Episode 04: Black is Not a Monolith, Part 1: To Thine Own Self Be True
Welcome to the Shy Girls Finish Last podcast. I’m Nicole Lathen, a certified shy Black girl. I hope you’ve had a restful day. Let’s get into it.
Hello beautiful people, thank you for joining me. Ya’ll, it’s been the pits. I didn’t mean to go so long between updates. Life been life-ing and ya girl been trying to hold on! I feel like Spongebob in that pizza episode, when he was holding onto that rock and the wind was blowing.
Anywhoooo, I hope to get on a more regular posting schedule. I didn’t start this just to flake out, you know? I’ve been toiling away outlining this vampire novel for my follow up story, and ya’ll. Not to toot my own horn, but I can’t wait until you meet Josette and Laurent. That’s all Im’a say!
So today, I want to talk about what “Black is Not a Monolith” means to me, my journey, and how this theme is a huge motivator for me to write. When I was tossing this idea in my head, I realized this would be too big to cover in one episode, so let’s call this a mini-series. This is “Black is Not a Monolith, Part 1: To Thine Own Self Be True”.
“You’re an Oreo!”
“Gimme yo’ Black card!”
“You talk so white.”
“You’re pretty well spoken.”
“Why are you so quiet?”
“She wanna have melanin so bad.”
If any of these statements triggered you, then congrats! You’re in the right place. If it didn’t, well, maybe by the end of this you’ll see how the other half lives. Let’s keep in mind that I’m no historian. I won’t have everything one hundred percent correct, but I try. I am writing from the perspective of a Black American so forgive some non-inclusive language.
What is Blackness? Can we really define it? Can we recognize it? Do all of us identify as Black?
We can trace some of the history of it. The Spanish were the first ones to refer to us collectively as negro, the spanish word for black. As the transatlantic slave trade got underway, “Black” became a catchall term for anyone darker than them. The English and later the Americans co-opted the term and now we’re “The Blacks” as if that term can truly encompass everything that we are.
Before the slave trade, we had individual identities. Some were aboriginal, indigenous, African, and what have you. We had varied traditions, cultures, religions, and languages. After the slave trade, the powers in charge stripped that individualism away.
Sure, our ancestors managed to keep some of those cultures alive by practicing beneath Catholicism or passing down oral traditions. However, our identity became a collective identity that effectively separated us into Them vs Us. Other cultures retained their sense of individualism and nationalism, quick to remind you that they’re Guatemalan, Mexican, Japanese, or Italian.
Over the centuries, everyone wanted to divest themselves of how Black people are treated. They recognized and acknowledged that Black people are treated horrifically and they made it a mission to not be treated as such as well. Instead of, y’know, helping us. People found new ways to separate themselves from the idea of Blackness. They created ways to legally claim the status and protection of whiteness while remaining Latino, Spanish, European, and so on.
Because we had this global mesh of skin tone and identity, it is hard to define Blackness. Not all Black people identify as Black. Not all Americans identify as African-American. Not all Black people are from the South. To understand “Black is Not a Monolith”, you have to accept that “Black” is not a catchall term and cannot apply to all people.
However, we share The Struggle, so it’s a term we have to deal with. It’s one of the only terms that we have in order to address larger issues like racial discrimination, police brutality, and colorism. The issue comes down to when you’re dealing with Black people, you can’t treat everyone the same. You can’t assume that every Black person has the same story.
There are some things that we share. Most of us in the US grew up religious, were woken up on Saturday mornings with church music or Anita Baker, had strict grandmothers, or asked for McDonald’s and received the famous, “We got McDonald’s at home”. We had parents who would barge into our rooms and demand to know what we were up to because it was too quiet. We didn’t have a concept of an allowance because “money don’t grow on trees”.
However, not all Black Americans had the same childhood. Someone born in Los Angeles or New York would have a different upbringing than someone born in Atlanta or Michigan. And this is just America. There are Black people in nearly every country in the world who don’t identify as Black and have had a different upbringing altogether.
