White Girls is a collection of essays by Hilton Als, a favorite NY writer. Through his language and prose, he reflected on the NYC art and literary scenes through the 1980s - 90s, when I was an art student at FIT. Hilton navigated a culture dominated by white girl gallerists, fashion editors, and socialites, as a gay black man in America. Hilton often appears in documentaries or readings of Joan Didion, a favorite California writer white girl. I thought about White Girls and my American experience after a friend shared this photo.
It was taken around 1984 when I was a student at Berkeley High, a mixed brown girl punk like Polystyrene and Pauline, who inspired me at the time. There was a paucity of black and brown punks in the Bay then and only a handful of colored girls like myself that I knew or hung out with - Spider, Toni and Rachel (the DMR twins), Robin, Carol, and Hilary. We were somewhat ephemeral, an anomaly in proximity to the white girls. Now, we're invited to contribute to documentaries, books, and engage with old friends reminiscing about bands and shows. The white girls were a reflection of teen America at the time, which in popular culture was white. The punks were in opposition to the mainstream - the kids in America who couldn't live in a world that included Huey Lewis and the News, Stacey Q, and Tiffany.
Aesthetically I admired white girl punks like Patti, Joan, Chrissie, Siouxsie, Debbie, and Cyndi. I was influenced by friends, like Andrea, Robin, Shannon, Dana, Jennifer, and Catherine. Andrea, Robin, and Shannon put together an all girl punk band called Boi.
I also adored the white girl avant garde punks: Lene, Laurie, Nina, and Diamanda, but I saw myself in Pauline, Poly, and Annabella. By the 1990s I was a big Erykah and Missy fan, the queens of Afrofuturist, conceptual hip hop. Since then, the weird torch has been passed on to Dojacat and Lizzo, brown and black girls of a new era.
In the 1980s girls like me just happened to crash the punk scene. It was an expansion of our world and we were always in search of that. No one ever said we didn't belong, we just did. Although I adored them, there was more going on other than Cheap Trick, Prince, and Madonna.
In 1981 I discovered something different after seeing the film Times Square, a movie about two New Yorican girls who start a punk band. I bought the soundtrack which was my introduction to The Cure and The Ruts. A year after that, I met Kamala in 10th grade who shared import 45s of Vice Squad and GBH, then I made those 45s into mixtapes at home. Kamala invited me to a show at La Pena in Berkeley. That show was Special Forces and Fang. When I walked in, the first thing I heard was Special Forces smash into a cover of Love Rollercoaster. What I had an idea about had come to life.
Kamala herself was instrumental in putting Gilman together and she's a badass drummer. She plays similar to Gina Schock and Stewart Copeland, with fluidly interchangeable, tight percussion. Kamala was half Lebanese, a different kind of white girl, which was a revelation to me at the time. She didn't give a shit about the prom. Kamala was something else. Kamala was a punk.
Those Fishbone and Body Count shows were every-thang - the same energy as Special Forces, Bad Brains, and Living Color. Supernatural serpentine fire punk from punkatron. I had a record or cassette of each of those bands. Years later the bands Death from Detroit and Bam Bam from Seattle, were re-discovered through space and time. It wasn't that punk was racist - it is by definition the antithesis of that - the punk scene simply saw itself as white dudes peppered with a few black dude bands like Bad Brains. Punk was a white boy's game until the 90s, when it made space for the white girls. I recently paused on a photo of L7 and the Lunachicks, 90s bands I liked. They were all white girls. I enjoyed their music and didn't question that then. I question it more critically now.
Punk Rock Origin for Dummies:
In the early1960s, Rudeboy culture came from West Indian immigrants who settled in the UK. From Rudeboy came ska; a style and music that was co-opted by white skinhead gangs in the National Front, a neo-fascist fringe (similar to the crackering that's happening in the US today). At the same time, there was a Northern Soul revival scene that loved American r&b, and those white kids became purveyors of modern rock and yada yada yada. By 1976, punk was a messier, louder alternative to glam rock and Led Zeppelin. With the exception of punk, almost every genre of Western music originated from or was created by black people, such as American rock n roll; the origin of that comes from the black church and the blues.
Alrighty, nerds, we move on....
In 1980s NYC, my friend CJ, another black punk girl, and I would have movie nights watching Mahogany and Lady Sings the Blues, movies we grew up with. We'd go to punk shows and play 'count the black girls' where the maximum was usually 5, including ourselves. Now things are better and that makes us happy. Black girls to the agnostic front!
I knew I was black because grew up in the 1970s, at a time of Black Power, which was centered in Oakland. My uncle was a Panther in the Oakland chapter. He and my father were old school cats from a church family in Ypsilanti, Michigan, near Detroit. One wanted what the white boy had, the other to take the white boy down. The duality of the blackman.
In the 1970s, mixed was black. That was a rule America made up long before I showed up. There was no bi- or multi-racial anything going on. Even though I'm ethnically half Italian, the system identified and tracked me as a black kid. I don't tell people I'm half white because Italians are Italian and my grandparents were immigrants. That's like saying a chocolate chip cookie is just a cookie. Alas, racism did not appreciate the details of my ethnic background. I learned it would hurt me, not my mother or the white girls around me.
I experience a kind of melancholy when I look at that photo because all the girls in it are gone. I was in my imagination most of the time, through movies, books, and art, more than I was concerned about being cute. I knew who I was, but I wasn't particularly interested in my reality.
I was a fat teen punk then, which in the 1980s obscured me further from visibility. I was the sidekick outlier in direct opposition to Molly Ringwald-ness. If I remotely identified with any white girl in a teen movie it was Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. Ally was dark and mysterious. At one point, Molly offered to give her a makeover to appeal to Emilio's misunderstood jock. I was annoyed Ally submitted to the corrosion of conformity.
What the fuck is up with that?!
