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    Bad Feminist: Essays
    Bad Feminist: Essays
    Bad Feminist: Essays
    Ebook386 pages6 hours

    Bad Feminist: Essays

    By Roxane Gay

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    “Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.”  — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

    A New York Times Bestseller

    Best Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe • Newsweek • Time Out New York • Oprah.com • Miami Herald • Book Riot • Buzz Feed • Globe and Mail (Toronto) • The Root • Shelf Awareness

    A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched cultural observers of her generation

    In these funny and insightful essays, Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of color (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.

    Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better, coming from one of our most interesting and important cultural critics.

    Editor's Note

    Profound essays…

    Everything from professional Scrabble to abortion to Lena Dunham comes under loving scrutiny in Gay’s profound essays. Told in simplistic yet soul-crushing prose, these musings show how media affects us.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 5, 2014
    ISBN9780062282729
    Author

    Roxane Gay

    ROXANE GAY is the author of several bestselling books, including Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, the essay collection Bad Feminist, the novel An Untamed State, the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti, and the graphic novel The Sacrifice of Darkness. She is also the author of World of Wakanda, for Marvel, and the editor of Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture and The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has launched the Audacious Book Club and a newsletter, The Audacity.

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    Reviews for Bad Feminist

    4/5

    1,049 ratings72 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a brilliant and unapologetic book on feminism. It provides new perspectives and challenges typical ways of thinking. The essays are well articulated and offer a clear picture of the topic. The book has the power to challenge readers to rethink their views and find common ground with the author. It is a wonderful read that evokes a range of emotions and leaves a lasting impact.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      A lot of gems here, some less strong ones mixed in too. I like her best when I don't read her straight through. Take a break in between essays. They are not all about feminism per se but they are mostly all pretty good. Some are wonderful.
    • 3/5
      There is good stuff here, I just wasn't feeling the lit criticism. I was looking for more of a memior, less culture critique. Interesting, I just felt it dragged.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed some pieces a lot more than others. Some of the pieces felt dated already and I wished I had read it sooner. Some of them are rather chilling given the current political climate. But I really enjoyed this overall and think it is definitely worth reading!
    • 5/5
      I found this book, oddly enough, in a comic book store! I love to read books of all kinds of natures, to inform myself and educate myself. After reading the description of the book, I decided to buy it!

      The essay's really made me think about my actions and my words. It was very thought-provoking and at times, made me question how I dealt with things in life. I love books that make me do that! It helps me to change my mode of thinking and to help change myself for the better. That is exactly what this book does!

      Amazing! Amazing! Amazing! You did an excellent job, Roxanne Gay! Can't wait to find and read Hunger next!
    • 5/5
      Nice and well articulated essays. The topic is feminism seems to be a thorn in the society but reading essays on this book, one gets a clear picture on the topic. Looking for more Roxane Gay. EssayCyber.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful read. Made me think, laugh and at times feel completely uncomfortable.
    • 5/5
      I love this author's work. I will consume everything she offers, including snarky and clever tweets ;)
    • 5/5
      This Is Very Good, Maybe This Can Help You
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    • 2/5
      just very mid just very mos just very mid just
    • 5/5
      Required reading for people of all genders and identities. This one made me feel understood and provided some new perspectives to challenge some typical ways of thinking.
    • 3/5
      This was a really tough read for me, at times, but I feel like it's really important and well-written book.

      Roxane Gay brings up a very important point - that women are complex and feminism is not the same set of principles or beliefs for everyone. The author listens to music that undermines and objectifies women, and she likes it, because it's catchy music.

      I didn't always like the writing style and I didn't connect well with all the chapters but I feel like she has an incredibly valuable and powerful voice. I think it's really important for me to read feminist books written by women I don't always agree with, because it challenges me to support my own perspectives and provide evidence for them.

      She brings up a lot of problems in modern society and culture - and she doesn't always offer answers, that's true. Instead, what I think she tries to do is to bring awareness to these issues because so many of them go unchallenged.

