When Do We Escape? When Can We Breathe?

Every time I bring up the scary R word people say, ‘If the roles were reversed.’ So, lets reverse them. You grow up in a world where your favorite characters don’t look like you but, you love these characters. You look up to them. Think about a character that you held dear to you when you were a child and now imagine if they looked absolutely nothing like you. Imagine that none of them did. Imagine trying to dress up as your favorite superhero and the only thing people can say to you is that your hair isn’t curly enough or your skin is too light to be them. That would crush your spirit, wouldn’t it? Little five-year-old you that can’t be anything but ‘the bad guy’, a caricature, loud character, annoying character, side character, suppotive character. Then you finally get a main character that looks like you and they turn into an animal mid movie. So, what was the point then? You barely got to see yourself and the rest of your community. Leaving you to believe that you’re not allowed to escape into a fictional world because you don’t exist in any of these worlds. The only way you can exist is if you’re not yourself.

Anytime Disney releases a movie that focuses on a black lead and features Black culture the main character(s) always turns into something within the first few minutes of the movie. In ‘Soul’ the main character (Joe) becomes a ghost and in ‘Princess and the Frog’ princess Tiana (the first black Disney princess) becomes a frog. So, my question is why can’t we ever just be ourselves on the screen? Is it really that hard to recognize Black people as people?

I believe this is Disney’s way of throwing the Black community a bone. Put us on the screen for a couple minutes so we’ll shut up about representation but, a whole movie that features us being us is just asking for too much. Black people have a history of being shunned from the screens. Then when we’re on screen without turning into an animal or ghost, we’re monoliths. As if every single Black person was a copy of another. Black people are people and like any other person, we aren’t all the same.

The only time we are allowed full screentime in a fictional or non-fictional movie is if we are in the hood, getting shot by the cops (ie. The Hate you Give, Seven Seconds), or we’re slaves (ie. 12 years a slave). As if that’s all we could ever be. I’m not saying that all of these movies aren’t important because they are and we should keep sharing these stories but, stories about us in fantasy, superhero stories or sci-fi are important too. Why can’t we be elves, wizards, superheroes, faye, or sprites? Then if we are any of those things, we still manage to get another caricature character. I would honestly prefer that the writer stay away from creating Black characters if they’re going to be racist. It’s like throwing us scraps and screeching ‘Are you happy now?” as if you did us a favor by acknowledging our humanity. If someone did that to you, you would be quite reluctant to eat too, even if you had to.

While there are many shows that did feature Black people as heroes, they either weren’t as mainstream or popular or they still managed to screw the character up somehow. I used to watch Static Shock when I was a child, but how many people know about Static Shock? I love Storm but why is she five shades lighter in the movies as opposed to the comic books? (ie. X-men First Class) Is blackness and melanin that bad that we can’t ever have anything that shows people that look like me? Even when the presentation is good typically, the light skinned Black people get the roles. Which is a result of colorism that stems from a person of color’s closeness to whiteness but that’s another conversation.

Now after pondering and wondering for decades about the time when Black nerds will be fed their fair share of fantasy and fiction on a mainstream platform, Black Panther hit theatres and we bugged out. Rightfully so.

When we heard that this movie was featuring nearly an all-Black cast... When we heard that this movie had many Black folk working behind the scenes. When we heard Kendrick Lamar was gonna be on the soundtrack, we were ecstatic. We made jokes about bringing soul food to the theatre. We got dressed up in African themed clothing and we cosplayed as characters from the movie. We even dressed up like members of the Black Panther Party. (I wore an afro with a dashiki). But why’d we do all of this? Why’d we act like happy excited kids when this movie came out?

Well think about it…this is the first time we saw ourselves on screen in a popular mainstream movie with a majority Black cast of superheroes. No stereotypical baby mama. No cops shooting us and watching us trudge through a court case where we know how the story ends already. No tragic story about another Black person losing their life to drugs. And no one mysteriously turned into an animal or creature. It was just a really cool superhero movie. It was the first time we got our escape. White people get escape all the time. They get Harry potter, The original Avengers, Star Wars, and many many more stories. So many that I can’t even name them all. Every time I picked up a fantasy story the characters were white as if it was this foreign concept that a mystical creature that isn’t real could have darker skin.

Now don’t get me wrong Black Panther didn’t just ignore our struggles either. They talked about our stolen culture, they talked about Black people who are disenfranchised all over the world. In fact, T’challa (The Black Panther) came back to support one of our communities (Oakland) by the end of the movie. However, the movie wasn’t just about that it was mainly about introducing us to a new superhero. It’s not that we don’t want to acknowledge the burdens that are forced upon us. It just becomes annoying when we are limited to just our burdens. It’s annoying to have someone throw your problems up in your face every time you want to have fun, is it not? That’s how we felt. We wanted to be treated like the humans we are and have our fun too. We wanted to nerd out and talk about superheroes. We don’t always want to talk about the fact that one of us could die tomorrow because of our skin color.

People read and watch fantastical stories because they want to escape the reality that they are constantly being bombarded by. Well for us that reality is watching each other die and get no justice. Its watching Black girls go missing and no one blinks an eye. It’s seeing Black fathers and brothers get caught up in drugs because of conditions we’re forced into. It’s the unhealthy relationships that stem from white supremacy.

That’s our reality, we see it. We live it, we breathe it. We know. I know. We get it. We are in it, and we feel it constantly. Yes, this has its place, and we should continue to be loud with those stories, but balance is key, and we don’t have that.

The dis-proportionate amount of Black trauma stories suffocates us like nicotine does to the lungs. Do you really think we want to keep smoking the trauma cigs til it kills our spirits on the inside? That’s why we need escapism. We need to breathe. Then when we do get the chance to breathe, we are side and supporting characters and if we’re main characters we either die or turn into something. So yeah, we get a chance to breathe but stuff like that is like putting a plastic bag over our heads and saying, “What? You’re still breathing.” Yeah, I am but it’s really hard to do that under plastic.

As a darker skinned Black girl, I was tired of only seeing girls like me as the ghetto undesirable friend. (ie. Pam in Martin or Dijonay in The Proud Family) I was tired of seeing girls that look like me as the annoying baby mother. I was tired of being the side character or the comic relief who dies mid show or movie, all for the sake of the White main character. I was tired of being the one who had to take all the low blow jokes on like a champ. In Black Panther I saw a dark-skinned Black woman leading an army of more women who looked like me. I saw a romance between two dark skinned Black people without all the stereotypes. I saw a dark-skinned Black woman who was a spy. That meant so much to me and many other Black girls of all ages.

I’m a Black nerd (AKA a blerd). I love fantasy and superheroes and it sucked to see that for some reason I couldn’t be any of those things, but White people could. Was I only good enough to further someone else’s story, or to just be traumatized while taking bullets for everyone? How’s that fair? As a kid I felt like I couldn’t pretend to be any superhero but storm because that’s all I had and like I said her actress (Halle Barry) is a lot lighter than I am.

This is why we need to push for representation. This is why when I create stories there is always a darkskin Black girl as the lead character. This is why I write romantic relationships between two dark skinned Black people. I want my community to know that you are wanted too, you are beautiful too, you can be a wizard or superhero too. I want darker skinned Black girls like me to be allowed to dream past the galaxies, just like White people do. We need to because living in our reality is enough to stress us to sickness. Our escapism is important, because we need it just as much as everyone else does.

We need an escape. We need to cope...

We need to breathe...