And that’s only nationality. What about other labels people have adopted? We have Black queer people, cis people, Black autistic people, Black introverts, Black extroverts, tall Black folk, short Black folk; those who listen to rock, emo, R&B, or rap music. There are nuances within Black people that get overlooked largely thanks to slavery and largely thanks to people who refuse to see a Black person as a person. Our humanity was taken during the slave trade and we have a hard time gaining that back because we can’t agree on who does and does not belong in the club.
“Everybody wanna be Black until it’s time to be Black.” That is a quote you have either heard or said yourself. To me, it refers to the fetishization of the Black body. In the previous episodes, I outlined how stereotypes negatively impact Black people, Black women specifically, and how those stereotypes continue to push us down.
Other cultures love Black culture. They love our music, our language, our art, our expression, our fashion, and our “swag”. They want to say the n-word so badly and love saying, “I’m Blacker than you”.
But when a Black person is killed by police, the media and our so-called allies want to throw up their hands. Maybe that person deserved it. Maybe he or she shouldn’t have argued with the police. When a Black person screams out for their mother while they’re getting murdered, the same people who claimed to be Blacker than you suddenly claim their true nationality more. When a Black person experiences discrimination for how they wear their hair, then all the co-workers who touched and remarked on our hair are suddenly silent and don’t see the big deal.
Everyone wants to steal Tiktok dances, story ideas, or music beats from Black creatives, ignore any type of credit, and get famous off of the backs of Black folk. Every time Black people come up with a new slang term, it gets used and abused by other people, mostly white people, and then co-opted into “Gen-Z slang”. Have you ever truly stopped to think why slang tends to change at the speed of light?
It’s because Black people constantly have to change and adapt just to have something for us. For us, by us, for our use only. We want something to be just for us. Just like other races get to have something just for them. We coined the term “woke” to tell other Black people to wake up and recognize that we need to work together. It got abused so much in 2020 during the protests and during Covid that it means the complete opposite now. It’s a dog whistle term white supremacists use in order to cry foul at representation in the media.
At its core, “Black is Not a Monolith” just means you can’t judge all Black people by all Black standards. If a Black person tells you how they identify, accept it. Live with it. Respect their right to it. Because you don’t get to define someone’s Blackness or how they participate in it.
I feel like we are so defensive and protective of Blackness because we literally have everything taken from us. The minute we invent a dance move, a white person steals it. The minute we use a new term, it’s snatched away. The minute we congregate for longer than a second, the police are called. We may not know what Blackness is, but we know what it isn’t. We know that when someone isn’t truly for us, they are kicked out of the collective club and shunned.
The problem with that is that we kick out our own people more often than we kick out other races. We have to have a community mindset because Black people are open and welcoming and nurturing at our core. We want to belong. We want to include people. We want to experience life. We want to experience freedom. Freedom in a way we had long, long before the slave trade.
We want to invite everyone to the cookout. It’s become a running joke where if a white person can catch some rhythm, we want them at the cookout. If a white person stands up for us, we want them at the cookout. But when a Black person “speaks white” or is a “nerd” or is “shy”, then they can’t be in the club. They don’t get to be Black. They don’t get the invite to the cookout because they’re “other” and not a “proper Black”.
We can accept Black people when they fall into certain stereotypes. We can accept Black girls who are loud, proud, extroverted, or Black men who have tattoos, bump loud music, and sag their pants. But we can’t accept a bi-racial person, a shy Black girl, a non-binary, someone into polyamory, or a nerdy Black man. We look down on Black people who may be different. They speak more “proper”, they don’t sag, they’re into classical music or they’re a ballerina. They prefer their hair straight or in an afro or a fade. Suddenly all that courtesy we extend to non-Blacks is non-existent when someone doesn’t fit our idea of Blackness.
And I feel like a lot of this starts at home. We’re raised with this Blackness hanging over our heads and whether or not we fit into the club. Black boys are sat down at younger and younger ages and are given the talk about what to do when they leave the house. Black kids have the magic stolen from them far too young that there are separate rules for them.
I’m light-skinned, I know, and I don’t make it any easier by avoiding the sun like a real vampire. I know light-skinned people are given an advantage over dark-skinned people and I have to be mindful about that. That still doesn’t exempt me from The Struggle.