      I found this book really readable and she can be quite intense and bitter, but she's also honest and vulnerable and compassionate.
    • 5/5
      I can't remember the last book that gave me life the way this one did. Roxane writes about Wendy Davis's filibuster and the gallery erupting in cheers, and this book did for my spirit what she describes, "awoke something in me that I hadn't realized had gone dormant." All parts of me are here in these essays, and many parts of Roxane that are different and a beautiful revelation. If I were to take the crystallization of my life experiences, feminisms, and sociological concerns for justice and cultural critique and make myself a fabulous writer, I would touch upon much of the subject matter but only a fraction of the heart and brilliance in Roxane's voice and insights. I am so envious of those people still living in the hometown I fled, who might have the chance now to exchange greetings in a coffee shop or the bookstore (because there is only one). Thank you, Roxane, for letting me see that I am, indeed, still here.
    • 4/5
      Roxane Gay makes the case for being a feminist whether you can be a good feminist even in to your own standards, by repeatedly demonstrating her very human very feminist views on our culture and her own life. We can be conflicted, we can be attracted to any number of patriarchal figments of our culture without relinquishing our feminist credentials. So we should understand our limitations as feminists but not give up our stance as feminists. I like her voice and look forward to hearing more of it.
    • 2/5
      I want to be very clear here. Much of the content of these essays was important and worth reading, although none of it was particularly eye-opening or groundbreaking. My problems with this collection rest solely with the prose style, which was so much about the author that it, at times, over-powered and undermined the value of an individual chapter. If the project had been sold as a memoir, then, perhaps, this would have been forgivable, but there were too many critical essays and reviews here that suffered from way too much "me". I am not denigrating in any way the validity of the author's experiences, only her ability to present them in a way that even attempts to universalize them. I am super-aware that any criticism I make may be unreasonably gendered or faintly racist, but given the sheer number of opportunities that the author takes to tell us about her PhD and faculty tenure, I feel fine is saying that this was some of the weakest non-fiction writing I have read.

      On a side note, the edition I have from Corsair in its 14th printing contained some of the most egregious typos I have ever encountered in a professionally published work. Simply shocking.
    • 4/5
      Thoughtful, entertaining, and bingeable essays. My only beef is that a few of them scatter in lots of different directions and then just sort of...end. Still, highly recommended. There's a great variety and lots of the essays resonated with me deeply or made me consider issues in a new way.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book, especially the feminist film and movie reviews. The author is an excellent writer who gives a fresh perspective to popular media. But the author would be better off studying feminism before she critiques feminism itself. Feminism is not the study of individuals but rather the study of class based systems that keep women down. There is no such thing as a good or a bad feminist. Feminism is not something that judges women for living their lives wrongly, but rather criticizes the patriarchal culture that makes life difficult for women. Some women do have the privilege of being able to live life with more equality, and we should be happy for them, but not all women can and they should not be judged for that. We are better off spending our energy fighting for a better world rather than striving to be a good feminist.
    • 5/5
      I hope many more can say we are bad, bad feminists. Thank you for this brilliant, unapologetic book.
    • 5/5
      Phenomenal! Powerful, humourous, provocative and heartbreaking. Dr. Gay's objectivity, humanity, and recognition of the dichotomy in which we live let one breathe a breath of relief. Through her insightful critques and anecdotes, rich and raw, she opens up a great platform for discussion and growth.
    • 5/5
      This book was one that truly challenged me to rethink how I think about many issues. There are topics that I can only sympathize with (as a white working class woman) but overall this book has got me thinking a great deal. I love that even though the author and I are so completely different, we are very much the same.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A collection of essays covering a wide spectrum of women’s issues, including rape, sexism, and racism. Thoughtful….. Worth the read!
    • 3/5
      I really wanted to like this book, but the essay nature made things feel a bit scattered. She made some really good points, but they weren't always on feminist issues. Maybe I should have done a bit more research into the books so that I could have properly adjusted my expectations, but the word feminist instantly brings certain topics to mind. That being said, the author is clearly educated and isn't afraid to speak her mind about her beliefs. Her views on race, education, feminism, politics, love, poverty, and many other topics were interesting and mostly fresh. Reading this book made me want to read some of her other works to know how to better judge this book. The scattered nature of the essays makes this a good read for anyone interested in the variety of issues she writes about, but being so scattered takes away from the book as a whole.
    • 4/5
      I was trying really hard to space these essays out between other reads but it swallowed me up this evening. Review to come!
    • 5/5
      Not a lot of so called "new ground" broken, but I loved reading these essays.
    • 4/5
      I read Hunger first, this is my second book by the author. I loved both but for some reason it felt like they were written by different people? Maybe it's the tone, this one is a bit more lighthearted dealing with a lot of pop culture. I really enjoyed the easy way she writes intersectional feminism into every aspect of this. I think I read this just in time though, as many of the references are due to become quite dated. Some already are (Cosby). This didn't feel very convicting in any way, as something like Hood Feminism does. Maybe that's because she's trying to explain why she's a "bad feminist" instead of telling us we are.
    • 5/5
      Bahni Turpin as the reader for the audio version? SIGN. ME. UP.