I had the same disdain for Pretty in Pink. Look at the title. Pretty in Pink? I was a teenage movie critic and shared my scathing critique with friends after a screening. ' I can't really relate to that.' I even saw it and tried again. Ducky's white creepers and Otis karaoke were fun. James Spader psychotic preppy was amusing and examining Annie Potts' older punk thrift store chic style. I wasn't particularly interested in the girl pining for the boy with weird hair. I think Andrew was wearing a wig to make him more full and attractive. I was more interested in Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, Starstruck, an Aussie teen new wave spectacle. The Blues Brothers. John Carpenter's The Thing. Original shit that wasn't just another convoluted teen romance where all a girl needed to do is make a fucking pink dress and win the dude with weird hair.
This parlayed into my lifelong disdain for the romantic comedy. I only like three in existence: The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and Harold & Maude.
In 1984 I had a moment of revelation, something new and exciting. I saw a black girl punk in Repo Man. Debbi only had a few scenes with Otto where she dumped him, then another where they cross paths again as she tries to rob a liquor store with her new idiot boyfriend. Repo Man was awesome because it was a world where everyone was equal and sarcastic. As a character, Debbi was apathetic and didn't care about anything, but she was a brown girl punk with a mohawk in a silver metallic floor length jacket. Debbi was cool.
Unbearably straight America was on Jazzercise, Nutrisystem, Olivia being physical (earbleed death pop) and Jane Fonda's workout videos. For the less glamorous, regular ass people there was Richard Simmons. Everyone was actually fat on his show and he genuinely wanted to help people get healthier. Simmons was a more realistic version of America, whereas Olivia and Jane were aspirational. This is all 1980s camp now that happened after feminism. The 4th wave young feminists, in pink pussycat hats, have since torn it to shreds. White girls got angry at white women for some white shit that went down 30 years ago. Caucasity gone wild!
I remember one class in high school, leaning on my palm, with a baffled expression, listening to a white girl elaborate on the power of Diet Coke as though it was a fat cure.
" Diet Coke is awesome! I can like have cake at lunch and not worry about it. Feminism really made things better for us. Do you want to go to Esprit de Corps after school? '
Proof that 9 out of 10 Berkeley white girls go to the white woman incubator, Sarah Lawrence College to bring the same tired shit forward. America has always had an obsession with perfection. The standard of that applied to white girls and boys and that came from Protestantism. They were everywhere and had amazing lives - in ads, TV shows, and teen movies. Berkeley still sees itself as the UC Berkeley lacrosse team. UC can't find any kids of color in the Bay to play lacrosse, a Native American game? Make it make sense, Berkeley, USA.
You better see me, 1980s black girl magic! America will always want me! When they see you they think of slaves! When they see me they think of Grace Kelly and Hickory Farms!
I admit I'm on some white girl shit here and there. I just put a black spin on things like sweet tea, lemonade, or sorrel instead of soda. With the exception of Mexican Coke, soda is trash. There is only half and half in my house for a splat in my coffee. I'm too black and too Italian for plant-based creamers. Some are so odd to me. I'm not drinking creamer made from mushroom fungi. Mushrooms go with pasta! Who is falling for mushroom creamer? Trippin.
Berkeley gets on the stupidest shit with advanced food that cost
white people money. As much as I love where I grew up, I can get annoyed with its affectations. It's not rock n roll or hip hop anything anymore. People can't protest without a permit that requires participants to be non-aggressive vegans. The population has changed to old white scholars who want it to be Provence or the remote Scottish Highlands. The next generation of grad students at UC Berkeley want it to be Tokyo, Taipei, or Shanghai. It used to be a carrot cake kind of town. Now it's boba tea! The only Berkeley Black left at all is within a small radius of the southside, the historically black side of town. Berkeley has become a politically, spiritually aware and uptight no fun zone passionate about social justice. There is always a room somewhere with white people talking about injustice and racism, with no one present who is affected by it.
I stopped living in Berkeley because I usually experience the kumbaya on loop, micro-aggression from women, or arbitrary fetishization from men. This has nothing to do with being attractive or not - I just represent what others are fretting about in the wider American world of racial violence, neo-fascism, and desire for the so-called exotic. I look like the ambushed black girl, the dead black girl, the say-her-name black girl, the Brazilian-Dominican-Maori-Moana black girl. Personally, I'm more comfortable in Oakland where I have more meaningful conversations about how to protect ourselves and live.
Fran Lebowitz, one of the baddest white girl boomers of all time, thinks California is on one with its contradictions and progressivism that reinforce the same power structure and social order. Why does technology use words that sound like philosophy? Core values? Mission statement? Community? It's all capitalism. What is wellness? Is that a California thing? It sounds like extra life.
One of Fran's closest friends was a black girl who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison.
Being the poster child for asexuality, I got fat by the time puberty hit, a genetic trait passed down from the Old Man. The only diet plan that worked, I would learn later was - las drogas! I was into speed and cocaine as I settled into my New York groove. Who really needs sleep anyway? It got in the way of fun and danger. I lived a life by night, working and partying in clubs, side hustle dealing, and going to shows. I had one gig where I booked strippers out of an apartment in Hell's Kitchen for an Italian playboy-pimp and his girlfriend. He loved it that I was Afro-Italian - like all of Robert De Niro's kids.
I didn't have much fear then as I do now, I'm just much slower. New York was more dangerous than Berkeley could ever be, more like the real world. Berkeley is a town of hurt feelings, not dead bodies. It is so gentle it would tax air if it was causing harm to one's authentic self.
I already knew how to be gentle growing up there. I call my childhood the Magic Bus - a kaleidoscope of flowers, butterflies, and people power potlucks in the park. There was a lot of people power going on which included death cults, communes, kidnapping, assassination, corruption, conceptual pornography, surrealist sci fi, Black Panthers, Cholo culture, Pickle Family Circus, Armistead Maupin, the Papyrus font, and Hare Krishnas.
Welcome to the Magic Bus, where your childhood is on fire with trippy shit and everyone eats carrot cake from the co-op!
