You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain

by Phoebe Robinson

but the point is that playful lingo is necessary because calling a vagina by its given anatomical name makes people uncomfortable.

Pussies, excuse me, vaginas, shouldn’t be the symbol of “bad” behavior; the symbol should be Donald Trump and his Cheetos-dust skin tone. Furthermore, vaginas are not weak or scary. They’re amazingly strong. And they’re self-cleaning. Basically, women have a Whirlpool dishwasher in their pants at all times. That’s some goddamned wizardry! Screw Harry Potter! Why isn’t J. K. Rowling writing a book about the magic of the vajeen and calling it what I call mine: Dolly Parton and the Coat of Many Colors? BTdubs, I call my vagina “Dolly Parton and the Coat of Many Colors”—sorry, you can’t unknow that about me—because vajeens, much like mood rings, change color based on mood and arousal. The more you know!

Remember Republican representative Todd Akin? The one who actually believes that if a woman is “legitimately raped” (whatever that means), her body will just “shut that thing down” and not get pregnant? Right, Todd. Because a woman’s body is magical and can make unwanted sperm go bye-bye if the woman wishes it away while rubbing a Sacagawea coin.

Dunking is both joyful and magical, like the feeling you get when you eat a really good piece of ham hock in a bowl of collard greens that was whipped up by a portly ethnic woman in a kitchen that’s a skosh too small and a tad too humid.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to working with you, and I’m even more jazzed about taking really long and unprofessional lunch breaks because working in an office kind of sucks. Not sure how you do it, but that’s why you’re the president and I’m just a lowly executive. Wow, I don’t know about you, but I have a strong feeling that we’re going to make a great team. A team in which you do all of the work, à la Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls, while I just look really cute, like all the other people in the Pussycat Dolls. Who else was in the Pussycat Dolls? Exactly. Am I going to ride your coattails to financial success like they did Nicole’s? Of course. Will you eventually grow to resent me because I’m practically dead-weight, the way Nicole probably does the other Pussys? Naturally.

Finding out you’re a token is like when on Maury, the women learn that the guy they thought was the father is not the father, so the ladies run off set and throughout the Maury Povich studios for a place to hide, but they can’t find one because every room they go into has a cameraman, so the women finally collapse onto a dusty futon near the parking garage and scream, “It’s not true! It’s not true!” Being The Black Friend is like that but times 1,000.

You’re constantly treated like a physical manifestation of the “You Might Also Like” section on Amazon.com (but only for “black people stuff,” obvs): “Hey, Pheebs, I just listened to Kendrick Lamar’s album on Spotify. Who else should I check out? Childish Gambino? Big Sean?”

Someone says to you, “I wish I was black because then I would be a really good dancer/have a great wardrobe/tell people to kiss my black ass and it would make sense,” and you’d rather hurl your body into outer space à la George Clooney in Gravity than listen to another second of this foolishness. #LiteralDeathIsBetterThanAWhitePersonSayingTheyWouldGiveUpTheirPrivilegeToDanceTheSoulTrainLine

If your white buddy treats you and the black coworker they know like two leftover socks from a load of laundry that are roughly the same size and color, but clearly weren’t sold together, aka they decide you and his coworker need to date because that person is also black.

Take a shot of tequila. Or two. Or three. Whatever it takes to make you feel like you’re being covered in Anita Baker kisses.

Do Not Start Any Friendships with White People during the Summer Months This may seem extreme, but hear me out. Inevitably, at some point during the summer, a white person will say to you, “Haha. I’m blacker than you,” after she gets a tan and presses her arm against yours like she’s doing a paint swatch comparison at Home Depot. This is not a good way to begin a friendship. You’ll feel weird while your new pal will feel content in finding the one black person required to conduct this color test; therefore, no other black friends are necessary. And you know what that means: You’re The Black Friend. So skip this awkwardness and wait until October to befriend some white peeps when you two can bond over pumpkin spice lattes.

Often, we will not defend ourselves against micro-aggressions for fear of being labeled “the angry black woman.”

If someone is going to be racist toward you, BURDEN them. Place upon their racist little shoulders all the reasons why their trifling comments will not be tolerated. And if they fire back that you’re too sensitive or that you’re angry or that you’re just out to make everything about race, that’s when you tell them to send all complaints and comments to my e-mail address: LookingForAFuckToGiveButCouldNotFindOneSoGirlBye@gmail.com.

While I understand that half the time people are merely regurgitating whatever nonsense they heard from family, friends, and the media without thinking, it doesn’t change the fact that they repeated it, so they cannot deny culpability. So it is up to you and me to call out this behavior every time it transpires. If the offenders are good people who made a mistake, I will allow you to find the tiniest of fucks to give about their damaged feels. And if after you present that minuscule fuck and they still don’t get why they’re in the wrong, or try to defend themselves, then, by all means, tell them to e-mail me at the above address and I’ll educate them myself.

Do Not, I Repeat, DO NOT Cosign Nonblack People Singing the N-Word around You Because Y’all Are Listening to Rap Because you will now be the go-to black person when they need approval to do other ignorant, racially insensitive things. So if anyone tries to get away with rapping the N-word to your face, I give you permission to snatch all the hairs off their chinny chin chins as well as the rest of their body. And they can spend the rest of the evening trying to piece their hair back on themselves like they have to papier-mâché together a piñata last minute for a quinceañera they didn’t know they were hosting.