      *****

      Roxane Gay showed up on my radar this past year with her two book publications. I knew I'd get around to reading her at some point, but she really hooked me when I came across her Twitter feed during the Michael Brown murder here in St. Louis and the (mostly) horrific ways we handled the situation. Then I found out that Bahni Turpin is the reader for the audio of Bad Feminist (she's the best I've heard so far), and my winter break finally arrived.

      I am so glad I read this sooner than later! I can't wait to encourage more people to read it. Gay goes into excellent detail about the perils of over-defining feminism, her own approach to feminism (so much deeper and more profound than that pull-out quote in the synopsis would lead one to believe), and the greater issues concerning civil rights overall. I was already hooked from the beginning, but once I got through the experience she details in "What We Hunger For," I couldn't put it down (metaphorically). The second half of the book, in particular, seems to take on even more gravitas and urgency.

      Though I can't say that I necessarily learned anything new--Gay and I seem to be on the same page ideologically, if not always on all individual tastes--she does contextualize and expand upon many subjects in ways I may never be able to achieve. I especially loved her discussion of the whole concept of trigger warnings, birth control, literature, and movies (thankfully confirming my suspicions--and then some--about The Help), as well as her many insights on race. Throughout so much of the reading I wished it were a SoundCloud file where I could add little shout-outs at various points...listening to audiobooks does present a little more of a hurdle when wanting to make notes in the text. I am in awe of her voracious reading and involvement in social media, her dedication to popular culture and furthering the notion that one can still enjoy a flawed piece of entertainment while still being critical of it, and that she continues to question herself and her beliefs. She is a friend I would want as my bosom-est of buddies, and I am grateful that she is as open and honest as she is to share her experiences and worldview with us.
    • 4/5
      A wonderful collection of essays, by turns hilarious, tragic and insightful. Gay is a brilliant cultural critic, balancing thoughtful analyses of books, movies and tv with personal stories. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Gay is funny and smart. I envy the hell out of the students who get to be in her classes. Her essays on feminism are excellent. They are in no way innovative, there is nothing that has not shown up in many many essays which came before. But Gay makes this school of thought approachable and interesting for a large audience. That is an admirable feat. I was not as crazy about the book and movie reviews. There is much that is really good. I was thrilled that someone else had the same response I had to The Help! My complaint is that Gay often criticizes books and films for not being the books she wanted them to be. She complains about what ifs. But the writer told the story she wanted to tell. You can lament that the book did not tell the story it told the best way, but you can't fairly lament that the story was not a different one. I found this particularly problematic in the review of Junot Diaz. You tell your story Roxanne, and he gets.to tell his. His does not need to be told from a feminist perspective to be valid or great *and she does acknowledge that the writing was great*. All in all though there is a lot of good here. a solid 3.5.
    • 4/5
      There's a certain image of a feminist that Gay has in her head -- maybe you do, too? -- and she can never live up to it. She likes pink things and pretty dresses and really bad music. Plus, she has some concerns about intersectionality. All of that is explored in this essay collection, which looks at everything from pop culture to rape culture, sometimes in the same essay. Her conclusion, "I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all," resonates with me -- I'm probably also what you might call a bad feminist, but for different reasons and with less angst about it than Gay seems to have.