If anything was exciting in my adolescence, other than punk shows and underground clubs, it was Telegraph Ave. on a Friday or Saturday night. It was essentially a teen takeover, our generation's version of A Clockwork Orange to RUN DMC's King of Rock. Punks squabbled with break dancers, DMR ( including the twins ) fought other punks, the drunk and retarded stumbled out of Larry Blake's or Silverball onto the street. Let's crash that frat party! Fuck those assholes! A good composite of that time and its depiction of 1980s teen social warfare would be Nerds. The nerds in Nerds were punk.
Living in New York made me tougher, more of a realist dreamer. Everyone in my social circle was black, mixed, or Latino. The California white girls and white boys were gone. The series Pose reminded me of that time and the young drag queens, artists, and club kids who taught me how to be a tough young lady. Unfortunately, I failed at that when I got mugged.
I worked in a restaurant on the Upper West Side, and lived on the Lower East Side which was hood then. Bop guns, prostitutes, crack heron hood. Closer to the East River, Alphabet City was even more rough. That's where the C Squat was - a place of barren, rat infested urban living, where the punk spirit testified. I was not hard enough at all to cope with living in C Squat. One can be punk and not live in squalor to prove it.
There was a Puerto Rican pimp on my block I nicknamed Sergio Valente because he always wore Sergio Valente jeans, a jangle of keys at his waist belt, and no shirt. The LES then was a neighborhood of elder Holocaust survivors, thugs, b-boys, and banji girls. In 1980s New York, a banji girl was a glamorous hood girl. I worked with banji homegirls in the clubs who taught me the non-violent hustle - flipping drink and coat check tickets. Most lounge attendants and bussers in NY clubs then were either black or Latino. The white girls were at the front of the house. The white boys were bartenders.
I was on my way home after a late shift and took a side street; thinking how beautiful and gothic the street was in low light - like a scene out of Batman or Escape from New York. I was listening to the Sugarcubes on my Walkman, but low enough to hear environmental sound. I heard a bottle crash behind me and didn't think much of it. I usually heard the sound of breaking glass in the streets after dark. A fifth slipping from a drunk's hand, toppled by a rat climbing a pile of trash. The nature of gravity involves sound.
Out of the corner of my eye, a strung out banji girl came up from behind me, and swung the end of a jagged, broken bottle at my face.
' Bitch, give me your motherfuckin money right now! I'm serious, you fuckin bitch! '
Great.
I snapped my head back, away from the bottle and considered if I should try a slick Enter the Dragon move or give her my shit and run. I talked to her calmly, gave her my money, and fled.
When I got to my building, I was so freaked out, so mad - I threw things around cussing fate and the banji girl out. I went from poor to poorer in an instant. At least I wasn't laying in the street, bleeding from gashes in my face. I called Ma in tears and she advised me to call the cops. Two grown white detectives, showed up at my tenement building to take a report. They offered to drive me around the neighborhood to look for the banji girl. In the back seat of their Buick sedan, I caught something. A brown girl will always remember the vehicle that could have taken her to her death rape. The two detectives exchanged a look between one another.
' How old are you again?' One asked.
' 21...that damn crackhead! That was all my fuckin tip money - the whole fuckin week! What am I going to do...shit! '
' Wow. ' Said the other. ' You sound a lot older than 21.'
I'm an artist! I stay ready studying postmodernism and Marcel Duchamp, nigga! I reflect now on how naïve it was to get in the car with those two men. I know something was up and for whatever reason, they didn't act on it. Maybe it was conscience or pity or maybe they got it that I was a lady and not a hoodrat.
That's what these days remind me of - the possibility of danger and harm at any moment, for myself and others. Two friends, one in Oakland and another in Miami, not knowing one another, gave me some sage advice recently:
There is a lot of crazy going on. Protect yourself and your energy with white people and keep your guard up, even at work. I'm sure they're nice artist people, but they are not your friends. Don't be too open or motherly to any white girl like you did the last time. She betrayed you and you lost your job.
That was true. After 'winning' at her internal her conflict that I existed, the white girl sent me a crank text because hate is a dish best served cold by a misogynistic racist with the emotional intelligence of a 12 year old.
More hurt than outraged, I had to learn a harsh lesson about the white girls of her generation, and keep my head up. Back in the day, white girls were a part of the Rebel Alliance. The young white girls of today not so much, unless there's a 'hot black dude' in the Alliance taking a selfie at the gym. I suppose it's more important to get his attention than to destroy the Death Star.
I can find the irony and humor in anything, even my own traumatic experiences.
Apparently we're living under a kind of twilight zone Jim Crow where so-called allies are in fact not - they just talk a lot of woke gibberish. If we become an inconvenience or an obstacle to their object of desire - they default to white girl tears terror. With each generation we go through the same racist pathology in America, just with variable nuances and behaviors. That's what my friends were warning me about. To move forward with vigilance and a degree of caution at all times. I know not who the monster could be or where. The monster may not even think it's a monster.
Growing up in such an inclusive place like the Bay, I get to my 50s and I had to adapt to being black in a world with shit people like Trucker and racist conspiracies like 'replacement theory'. I keep to myself to protect myself. I'm more cautious now of younger generation white girls, their racial dysmorphia amplified by Kardashian zombies who monetized the augmented black girl body, their mixed kids, and black men. A vulgar clown circus of exploitation and excess as entertainment.
Unbow your head, sister. - James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk.
I was messed up for awhile having been taken out by white girl tears in my own hometown, because the stress of a brown woman, working my finger to the bone for a white institution and managing my life, made her 'uncomfortable'. I never took my shit out on her. I was real and vulnerable - a human being. She envied blackness and beauty and wanted to experience the otherness and oppression of our every day lives. Racism made us special, but whiteness made her ordinary. Other co-workers had shouting matches with one another, but they were white. It can be a lonely existence, unable to be a person like a white girl.
