This Is Major by Shayla Lawson

Author:Shayla Lawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Intraracial Dating

ACT I

“It feels counterintuitive to suggest that straight black men as a whole possess any sort of privilege—particularly the type of privilege created for and protected by whiteness,” says Damon Young in his Very Smart Brothas article “Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People.” “But assessing our privilege,” Young continues, “considers only our relationship with whiteness and with America. Intraracially . . . our relationship to and with black women is not unlike whiteness’s relationship to us.”

Perhaps. You take a moment to assess.

SCENE 1

YOU are sitting in a bar in New England that is doing its best impression of one in Manhattan’s Financial District. The cast includes a woman from TURKEY you have recently befriended and her boyfriend, a native of MISSISSIPPI. He derides YOU, saying you are just like my mother, when YOU do not respond to a magic trick he wastes on YOU involving sparklers and a flick of the wrist.

MISSISSIPPI: See, that’s why I have never been able to date a black girl!

YOU are dumbfounded by the exclamation in his statement that suggests YOU have just agreed with him about black girls.

MISSISSIPPI: See, I was born and raised with all black women: my mom, my sister, my grandma—

MISSISSIPPI continues to elucidate as if this biological predicament only affects black men.

—I could never see black women as anything but—black women are so trained to act like your mom, you know—I couldn’t be free with a black girl, you know . . . like, be a kid and just explore.

YOU Exit. But the Scene persists.

SCENE 2

YOU are in Portland having some version of the MISSISSIPPI conversation over and over again with men who barely interest you. One time, you take a man home, convinced that curing him of his white supremacist intimacy is your patriotic duty. But your allegiance to this flag soon bores you. For a time, YOU find yourself beside a web designer from ANTIGUA—hoping to find a less burdensome self-loathing in dark men from outside the Light Continent.

ANTIGUA: You are the only black woman I’ve been able to connect with in this city.

YOU: I know.

YOUR tone is chiding, but he’d considered this a compliment, so he looks surprised.

The two of you move to the bedroom. ANTIGUA decides to pleasure YOU unprompted. Proud of his efforts he begins Milly Rocking in front of your mirror; there is no music. A self-impressed beatbox, he repurposes the lyrics of Kanye West’s “Fade.”

ANTIGUA (SINGS): “You talkin’ bout a real-ass nigga . . .”

YOU, half-come, watch the strange display of your bedroom through the sheets, half shielding your eyes as the stage lights go low.

YOU date through your designer phase and your DJ phase, your executive phase, your phase in which everyone reminds you of a skateboarding Malcolm Gladwell and a phase in which everyone looks like Tyler, the Creator—DJs and executives alike. YOU hook up. YOU make out. YOU dinner-and-movie. YOU Netflix-and-chill. YOU “let’s just wait.” YOU can count on one finger the number of black men who can rightfully say they have been your boyfriend.

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