      I really enjoyed Gay's memoir [Hunger], but this one didn't strike as many chords with me. Part of the issue is that this book has been around for a while. Some of the pop culture references and all of the political ones feel dated, and even when the pop culture stuff was new, a lot of it was stuff I didn't consume. I admit to skimming some of the essays about shows I never watched and books I never read. It's certainly not the author's fault that I didn't get around to reading this book until now, but even if I had read it hot off the presses, I'm not sure how much of those segments I would have related to. Still, the writing is very good, and I loved the bits about Scrabble! Recommended with caveats: remember when you're reading that when this book came out, Trump hadn't been elected and Cosby hadn't been convicted.
    • 4/5
      The premise of the books is you can be a feminist and make mistakes, be a hypocrite, and be a flawed human. Roxane Gay takes on race, pop culture, politics, feminism in her essays. Her writing is insightful and thought provoking. I found myself going yassss and wtf no in the same essay. I'm glad she included personal essays about her life and experiences. I would of liked there to be a more defined theme and flow. Some of the essays repeated things she said in a previous essay a few pages earlier. Really enjoyed the book and plan to read more by Roxane Gay!
    • 4/5
      The whole time I was reading this book of essays, I was thinking about how to review it. I never really came to a decision about that.

      I'll start by saying that, overall, I really, really enjoyed this book. There were parts where I laughed out loud, and parts that I read aloud to my poor sister who was stuck on a plane next to me while I was reading. Having worked in higher ed for years, and worked with quite a few faculty, I found this particularly amusing:

      There is a plague on grandmothers. The elder relations of my students begin passing away at an alarming rate one week. I want to warn the surviving grandmothers, somehow. I want them to live.

      I loved the entirety of the essay "How to be Friends with Another Woman." Yes, yes, yes, to all of it.

      There were some parts in the middle that I found kind of boring, but that was on me, my mindset at the time of reading. The writing was overall excellent.

      I found some things within themes to be repetitive, likely because many of these essays were published elsewhere prior to the compilation of this book. However, despite the repetition, each essay brought something new to the topic.

      After one of my status updates for this book, a friend asked me how I liked it. She was reluctant to read it because she found the title off-putting, as if there's a "right way" to be a feminist. I assured her that the book was worth the read. I think the idea of being a "bad feminist" comes down to the "popular" thought that there's one right way to be a feminist -- hate men, burn bras, eschew family/kids, etc. -- and that doing the opposite of that -- love men, like the color pink, want babies -- is "doing it wrong."

      I think that, through this whole book, Gay shows that there's no one right way to do/be anything. And as far as feminism goes, the final paragraph of the book sums up her views -- and my views -- nicely:

      I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.

    Book preview

    Bad Feminist - Roxane Gay

    Introduction

    Feminism (n.): Plural

    The world changes faster than we can fathom in ways that are complicated. These bewildering changes often leave us raw. The cultural climate is shifting, particularly for women as we contend with the retrenchment of reproductive freedom, the persistence of rape culture, and the flawed if not damaging representations of women we’re consuming in music, movies, and literature.

    We have a comedian asking his fans to touch women lightly on their stomachs because ignoring personal boundaries is oh so funny. We have all manner of music glorifying the degradation of women, and damnit, that music is catchy so I often find myself singing along as my very being is diminished. Singers like Robin Thicke know we want it. Rappers like Jay-Z use the word bitch like punctuation. Movies, more often than not, tell the stories of men as if men’s stories are the only stories that matter. When women are involved, they are sidekicks, the romantic interests, the afterthoughts. Rarely do women get to be the center of attention. Rarely do our stories get to matter.

    How do we bring attention to these issues? How do we do so in ways that will actually be heard? How do we find the necessary language for talking about the inequalities and injustices women face, both great and small? As I’ve gotten older, feminism has answered these questions, at least in part.

    Feminism is flawed, but it offers, at its best, a way to navigate this shifting cultural climate. Feminism has certainly helped me find my voice. Feminism has helped me believe my voice matters, even in this world where there are so many voices demanding to be heard.

    How do we reconcile the imperfections of feminism with all the good it can do? In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For whatever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement.

    The problem with movements is that, all too often, they are associated only with the most visible figures, the people with the biggest platforms and the loudest, most provocative voices. But feminism is not whatever philosophy is being spouted by the popular media feminist flavor of the week, at least not entirely.

    Feminism, as of late, has suffered from a certain guilt by association because we conflate feminism with women who advocate feminism as part of their personal brand. When these figureheads say what we want to hear, we put them up on the Feminist Pedestal, and when they do something we don’t like, we knock them right off and then say there’s something wrong with feminism because our feminist leaders have failed us. We forget the difference between feminism and Professional Feminists.