Before that twilight zone episode, I worked 10 - 15 hours days through 2 election cycles, including the General Election during the pandemic, to get the fascist cracker out to protect myself and other people of color in the failed democracy that elected him. I would take walks and meditate myself out of despair into determination. Get him out!
Kick over the wall 'cause governments to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
Do you know that you can use it?
The Clash, Clampdown, 1979
The 1980s was an exceptional time of creativity and experimentation - of live shows, graffiti, and flyers all made by hand. I have fond memories of punk and ska mayhem then. The white girls and I had friendship and a shared love for Bow Wow Wow. Annabella, the beautiful lead singer of the band, was a brown girl. The white girls didn't really know how to place her in relation to themselves. I did.
We shared a connection through time, kids born in the 1960s who became germ free adolescence into the 1980s. We're from the same place in time, know the same songs, use idioms and phrases from our favorite movies in conversation, and remember those moments in American history that shaped our lives. A young co-worker once asked me if I was a Reagan Youth. Initially I thought of the band, which I had seen in Tompkins Square Park in 1988 before the show turned into a riot-brawl against the cops. That day is punk legend now.
I guess I was a Reagan Youth, literally and figuratively.
Since middle school I read Lorraine Hansberry's Young, Gifted, and Black and had a paperback of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls.... I had seen the PBS teleplay around 1981 and a lightbulb went off. It wasn't just seeing myself in the characters. It was the language of black and brown girls. When I consider it now, what I saw in popular culture was our erasure - the same as in previous generations. The white girl was the American girl and no one questioned that. Whenever I travel abroad I get that pause and asked the same question to this day:
' You're American?'
I'm not a progressive the way the left defines it. I'm a black radical Afrofuturist progressive. That's a revolution of thought as much as it is a political construct. The first consideration I make is for black folks because whatever policy or law this country comes up with affects me as a black person. School bond? Which district, homie? I support reparations, affirmative action, forgiving student loans, foundations for black student scholarships, black teachers for black students, subsidizing free childcare for working moms, and burning shit down when necessary. The country certainly owes a debt to the Old Man. Even in his old age, as dementia and paranoia have set in, I can hear the pain of racism in his experience living in a segregated and brutal world. When he was young, in the late 1950s, he was sentenced to 60 days on a chain gang in North Carolina because he refused to be treated like a dog in a whites only diner. Two months shackled to other men at hard labor like a slave.
Afrofuturism is black imagination and I'm always down with that; the future-past avant garde. For me, that began with The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr. T and Forbidden Planet, a 1957 sci fi remake of The Tempest. My love of science fiction expanded between books and movies. I still have the same tattered copy of Golden Apples of the Sun I read in middle school. Other than imagination and wonder, I use code switching to navigate my American life. Most of my teachers growing up were hippies and bohemian intellectuals. We read poetry, Orwell, Sinclair, Steinbeck, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. On the phone, I can sound like I'm reading from the collected works of Emily Dickinson. Alas, life and American intonation have changed. I have not adapted to the young, fast, and distracted cadence of today.
Before punk and my internal liberation (an on-going work in progress ), I had a vanilla phase. I expressed this in my love for ABBA and Foreigner, which I still have and I don't care what anyone thinks. I read Judy Blume and VC Andrews books regularly. I wondered what it would be like to be those characters - pretty and golden with a nice house - even if one's circumstances were weird locked up in the attic and falling in love with their sibling. Cathy and Chris were the Afterschool Special versions of Cersei and Jaime Lannister.
I know now, that such peaches and cream fantasies were a reflection of that time. Even the status quo color palette then was vanilla - pastel pink, coral, green, and blue. Then Miami Vice introduced neon pastels. Neon pastels? Diana Vreeland herself must have had an opinion about that. The patron saints of yacht rock, Crockett and Tubbs are now icons of Miami. I saw a large scale photo portrait of the two of them, as if real people who accomplished something, in the Miami History Museum.
Once I claimed punk, I read punk writers like Lydia, Patti, Tom, Jim, and Tama. There were no published black punk writers, but there was Greg Tate, a musicologist and critic for the Village Voice who wrote Flyboy in the Buttermilk, 1988. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that there were zines created by black girl punks. Maybe 10 years my junior, those girls were a response to Riot Girl, which was white girl dominated. Riot Girls were 1990s feminists who, like their first wave predecessors, didn't think colored girls mattered in the struggle for gender equality. Black women were grouped into black people as a whole, a part of civil rights. Such exclusion is called centering white womanhood, another American tradition. I'll illustrate this in a standard inclusion clause to a contemporary CA job posting:
We are committed to diversity and inclusion. Women, minorities, people with disabilities, and those who identify as gender non-conforming are encouraged to apply.
Exactly.
Riot Girls were the suffragists of 90s punk. Brown and black girls, Ramdasha Bikceem, self-published Gunk and Osa Atoe self-published Shotgun Seamstress. Whenever I meet young, Afrofuturist punks today, I tell them to check out archives of those zines and to see James Spooner's, a mixed brother, documentary Afropunk: The Rock n Roll Nigger Experience. My friend CJ is included in that as part of Sista Grrrls, the black and brown girl New York riot coalition.
There are Black People in the Future. - Alisha B. Wormsley, visual artist and filmmaker.
In the 1990s, Sista Grrrls included CJ 'Honeychild', Tamar Kali, Maya Mother Goddess, and Simmie. The whole point was to be visibly black girls who rocked, in our own words, as an expression of black girl punk, avant garde identity. Maya got her inspiration from Tina Turner and Betty Davis. CJ from Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Bo Diddley. Back then, black girls in a punk band, leading any kind of rock band, was rare. Sista Grrls even put on their own shows at CBGBs.
I'm always searching for black and brown girls who rock, even through different genres. I love Nneka, an Afro-German musician and songwriter from Nigeria. She had a big reggae hit there and in Europe with Africans and another with Walking.
