide phenomenon. Additionally, the UK’s The Guardian newspaper published research from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) stating that “police forces are up to 28 times more likely to use stop-and-search powers against black people than white people and may be breaking the law” to do so.

While these incidents are devastating, the average person experiences racism in lesser life-threatening ways. Microaggressions, or slights/snubs/insults, that reinforce marginalization of a particular group are the more common way that racism manifests on a daily basis. Normally, my run-ins with racism come in the form of jokes that I “talk white” or that I’m not like “other black people,” as if that is some sort of compliment. Other times, I may find out that I have lost out on a job in entertainment because they wanted a white woman instead. All of those are, unfortunately, standard-issue, and while they are upsetting in the moment, I tend to use that mixture of anger and sadness to propel me forward. I would have run out of tears a loooong time ago if I let every time...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.9.2022
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Comic / Humor / Manga ► Humor / Satire
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Journalistik
• Schlagworte: 2 dope queens • Black lives matter • everythings trash • Feminism • please don't sit on my bed • poc author • Politics • Race
• ISBN-10: 1-914344-00-6 / 1914344006
• ISBN-13: 978-1-914344-00-8 / 9781914344008