    I openly embrace the label of bad feminist. I do so because I am flawed and human. I am not terribly well versed in feminist history. I am not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be. I have certain . . . interests and personality traits and opinions that may not fall in line with mainstream feminism, but I am still a feminist. I cannot tell you how freeing it has been to accept this about myself.

    I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself: a woman who loves pink and likes to get freaky and sometimes dances her ass off to music she knows, she knows, is terrible for women and who sometimes plays dumb with repairmen because it’s just easier to let them feel macho than it is to stand on the moral high ground.

    I am a bad feminist because I never want to be placed on a Feminist Pedestal. People who are placed on pedestals are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regularly fuck it up. Consider me already knocked off.

    When I was younger, I disavowed feminism with alarming frequency. I understand why women still fall over themselves to disavow feminism, to distance themselves. I disavowed feminism because when I was called a feminist, the label felt like an insult. In fact, it was generally intended as such. When I was called a feminist, during those days, my first thought was, But I willingly give blow jobs. I had it in my head that I could not both be a feminist and be sexually open. I had lots of strange things in my head during my teens and twenties.

    I disavowed feminism because I had no rational understanding of the movement. I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person. This caricature is how feminists have been warped by the people who fear feminism most, the same people who have the most to lose when feminism succeeds. Anytime I remember how I once disavowed feminism, I am ashamed of my ignorance. I am ashamed of my fear because mostly the disavowal was grounded in the fear that I would be ostracized, that I would be seen as a troublemaker, that I would never be accepted by the mainstream.

    I get angry when women disavow feminism and shun the feminist label but say they support all the advances born of feminism because I see a disconnect that does not need to be there. I get angry but I understand and hope someday we will live in a culture where we don’t need to distance ourselves from the feminist label, where the label doesn’t make us afraid of being alone, of being too different, of wanting too much.

    I try to keep my feminism simple. I know feminism is complex and evolving and flawed. I know feminism will not and cannot fix everything. I believe in equal opportunities for women and men. I believe in women having reproductive freedom and affordable and unfettered access to the health care they need. I believe women should be paid as much as men for doing the same work. Feminism is a choice, and if a woman does not want to be a feminist, that is her right, but it is still my responsibility to fight for her rights. I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn’t make certain choices for ourselves. I believe women not just in the United States but throughout the world deserve equality and freedom but know I am in no position to tell women of other cultures what that equality and freedom should look like.

    I resisted feminism in my late teens and my twenties because I worried that feminism wouldn’t allow me to be the mess of a woman I knew myself to be. But then I began to learn more about feminism. I learned to separate feminism from Feminism or Feminists or the idea of an Essential Feminism—one true feminism to dominate all of womankind. It was easy to embrace feminism when I realized it was advocating for gender equality in all realms, while also making the effort to be intersectional, to consider all the other factors that influence who we are and how we move through the world. Feminism has given me peace. Feminism has given me guiding principles for how I write, how I read, how I live. I do stray from these principles, but I also know it’s okay when I do not live up to my best feminist self.

    Women of color, queer women, and transgender women need to be better included in the feminist project. Women from these groups have been shamefully abandoned by Capital-F Feminism, time and again. This is a hard, painful truth. This is where a lot of people run into resisting feminism, trying to create distance between the movement and where they stand. Believe me, I understand. For years, I decided feminism wasn’t for me as a black woman, as a woman who has been queer identified at varying points in her life, because feminism has, historically, been far more invested in improving the lives of heterosexual white women to the detriment of all others.

    But two wrongs do not make a right. Feminism’s failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come.

    We don’t all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us.

    Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct. I hear many young women say they can’t find well-known feminists with whom they identify. That can be disheartening, but I say, let us (try to) become the feminists we would like to see moving through the world.

    When you can’t find someone to follow, you have to find a way to lead by example. In this collection of essays, I’m trying to lead, in a small, imperfect way. I am raising my voice as a bad feminist. I am taking a stand as a bad feminist. I offer insights on our culture and how we consume it. The essays in this collection also examine race in contemporary film, the limits of diversity, and how innovation is rarely satisfying; it is rarely enough. I call for creating new, more inclusive measures for literary excellence and take a closer look at HBO’s Girls and the phenomenon of the Fifty Shades trilogy. These essays are political and they are personal. They are, like feminism, flawed, but they come from a genuine place. I am just one woman trying to make sense of this world we live in. I’m raising my voice to show all the ways we have room to want more, to do better.