Yes
Black, blackness
The Black side of me
C'mon, listen up
In all things we commend ourselves
In much patience, in tribulations, in needs, in distress
In stripes, in imprisonments, in tumult
We belong to God
I had an old friend Seanty, who as an older man, moved north to Shasta County. We tend to migrate in the West, like attractive elk, to more pastoral parts up yonder. Seanty used to follow me around when he was in 9th grade. He could have been crushing when I think about it. I was oblivious to such things at the time. Even holding hands with someone in high school caused asexual anxiety. Touching?! I liked Seanty's character - he was eccentric and fun. We were both film nerds and saw A Nightmare On Elm Street, Dance Craze, and Quadrophenia at the UC Theater. Seanty also had cool style compared to other boys in school - the sharp, Northern Soul mod. He always had love for black people and the culture. He was into funk, soul, and hip hop so deeply, he went on to become part of a DJ collective that did gigs around the Bay.
And you may ask yourself...how? Oh, there are many cultural nuances to the Bay. For example, there's always a Noah, across generations, with soul. The Noah is a black-white boy, the Bay Area's version of Eminem. Rafael Casal is an awesome Noah.
Into the future, Seanty was a good, dear homie. I took a long weekend and went up to Shasta to visit him and his family. In the time we hung out, I caught a contradiction, something I never noticed when we were kids, that came with maturity and self-awareness. Seanty saw black people more as funk gods and goddesses, as camp not as everyday people, writers, and thinkers. There are maybe 5 black people in all of Shasta County, so there was no community for him to connect to. He shared one YouTube video of a 1970s old school, singing preacher in a white suit and big preacher pimp hat.
' Seanty, you know black folks aren't just obscure camp characters in the past, right? '
' Whatchu talkin about, Willis?' he asked in his pitch-perfect Gary Coleman voice. He really sounds like Gary when he does that.
Seanty couldn't engage about James, Nikki, or Malcolm the way he could about Marvin or George, or black thought because he had no idea what that was. He would revert to the get down quotes and funk banter from Car Wash. Seanty is a 1970s black dude born at the wrong time, in the wrong body. That was part of why he moved his family up North. It wasn't just a cheaper part of the state to live. As a middle-aged cool gingerman, he could no longer move through the Bay as he once did, particularly with the younger generations. Young people now don't know Trouble Man or Shaft or Maggot Brain. Seanty had become a middle-aged American white man with a kind of soul expression they couldn't place. They would think he's appropriating, not that it was an expression of himself. We were closer to the past then, we are farther from it now.
At one point Seanty asked if I would consider moving up to Shasta, where there's no traffic, natural beauty, and and an abundance of fish and game bros.
' Dude, you're trippin. ' I said ' It's beautiful up here, but do you not see the goon base with this county? I saw two other black people in Raley's this morning. Culturally it's Idaho. I need to be around black people. '
In high school I had several black boy homies. I was the asexual sister-equal to Derek, AJ, and Scott. They hung out between the slopes near Milvia and Provo Park, across the street from the Berkeley High campus. They were a part of what I called the San Orita Crew, an inside joke for the homies in and out of county jail.
AJ was dating my friend Celine, a blonde Italian girl, in high school. My favorite memory of the two of them, was riding in AJ's Camaro on my 17th birthday on our way to Ruthie's Inn dance night. AJ popped Rick James on the tape deck.
She was only 17, 17 and she was sexy!
Right. I think they were just being nice.
AJ was a cook at Barrington Hall, the notorious UC Berkeley student housing on Dwight Way. There were a lot of good punk shows there, but I couldn't imagine living at Barrington it was so busted - it even smelled busted. Eventually AJ got strung out on crack and never came back from it. He changed drastically and so fast. I always wondered who he could have been if crack never got him. Some things damaged our generation, took us from ourselves and one another - crack, speed, heroin, and AIDS. I lost several friends to all of it. We had too much freedom, I guess. All we were taught was freedom and revolution. I loved each one and had I known how to approach it then, I would have helped them. We all had internal struggles or held secrets that we couldn't express because we were just kids.
Derek was a ladies man and always with a white girl. Black boys have told me me that it can be easier with white girls; one has access and the illusion of protection they themselves don't have. He enters her world, she doesn't enter his. Then his identity gets blurred in the process. No one around him is a reflection of himself. The homies like Derek rarely looked me in the eye in the presence of the white girl. It was a kind of non-verbal cue of understanding. We'd both end up doing community service on a traffic citation, not her. I've never seen a white girl in traffic court in my life - not once.
Scott was a handsome, light-skinned dude and like Derek, a few years older than the rest of us. Sean was into Asian girls. He was known to be an abuser and had been abused himself growing up. He was in the player-pimp game and eventually graduated to trafficking. He had a tumultuous relationship with one friend, who was Japanese-American. One summer he stole her mother's car and drove it to Yosemite where my girl worked in Curry Village housekeeping. Scott once bragged about kicking a dude out of his car at the toll plaza to the Bay Bridge over a disagreement. Scott was the 1980s version of Fillmore Slim, a legendary San Francisco gangster of the bebop era.
Knowing Scott before my girl did, I was a bit concerned. They would break-up and make-up on a continuous cycle for years even after she and we graduated. Being a friend to both of them was too much with the drama. Into the early 90s she sublet her apartment to friends. They were a chill, earthy couple who did a lot of camping and hiking. Early one morning, they were awaken by the FBI who were trying to track Scott down for trafficking across state lines. Nothing will freak hippies out more than an FBI raid before even having a cup of tea.
Scott was on the run from Dragnet for awhile until eventually he turned himself in. He ended up in San Quentin where he found Derek. San Quentin can be tough, but the last stop for the dispossessed, the end of the line in California, is Pelican Bay. Fortunately none of my BHigh homies, that I knew of, ended up there.
Ray Jay was another cat. I didn't know Ray Jay, but I knew of him by association. He was also a part of the San Orita crew. Ray Jay was a big dude, built like a linebacker. My only memory of him was during a house party my neighbor Tom had, as life and teenage chaos played out.