I got all the light-skinned jokes, house maid jokes, Oreo jokes, and accused of wanting to be a white girl because I listen more to emo bands than rap groups. I actually lost a friend over this very same debate because she accused me of not wanting to be Black because I didn’t want to go to a conference on this subject.
At the time, I felt like the media was to blame. How can we move forward as a people if we’re never shown that we can? The previous episodes highlighted the issues with Black characters and what Hollywood thinks of us. We get the catchall representation full of struggle and drama. Which, okay, that is allowed to exist but it shouldn’t be the only thing that exists. The rare times we get proper representation, it’s never really celebrated. It’s often found in sci-fi or fantasy, genres not many pay attention to. That’s why representation matters. We get to see all sides to Black people. Our sum does not only equal comedies, rom-coms centered around the divide between Black men and women, or cheesy horror movies.
Maybe it’s my tiny tin hat, but I’m not sure if the powers in charge think that if we see better that we’ll suddenly rise in a revolution. Bro, if we wanted revenge, we would have been ran them hands. Black people just want to be left alone. But we can’t agree on what that looks like. One type of Black person or experience is not mutually exclusive with another.
We spend too much time policing what is and isn’t Black, gaining a type of superiority for being accepted in the club and having the privilege of excluding others, and inviting people into our community that just want to use our culture to be “cool”.
Maybe you grew up in a household where no one spoke positively about Black skin. Maybe you’re light-skinned and grew up the butt of certain jokes. “That’s the light-skinned in you”. Maybe you’re dark-skinned and were told that you were ugly because of it. “Can’t even see you with a flashlight”. Someone called you ghetto, accused you of being white, too nerdy to be cool, too cool to be nerdy. Whatever it is, someone told you that you didn’t get to be Black because of xyz. And that hurts. That leaves scars. We grow up with a twisted view on Blackness trying to escape what we were born into. Because we’re taught that it’s an ugly thing.
My family didn’t really discuss race. We had the occasional, “it’s because we Black” gripe but we never officially sat down and talked about it. I got accused of wanting to be white so badly, well hell, I almost believed it myself. Almost. I just knew that I was going to end up with a white boy because it seemed like I wasn’t the right kind of Black girl for the type of Black boys I was interested in.
I listened to emo bands and rock bands because the lyrics tended to hit harder as a lonely girl and TV became my constant companion. I rarely saw myself on screen because the type of shows and movies I was interested in all starred white people in their lily white world. I had to suspend the idea of Blackness otherwise I wouldn’t have anything to watch.
The few characters I could identify with were Penny Proud or Raven Baxter. These were my type of women. They were weird, loud, unpopular, and goofy, but still defended their Blackness. They held onto it while still being labeled “other”. And though I didn’t know it at the time, that started my journey with just accepting who I am.
The more people accused me of not wanting to be Black, I had to think about why they thought that. Maybe they thought that me embracing science fiction and fantasy, singing along to Fall Out Boy or My Chemical Romance, wearing skinny jeans and graphic tees meant that I wanted to reject my Blackness. Why? Black people invented rock music. Black people made skinny jeans cool. My engagement in those things didn’t mean that I didn’t also enjoy trap music, or twerking, or kickbacks. But to only associate those things with being Black is a huge disservice to Black people.
It wasn’t until college and that falling out with that friend that I had to define Blackness for myself. I am Black. I can’t change my skin tone. I can’t control what a slave owner did to my enslaved Black ancestor. At the end of the day, if we both faced the cops, they’d shoot me down too.
I simply have different interests. Not better interests, not elevated interests, just different. And that’s not a bad thing. That doesn’t mean I reject your idea of Blackness. I was raised to treat others how I wanted to be treated. My philosophy has always been about acceptance and tolerance. I don’t have to like your lifestyle. I don’t have to like the company you keep, the people you take to bed, or the foods you like. But I respect your right to it.
We spend so long fighting for freedom and tolerance and acceptance on a large scale, that we forget it starts more locally. It starts with you. We forget that we are, right now, free. I’m free to write and share this podcast. I’m free to write a book with a girl that looks and acts like me. I’m free to hop in my car and drive to New York if I wanted to. I’m free right now. I accept myself right now.