    [Me]

    Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Reach Me.

    Niche dating sites are interesting. You can go to JDate or Christian Mingle or Black People Meet or any number of dating websites expressly designed for birds of a feather to flock together. If you have certain criteria, you can find people who look like you or who share your faith or who enjoy having sex in furry costumes. In the world of the Internet, no one is alone in his or her interests. When you go to these niche dating sites, you can hope you are working with a known quantity. You can hope that in love online, a lingua franca will make all things possible.

    I think constantly about connection and loneliness and community and belonging, and a great deal, perhaps too much, of how my writing evidences me working through the intersections of these things. So many of us are reaching out, hoping someone out there will grab our hands and remind us we are not as alone as we fear.

    I tell some of the same stories over and over because certain experiences have affected me profoundly. Sometimes, I hope that by telling these stories again and again, I will have a better understanding of how the world works.

    In addition to not having done much online dating, I have never really dated anyone I have a lot in common with. I blame my astrological sign. Over time, I definitely find common ground in my relationships, but the people I tend to date are often quite different from me. A friend recently told me I only date white boys and accused me of being . . . I’m not sure what. She lives in a city and takes for granted the diversity around her. In retaliation, I told her I dated a Chinese boy in college. I told her I date the boys who ask me out. If a brotha asked me out and I was into him, I’d go out with him, happily. Brothas don’t step to me unless they’re in their seventies, and I’m not trying to date a geriatric. I also seem to have a penchant for libertarians. I seriously cannot get enough of them and their radical need for freedom from tyranny and taxation. I cannot imagine what it would be like to have a lot in common with someone I’m dating from the first encounter forward. I do not mean to suggest that I would have a lot in common with someone simply because we’re both black or both Democrats or both writers. I don’t know that there is someone in the world with whom I have a lot in common, especially not in the ways that would make sense on the kinds of websites where you enter some key characteristics and preferences and might somehow meet your match. I haven’t even tried, which I do not see as a bad thing. I love being with someone who is endlessly interesting because we are so different. Wanting to belong to people or a person is not about finding a mirror image of myself.

    BET is not a network I watch regularly because I am very committed to Lifetime Movie Network and lesser cable network reality programming. Also, the shoddy programming on BET is a travesty, and considering that I have watched two episodes of WE tv’s Amsale Girls, my tolerance for shoddy programming is exceptional. It’s a shame how black people consistently have to settle for less when it comes to quality programming. It’s a shame so few options exist beyond BET. The networks offer a numbing sea of whiteness save for shows produced by Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Scandal), who makes a deliberate effort to address race, gender, and, to a lesser extent, sexuality when she casts. Beyond that, black people—all people of color, really—only get to see themselves as lawyers and sassy friends and, of course, as The Help. Even when a new show promises to break new ground, like Lena Dunham’s Girls, an HBO show set in Brooklyn, New York, that follows the lives of four friends in their twenties, we are forced to swallow more of the same—a general erasure or ignorance of race.

    Where BET is concerned, we settle for nothing at all unless it is airing reruns of Girlfriends, which is criminally underrated. It took me a long time to appreciate Girlfriends, but that show was onto something and never got the support it deserved. Sometimes, though, I feel like looking at people who look like me. Brown skin is beautiful; I like seeing different kinds of stories. The problem is that I see people on BET who look like me, but that’s where the similarities end. This is partly because I’m in my late thirties. In BET years, I am ancient. As much as I am plugged in to pop culture, there are things I don’t know about. Geography and my profession don’t help. As I began writing this essay, there was a show airing on BET called Toya. I’ve seen the name when I’ve browsed TV listings, but I’ve never really watched it. I eventually saw a couple of episodes and don’t even understand why this show is a show. What is the premise? I consulted Dr. Google and learned Toya is the ex-wife of Lil Wayne, but that’s it. She’s not even a backup singer or video ho, I don’t think. The threshold for fame weakens ever so rapidly.