Tom had a roommate Nate, a metalhead surfer from Southern California. Things started swinging to the Gap Band and Prince, then Nate and Ray Jay got into it and a brawl ensued. I had a few friends hanging out at my place because Tom's had gotten too crowded. We heard a repeated thump, thud, thump as the walls shook, then a crash, which was Tom's aquarium, and kids shouting. When I looked through my front door peephole, I saw a stream of kids rush out of Tom's place. A few others jumped over his balcony onto ours to escape the mele.
' Can I come in here?' One kid asked.
'What the fuck is going on?!' I shouted.
' Ray Jay is fighting with some white dude! '
The party was mixed, but most of the kids were Berkeley Black. That's like being a code switching thug-intellectual who shape shifts from hiking by day to all up in the club by night. Nate had called Ray Jay a ( blippity blip derogatory word ) and dropped a bomb on the party train.
Tom tried to break them up as teens ran and spilled out to Grant street, in front of our building. The block was swarmed with 5 BPD cop cars, an overzealous response from the Berkeley Police Department, just a few blocks away. It was a party, not a riot. They shut everything down and arrested Nate, who had a bench warrant in Orange County. I didn't see Ray Jay and thought maybe he fled with friends or his ride or die. Tom's apartment looked like downtown Beirut after a flood, but he was resilient. His mom, an outlaw hippie, had been convicted of trafficking marijuana between the US and Central America. She used weed in her healing practice and once convicted, served mandatory federal time. After her conviction Tom became an activist against mandatory sentencing for non-violent offenders.
Ma was quite a trooper through that long, rowdy night. She may have privately questioned her life choices at having mixed kids with thug-adjacent associations. I don't know. We had more in-depth discussions about how I dressed and keeping the music down than race. She would call us her 'rainbow babies' or 'peanuts' after the Charles Schultz comic strip. To her, her daughters were black and beautiful.
My teen experience was a part of the 1980s Bay Area youthverse. The circumstances and systems of control in our lives usually went in the direction of neglect, addiction, poverty, or incarceration. In 1989, when I was living in New York, 5 black boys, Korey, Antron, Raymond, Kevin, and Yusef were taken in the Central Park jogger case. I don't say they were arrested, because they were taken like the boys in Scottsboro, like Emmett, for their assumed interaction with a white girl.
The Central Park boys, all under 20 at the time, lost their youth, each serving between 8 -13 years for a crime they never committed. It was someone else, a serial rapist white boy who attacked the white girl in Central Park. During the trial, a rich man put a full page ad in several New York newspapers, calling for the death penalty in their case. In 28 years, that man would become the 45th President of the United States. In 2014, the City of New York gave each of the boys a settlement between $7.1 - $12.2 million.
The white girls and I didn't see the future coming. The America we lived in then would change drastically into the future and we would change with it. What they didn't expect and I didn't really consider, is that I wouldn't change as dramatically with age as they did.
Ironic to me now that although I knew I was black, being black would stress me out. It was such a story of struggle in this country; part of the reason why I never wanted kids. That looked like a single mother squabbling in child support court, having to do twice as much only to get half as far. A life of labor and hustle, taking a backseat to the white girl. What I had to figure out was that black is where it's at. I was fortunate to be a part of a history and culture that is layered and exquisite. Folks kept showing me that I had the magic, I just had to access it; get America and the white girl out of my head.
Into the future, I was still androgynous, my style somewhere between a French minimalist concierge and Afrofuturist sherpa. I was used to my face as time creeped up on it. The childlike youthfulness morphed into planes and angels without wrinkles. The hyper-symmetrical face of an older brown woman. I had aged like the Old Man did into adulthood, like his people did before him.
This struck my friends who re-connected with me after years of life. I had changed in mystically black ways.
One friend, who I used to hang out with in goth and new wave underground clubs in the city, said I had turned into a hubba hubba. Okay. On the older person social, she lamented about her weight and dating. She was performative and affected in her hipness and esoteric knowledge. Whenever we messaged one another she seemed annoyed and stoic. She would do the 'good white person anti-racist' schtick. Then she posted something that wasn't: a portrait of a black girl and a white girl painted in the 1820s. The text told a made-up narrative, in a white lady voice, about how they were best friends who loved one another, despite race.
Dude, the black girl was a slave.
That's it. Delete, delete, delete.
I don't engage with such things anymore. I had to stop educating friends about their distortions of history and the truth. I did the same with a white boy friend, who sent me a harsh admonishment in response to my defense of Whoopi after a comment she made about the Jews. They couldn't be identified as Jews in Nazi Germany because they were European like everyone else and had to wear patches to identify themselves. That's not anti-semitic, it's true. He said I was trippin to defend her, another black woman in America, who made an accurate statement about history. It was like a person demanding you're on their side without giving consideration to yours.
Unfuckingfriend. I need to remember the older person social is the devil's work, a cauldron of potential trouble. Grown ass people clocking one another's opinions and acting like 15 year old internet spies. I read something recently that would be refreshing: what if we posted nothing but our failures?
I had a conversation recently about how white girls tend to center themselves in any situation where a cultural shift occurs. Diversity in popular culture and marketing now is a white girl with a black boy, with kids who actually look mixed (I didn't see that until the Cosby Show and A Different World). Is there no other variation of mixed relationships or relationships to black and brown girls in America? Are these depictions for the progressive fetishist Goop market? Who is Hollywood talking to?
My peers and I changed into older adults living in a divided country, busted up by Christo-fascism. The white girls were suddenly uncomfortable with what they've always enjoyed - power, protection, and privilege; earnest to proclaim their allegiance to the left and denounce the right. They started looking at me differently and I started to think differently about myself in relation to them. A 21st century, destructive American conservatism was talking to them, not me.