I accept my Blackness. Part of that acceptance is the fundamental understanding that not every Black-identifying person is the same as me. I say there are not enough stories about soft Black girls who are nerdy, plus sized, introverted, or different and still get the conventionally attractive billionaire in the end. It’s not a joke, a bet, or a challenge. They love a plus size Black woman down. Those are the stories I want to explore. Because those are the stories I resonate with. It does not mean that urban books that primarily take place in the hood or have struggle love is bad. It simply means you get to enjoy what you want to enjoy, while I enjoy what I want to enjoy. And that doesn’t make me anti-Black to want something different.
I do not get to define your Blackness or tell you how to engage with it. You have to figure out how you identify with it and live in your truth. Stand on business about it. Stop clowning your friends as often about liking anime, traveling to other countries, going to the club every night, or going to takeovers. We want to say Black is Not a Monolith, until we see a Black person not “acting Black” or “talking Black”.
What even is “acting Black” or “talking Black”? Why is my Blackness boiled down to how I communicate, dance, or based on how many hood movies I’ve seen? My family is always pointing out how much I don’t like hood movies. I don’t want to be reminded of struggle in my fantasy life. I want to turn my brain off and just enjoy it. I want to enjoy watching a character face obstacles different from me. I want to watch free Black folk for a moment. But how many instances of free Black folk do we really get?
The few examples we have of free Black people is maybe Black celebrities. That comes with its own set of problems but if we look at people like Denzel or Will Smith, both made careers in the film industry and raised their kids as such. Jaden and Willow Smith are free to explore what they’re interested in. Yes, it looks funny to the majority of us. But that’s what living authentically and standing on business looks like.
Black people have to have a certain outlook about things. We have to laugh to keep from crying. We have to crack jokes to show our love. No one is saying to stop that. But add in praise along with those jokes. Let the person on the other side of the joke know that at the end of the day, all Black is beautiful.
All Black is beautiful.
What you consider ghetto is fun to someone else. What you consider uppity is stability to someone else. What you consider unattractive is gorgeous to someone else. The sooner we accept our interests and stand on business about it, the better we’ll be able to work together.
This is why I got into writing these kinds of stories. This is why I joined that writing community and passed around stories from all walks of life. It helped me appreciate the nuances and individuality of Blackness. This is what makes being a reader the best thing in the world.
I get to experience and read about Black women of all shapes and sizes, Black men with different temperaments and styles, loving on each other and in community with each other and it has absolutely elevated how I identify with Blackness. I love being Black. I would never trade this for anything in the world.
My goal has always been to share soft Black imagery and find others seeking soft Black imagery. The world is cruel enough as it is. I want to escape. I want to escape with different kinds of characters. I want Black Marvel without saying it’s Black Marvel. I just want Marvel with Black folk. I want Black Star Wars or Star Trek without saying it’s Black Star Wars or Star Trek. I just want Star Wars and Star Trek with Black folk. I want Black rom-coms without saying it’s a Black rom-com. I just want a rom-com with Black folk in it.
I’m not rejecting other types of Blackness. I’m not calling anything else trash or ghetto or crying about it online that it shouldn’t exist. If people want comedies set in the hood or realistic rom-coms, I respect your right to it. All I ask is that you respect the right for me to enjoy Marvel or Lord of the Rings. It doesn’t make me anti-Black. It just means I’m not a monolith. I do not represent all Black-identifying people.
I represent one type of Black person. One type of Black girl. And I want to find others like me and show them that I see them too. We don’t have to be happy with crumbs all the time. We can have more. We’re free to want more.
If you enjoyed this episode or it made you think or it sparked a conversation, please let me know! Leave me a comment!
Thank you for listening, ya’ll! And while you’re here, don’t forget to check out more on my website nicolelathen.com. You can find me on Instagram as @nicolelathenwrites. Be on the lookout for my upcoming novel, “With These Words” about a shy Black girl finding the love and strength to fight for the future she wants.
See you next time for "Black is Not a Monolith, Part 2: All Skinfolk ain’t Kinfolk". The only people we should shun out of the club are the ones who don’t truly support us.
And remember, Black girls deserve to be seen.