    I watched the Toya show, and there was nothing about any of it I could relate to other than caring about my family. I vaguely got the sense that Toya cares for her family and is trying to help them get on the right track, but it was fairly unclear because mostly the show involved people talking about boring things. During the show she dated someone named Memphitz (they are now married), who was looking at gorgeous diamond rings. Is he a rapper? What do these people do for a living? Lil Wayne’s child support can’t be that good. I wish BET did more to represent the full spectrum of black experiences in a balanced manner. If you watch BET, you get the sense that the only way black people succeed is through professional sports, music, or marrying/fucking/being a baby mama of someone who is involved with professional sports or music.

    Once in a while, I would love to see an example of black success that involves other professional venues. On most television shows, white characters provide viewers with a veritable panoply of options for What I Want to Be When I Grow Up. There are exceptions, certainly. Laurence Fishburne played the lead on CSI for a season or two. Back in the day, Blair Underwood played a lawyer on L.A. Law. There are the aforementioned Shonda Rhimes–helmed shows. I suppose the thinking is that a person of color as a lawyer or doctor or writer or, hell, a jazz musician or school teacher or professor or postal worker or waitress wouldn’t be as interesting for the kids because the allure of current offerings is undeniable. And yet. At some point, we have to stop selling every black child in this country the idea that he or she only needs to hold a ball or a microphone to achieve something. Bill Cosby is kind of crazy these days, but he knows what he’s talking about, and he’s kind of crazy because he’s been fighting this fight for his whole damn life. BET frustrates me because it is a painful reminder that you can have something and nothing in common with people at the same time. I enjoy difference, but once in a while, I do want to catch a glimpse of myself in others.

    In graduate school I was the adviser of the black student association. There was a negligible black faculty presence on campus (you could count them on one hand), and those folks were either too busy or burnt out or completely uninterested in the job. After four years, I understood. The older I get, the more I understand lots of things. Advising a black student association is exhausting and thankless and heartbreaking. It kind of destroys your faith after a while. A new black faculty member came to campus a couple years in, and I asked why she didn’t work with the black students. She said, That’s not my job. That person said, They’re unreachable. I hate when people say something is not their job or that something isn’t possible. We all say these things, sure, but some people actually believe they don’t have to work beyond what is written in their job description or that they don’t have to try to reach those who seemingly cannot be reached.

    I get my work ethic from my tireless father. When it comes to showing young black students there are teachers who look like them, when it comes to mentoring and being there to support students, I feel it’s everyone’s job (regardless of ethnicity), and if you don’t believe that as a black academic, you need to check yourself, immediately, and then check yourself again and keep checking yourself until you get your head on right.

    When I was an adviser, the black students respected me, probably, but they didn’t really like me a lot of the time. I get it. I am an acquired taste. Mostly, they thought I was bougie. Many of them called me redbone and laughed when I got irritated. They thought the way I use slang is hilarious because I round my vowels. They’d tell me, Say ‘holla’ again, and I would because that’s one of my favorite words even if I maybe say it wrong according to the kids. I kind of singsong the word. They especially loved how I said gangsta. I didn’t mind the teasing. I minded how they thought I expected too much from them where the definition of too much was to have any expectations at all.

    Yes, I was a demanding bitch, and at times I was probably unreasonable. I insisted on excellence. I get that from my mother. My expectations were things like requiring the officers to show up to the executive meetings, insisting officers and members show up to general meetings at least five minutes early because to be early is to be on time, insisting that if students agreed to perform a given task they follow through, insisting they do their homework, insisting they ask for help and get tutoring when they needed that kind of support, insisting they stop thinking a C or D is a good grade, insisting they take college seriously, insisting they stop seeing conspiracy theories everywhere, insisting that not every teacher who did something they didn’t like was being racist.

    Many of those kids, I quickly realized, did not know how to read or be a student. When talking about social issues in academia and even in intellectual circles, we talk about privilege a lot and how we all have privilege and need to be aware of it. I have always known the ways in which I am privileged, but working with these students, most of them from inner-city Detroit, made me realize the extent of my privilege. Whenever someone tells me I don’t acknowledge my privilege, I really want him or her to shut the fuck up. You think I don’t know? I’m crystal clear on privilege. The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.