I wonder if it occurs to anyone in the mainstream that no matter what a person's political values are, all white people represent white power; the standard of an American identity. When I've been abroad, I've never heard a person distinguish Americans between the right or the left, conservative or progressive. I would hear how much they like the show Friends. In Italy they call it Amici. The systemic racism of American society is studied and lectured upon globally.
While living in Guatemala, I stayed in a house with other volunteer working women. Several were from Sweden, Iceland, and Germany. There were two black American girls, myself and Nikki. Nikki was from Connecticut, researching and recording the experiences of Mayan people during the Guatemalan genocide and civil war.
One evening over dinner the European white girls asked us about American culture. Nikki went into an hilarious skit about working
at a kids themed pizza restaurant in high school. She
had to be 'on' and 'fun' all the time for the high maintenance white parents paying hundreds of dollars for their young prince and princesses' birthday bash.
' Hey Timmy! What kind of game do you wanna play today?! It's Timmy day!'
The European white girls howled with laughter at how pretentious and performative we have to be in America to entertain white people with money. Then we go home to be ourselves. In that moment, without being academic at all, Nikki brilliantly described our history and American experience.
During my punk youth I had friends in local bands, attended punk weddings, and sad punk funerals. In the 90s I hung out with Ben, a cutie pie and road manager for Green Day, a few times. He told me about Dookie and how much shit they got from Gilman about getting signed. During one phone chat with Ben, Tre, the drummer, got on the phone and read a sonnet to me. Nerds. I do adore their originality.
Mike, the bassist, had a mixed girlfriend who was a girly girl I worked with in a Berkeley shop. I sometimes struggle with the girly girls; they seem to lack the ability to be autonomous individuals - their lives and schedules centered around the boyfriend-husband, but she was cool. Black and brown girl people exist in all kinds of ways.
When I mentioned I had hung out with Ben several years before, Mike's lovely girlfriend spilled the tea, being that she was Green Day inner circle. She said that Ben's girl cheated on him while they were on tour, during the Woodstock mudslinging chaos show. MTV broadcast that show which was messy and hilarious. Mike got hit by a whole person during their mud set and lost several teeth between the person and security. The band had to take a break from touring so he could come home to have implants done.
I thought Green Day getting signed was a good thing. If it could happen for Tim and Rancid, why not Green Day? They were banned from Gilman for getting signed. It's ironic to me now that every single one of those punks would have been happy to be a rockstar, not slogging it out working at Blondie's, Peets, or the Nature Company like the rest of us clowns. Now our much older, less earnest selves come together to celebrate Green Day.
I think they were one of the best 90s punk bands. Blink 182 were the funniest, although they've since turned into middle-aged Hollywood bros with implanted facelift babes on reality TV shows. Check out my infinity punk pool in the Palisades!
I was so into punk exploration when I was younger, I would go to Survival Research Laboratory shows by myself under overpasses and in warehouses to choke on fumes and mechanical parts. I went to Burning Man for 8 years, drawn by the Death Guild, an industrial art collective that re-created Thunderdome. I have photos of myself and friends posed in sandstorms, dudes in Priscilla Queen of the Desert drag, and a great one of the Thunderdome emcee living his Mad Max dream. I fought a match in the dome too. My opponent, a white girl, bested me in two rounds, but I wasn't bitter. She was a friend and we had a good time in the wilderness. I like the wilderness. Let's go cave hiking and check out the bats! Hide out in the tent while wild boars invade our camp site. Highly recommended for the auditory experience alone. I'm a sensitive person, but I am not a delicate flower.
Into the future, I reconnected with a white girlfriend who was surprised I had become something she didn't expect - a brown woman who hadn't really aged and was an adventure Jedi. The brown girl punk sidekick to her teenage ego was gone.
So, you're moving to Italy now? Well, we're moving abroad too. We don't want our (white) kids growing up in a country like this. How did you learn Spanish? How do you know all these people in Sweden and Iceland? You met in Central America?! You married a Garifuna Belizean? You've been to Haiti?!
Was she biting her pearls? I was getting Babs in the country club energy over here. It doesn't take much for me to get it when someone is less a friend and more like a scorekeeper in the bad bitch race. I withdrew into disappointment. This isn't uncommon as white girls become older American women. It's inevitable, like flipping up their shirt collars to hide their necks and straw gardening hats. I'm always asked if I need a hat.
Inside drag voice. Bitch, not really no. In fact I could be out here with you for hours if you'd like to see my transformation into Foxy Brown, the Queen of Rotisserie Chicken.
I can't maintain a connection or trust with anyone who competes; even if it's just in their head, which it usually is. I'm not competing with anyone, black or white, in a racist, patriarchal society over men or life.
That is for the birds.
Such derision is like the girlmance fight in a romantic comedy; revealing hidden insecurities and jealousies. Then there are tears and reconciliation until one bests the other at life again in some way. That was an old Hollywood narrative structure that has been adapted to contemporary reality TV. The frenemy, girlmance fight is a white woman construct, not a black woman one. All we do is work and hustle. The girlmance squabble is predicated on a life of leisure. Leisure for the black girl throughout our history has been a meal break, sleep, and death. These days I'm a rest and leisure activist. I was inspired by Autumn Breon's character, Esoterica Waste Management. The waste management is racism and sexism.
What black and brown girls may lack in time for American leisure, we rule at hateration. Passed down from generation to generation, with origins in the church, there exists the Hater Goddess. She will put bullshit in your head, such as her devotion to a white god while cussing the black man out. Jesus saves but the brothers don't do anything but stress her out. She will be on the phone across the room, clocking your every move, waiting for a moment to strike. If you spill a cocktail or trip, the Hater Goddess will laugh the loudest. She will scan your body within seconds to assess if you have more body than she does. In my imagination, the Hater Goddess looks like.... Lisa Ray.
Lisa Ray was a superbabe of the 90s hip hop era. She hit the big time in Player's Club, a strip club adventure set in the ATL. Lisa Ray was like the Dorothy Dandridge of hip hop. She parlayed entertainment into a career marrying Caribbean heads of state. She wore white clothes, adored white with red accents, had little white dogs, a white Maybach, and sipped white russians. She was a bad bitch with a butler. In interviews she always had a compelling Hater Goddess story. I would like to hang out with Lisa Ray at a party in the Hamptons and watch her burn it down to the ground.