    These kids didn’t know how to read so I got them dictionaries, and because they were too shy to discuss literacy in meetings, they would catch me walking across campus or in my office and whisper, I need help reading. It had never crossed my mind before that it was possible for a child to be educated in this country and make it to college unable to read at a college level. Shame on me, certainly, for being so ignorant about the galling disparities in how children are educated. Shame on me. I learned so much more in grad school out of the classroom than I ever did sitting around a table talking about theoretical concepts. I learned about how ignorant I am. I am still working to correct this.

    One-on-one, the students and I got along much better. They were far more open. I had no idea what I was doing. How do you teach someone to read? I consulted Dr. Google regularly. I bought a book with some basic grammar exercises. Sometimes, we just read their homework word for word, and when they didn’t know a word, I made them write it down and look it up and write the definition down too because that’s how my mother taught me. I had a mother who was home every day after school and who sat with me day after day and year after year until I went away for high school, helping me with my homework, encouraging me, and certainly pushing me toward excellence. There were things in my life my mother was unable to see, but when it came to my education and making sure I was a good, well-mannered person, she was on point in every way.

    At times, I resented the amount of schoolwork I had to do at home. My American classmates didn’t have to do any of the stuff I had to do. I didn’t understand why my mom, both of my parents really, was so hell-bent on making us use our minds. There was a lot of pressure in our household. A lot. I was a pretty stressed-out kid, and some of that pressure was self-induced and some of it wasn’t. I enjoyed being the best and making my parents proud. I enjoyed the sense of control I felt by being good at school when there were other parts of my life that were desperately out of control. I was expected to get straight As. Bringing home a grade less than an A was not an option so I didn’t. This is a typical child-of-immigrants story, not at all interesting. When I worked with those kids in graduate school, I understood why my parents showed us how we had to work three times harder than white kids to get half the consideration. They did not impart this reality with bitterness. They were protecting us.

    At the end of our sessions, the students I worked with would generally say, Don’t tell anyone I came to see you. It wasn’t that they were embarrassed to get help, most of the time. They were embarrassed to be seen putting effort into their education, to be seen caring. Sometimes, they’d open up about their lives. Many of the kids I worked with did not have parents who would or could prepare their children for the world the way mine did. Many of them were eldest children, the first in their families to go to college. One boy was the eldest of nine. One girl was the eldest of seven. Another girl was the eldest of six. There were many absent fathers, incarcerated mothers and fathers and cousins and aunties and siblings. There was alcoholism and drug addiction and abuse. There were parents who resented that their children were in college and tried to sabotage them. There were students who were sending their student loan refund checks back home to support their families and spending the semester without textbooks, without enough money to eat, because the mouths back at home needed to be fed. There were certainly students with a great parent or parents, with families who were supportive, who knew nothing of poverty, who were well prepared for the college experience or well prepared to do what it took to get up to speed. Those students were the exception. I often think about the danger of a single story, as discussed by Chimamanda Adichie in her TED Talk, but sometimes, there actually is a single story and it tears my heart open.

    By the end of my last year of school, with all the other things I was dealing with in my personal life, I was completely burnt out. I had nothing left to give. All too often, the students just did not give a damn and neither did I. I’m not proud of this, but I really was dealing with a lot. That’s what I tell myself. The students didn’t show up to the BSA meetings. They half-assed their participation in club events and didn’t promote events and dropped the ball, and I no longer had the energy to glare and yell and push and prod and make them want to do better. If after four years they had learned nothing, I had failed, and there was little I could do to rectify that. They were just being college students, of course, but it was frustrating. When the last semester ended, I was relieved. I would miss the students because they were, to be clear, a great joy—bright, funny, charming, kind of crazy, but good kids. I still needed a break, a very, very long break.

    The woman who recruited me to grad school had worked with the black students for about twenty years. When she retired, she was so burnt out she couldn’t even talk about them without being overwhelmed by her frustration with their unwillingness to change, the ways they had been wronged, their lack of faith that there was a different, better way, the administration’s piss-poor efforts to create change, all of it. I understood her burnout too. It took me a mere four years, but I got there. And yet. There was an end-of-the-year banquet where the students surprised me. They gave me a plaque and read a beautiful speech where they said I was the epitome of integrity and grace. They thanked me for recognizing they were talented and powerful beyond measure. They said I stood up for them even when they were wrong and that I was family, which did nicely explain our relationship—unconditional but complicated. They

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