Got me fucked up with the crystals! Meditate - with my eyes closed - around a bunch of white women? Oh hell no! Tory Burch my black ass! Girl, where the gasoline at?
The Hater Goddess is usually loud and sassy to make sure other people are paying attention. All men to the Hater Goddess are niggas. She'll even say " I got this white nigga on the side.' I doubt she even knows what a man actually is. She could be talking to you and sound rational, but she's actually planting shit starter seeds. The Hater Goddess is the creator of the side-eye and the teeth suck; even the men picked up on that. Do not invite the Hater Goddess to your party, baby shower, or wedding. Do not offer the Hater Goddess liquor or indo under any circumstances. The Hater Goddess will take everyone out.
She can be fun in social situations where anything raunchy is going down. The club! The strip club! Dave & Busters on a Saturday night! Royal Caribbean bubble party! The one thing she will not tolerate is fucking with her money. You can fuck with the niggas, but do not fuck with her money. She loves her money more than she loves herself. The Hater Goddess is a trip, but I understand her. She's not actually fighting anyone - she is resistant to being vulnerable and loved.
Look at this 50 year old baby! Lookin good, girl!
You keepin it tight mama? You ready to get your back blown out?
That is so rude!
You know I'm right! Get those Kunkles in, baby.
You are glowing, mama. You having extra good orgasms. What you dealin with?
Black girls talk the best shit and I love the sound of our laughter. One has to have a degree of backbone for the raunchy cap-compliment in social situations with the Hater Goddess. She does not compliment anyone. Instead she'll mumble, ' ...she think she cute.', then wave across the room with a jovial 'Hey girl!'
I acknowledge the cap-compliment, otherwise I zip it. I know the score. Do not tell the Hater Goddess anything. No names and no details. She's either going to come for him or check him on social, then he gets upset. Damn, dude why you gotta put our business in the street with that chickenhead?
It's too much.
The genetic disposition of one's state. As older women, the white girls and I had afflictions relative to our race: breast cancer for them and fibroids for me. I was more concerned about the other 'black diseases': high blood pressure, diabetes, and hypertension. But no, fibroids came hard for me; my body a host to alien life forms with their own vascular systems. It was so bad, when I saw the ultrasound I knew I was headed for the uterus big chop. And you know what that did? I got skinnier.
In America, the hyper symmetrical face-black girl slim paradigm is just asking for shit. The single digit size is social currency in the male attention clown circus. Dudes come out of the cracks while women scrutinize you as though you're a dick hunter there to take all the dick of man.
Do you have any idea how lonely I am?
No, no they don't. I got off the girly girl train after elementary school. I'm good. Thanks! Being a fat-brown-girl-punk teen, I knew how to be invisible and alone, which saved me from considerable romantic drama. If not for that then, I would not be the person I am now. I still adore punk too, generation after generation. The lifestyle part, well I've simmered down considerably. I'm like Auntie Punk - the mixed Mary Poppins with a blowout. Would you like some tea with half a spoonful of sugar? I'm into tea, but chill on the sugar.
The change between the white girls and I, through time, became more amplified as Proud Boys took over the Capital, black people were shot down, ambushed, choked to death, and immigrants were incarcerated. California's response to that was its regular exercise in cognitive dissonance:
Berkeley Stands United Against Hate. The well-intentioned bumper sticker.
Hey, lady! Get on the Micro-aggression Party Train! Reinforce your blatant ignorance and amplified insecurities today! You can apply your micro-aggression antics anywhere - at work, at school, even on social media.
That was nothing but a modern day lynching! Profoundly misguided liberal elite woman.
You're safe here! Mmmm....
I want you to be successful. What does that have to do with you, benevolent Queen of Whiteness?
You're not black black. You're only half. You don't talk black. How exactly does one who is not black at all, know how to measure what any degree of what black is?
I told Lisa this a thousand times! Cc: several other white women colleagues, who she doesn't talk to like that, for that extra micro-aggression, dehumanizing gut punch. If that doesn't work, whine to the white men in power. She was also a liberal progressive.
Friend a brown woman you don't know and stalk her page for interactions with her black and white dude friends you want!
I'm usually monitored for my interactions with people with dicks. I'm not a player at all, I'm just one of the homies with universal jokes.
What I appreciate is that we don't have to pull up to white girls on whiteness anymore. I'm not afraid of rejection. I have been rejected repeatedly in my own country while laboring and paying taxes into it. I have lost jobs, time, opportunity, and my peace of mind, at the hands of white girls. I live and that makes them mad. I am loved and that makes them mad. I'm not afraid and that makes them mad. If I gave them a kind word, they discard it, because the thing they want the most, they can never have. I've lost several friends since 2015 because they didn't have the capacity to understand my vulnerability and rage. They didn't see me as a brown girl; the first beautiful thing I was given and the first thing I present to the world, before I even say a word.
Over the years, through reflection and experience, I realized when I was young, I never belonged to the white girls the way I thought I did. The whole time I belonged to the black and brown girls who have always treated me like their people, not the enemy, or an obstacle to one's desire. A sisterperson trying to keep her head up through the thick and thin of a hard place.
Good morning, ladies! Let's close the circle. We give thanks to Lady Baduatron, for ourselves and that we are still here. There Are Black Girls in The Future. Are you ready to fly? On three....
Do you know I'm watching your colours keep flashing
I look through your eyes
Grey is for waiting not knowing
You're going to be by my side
Red is for warning and blue is the colour
And yellow is love
Black is the colour of night
When you're lying with me
Are you ready to fly
Can you leave the world behind, baby baby
Are you ready to fly
Together we'll reach for the sky
Rozalla, Are You Ready to Fly, 1992