Instead, do what I do when someone asks me to sum up the opinions of the nearly forty-five million black people who live in this country: Ctrl + alt + del the conversation and shut it down like it’s a Dell computer.

if I wear white people makeup foundation, I won’t look like I woke up like dis, I will look like I motorboated a mound of cocaine, Tony Montana–style.

we discussed how the entertainment industry is simply more difficult for women of color. This is not a refutable fact. Just look at who’s being cast in TV shows and movies, and it’s apparent that many roles tend to go to actors who are the color of the doves that cried in that Prince song.

In regular old life, people take group photos to post on Instagram without the help of professional lighting. And I find that a photo of myself with a bunch of white peeps quickly turns into a game of “one of these things is not like the other.” Essentially, the picture comes off like the beginnings of a solar eclipse. I’m all dark and shadowy and encroaching on the face of the white person next to me. This is not a good look. But this is where the test comes in. If the white people checking out the photo keep it real by saying, “You know, let’s take that over again,” then you know they have your back and want everyone to look good. If, on the other hand, they look in their pocketbook and find nary a fuck to give about them looking amazing in the picture while you look like the inverse of The Nightmare before Christmas skeleton head, then you are The Black Friend, and not their actual friend.

At the last Black People of America meeting, we reviewed the Official List of Things White People Shouldn’t Do to Black Folk. Obviously, the biggies—no bigotry, slavery, racially motivated murder, racial slurs, profiling, or cultural appropriation for their own gain (ahem, Iggy Azalea)—needed no updating. But then there are more subtle things that need to be added to the list: Don’t use the last of the cocoa butter, talk during an episode of Empire, or attend a black family cookout and say Lionel Richie blows. I mean, you’re really asking to get stabbed with a Capri Sun straw if you say anything negative about Richie around black people. BTdubs, if you’re wondering if there is actually a physical list, the answer is yes, there is, and, no, I’m not telling you where it is. Mainly because I don’t know where it is. Only Danny Glover does. But what I do know is that Glover is solely responsible for amending the list. If, for some reason, he’s unavailable, it’s been decreed that we tuck the amendment(s) inside Aretha Franklin’s hat that she wore to the 2009 President Obama inauguration and then shoot the items into the sky via a missile launcher that Glover has preprogrammed with the coordinates of where the list is located.

made me want to graduate summa cum laude from What Da Fuq University.

In the entertainment industry (and also everywhere else), people are divided about Afros. Some love this “trendy ethnic look” which is better known as “the hair that grows out my fucking head, but thanks for patronizing me by saying it’s now OK because some white execs have decided barely-not-white models with ‘fros can appear in T-Mobile print ads.” Meanwhile, others dislike the ‘fro because they think the person wearing it is fixing to start a revolution. There is no in-between.

A white woman telling a black woman that she’s not likable because she’s smart is a prime example of coded language. In this instance, smart was code for “You’re showing off your intelligence in a way that I don’t believe a person of color should.” The thing is, I hadn’t been “showing off” my intelligence—my closing joke was about me coveting Jon Hamm’s ham, for Christ’s sakes. High concept, that ain’t. The problem was that to Female Judge, I didn’t sound like I majored in Grape Drank Economics with a minor in Magical Negro Linguistics, nor did I carry myself like I was lucky to have a seat at the table. I behaved as though I believed I belonged there. While that’s an attribute celebrated in men, it’s constantly attempted to be ground out of women, especially those of color.

Perhaps it’s nothing more than pure naïveté on my part, but I’m baffled that uppity is still around. After all, we are long past the days when sidewalks were turned into water slides for blacks as police hosed them down, while white guys celebrated on the streets by doing the old-man dance from Six Flags commercials.

language that is so shady that the Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera might as well be hiding in it.

He gave me an apology deep-fried in white guilt. And not the good kind of white guilt—you know, the type that gave the world Macklemore.

seriously. First of all, people need to stop acting like racist behavior only happens within a three-block radius of Paula Deen’s house.

when you are a person of color in this country, you learn early on that you cannot fall apart every time something racially charged happens to you. You just have to be resilient or you won’t survive.

they’re under the misapprehension that because I talk about race a lot, that I must love talking about it. I don’t. And I’ll let you in on a little secret about what other black people rarely say: Explaining your life to a world that doesn’t care to listen is often more draining than living in it.

I felt sorry that he cared more about someone thinking he’s racist as opposed to correcting the behavior that would lead someone to feel that way. I felt sorry that after asking two black people to explain why what he did was wrong, he learned nothing from either of us. And most of all, I felt sorry because he was so self-absorbed, he will, most likely, do something like this to someone else—and that person might not be able to handle it as well as I did. And when I couldn’t feel sorry anymore, I just wanted to laugh because this bizarre rite of passage of being called “uppity” wasn’t even mine to claim at this point, because he had made it all about him. I was just a witness to his emotional breakdown.

I could no longer be concerned about how standing up for myself was going to impact someone who didn’t care all that much about belittling me.

But it turns out for me that carrying on isn’t enough. Holding my head high and rising above doesn’t make me feel strong or fierce. It makes me feel stifled. Almost as if I’m choking on a tiny injustice and that one of these days, the right injustice in the right shape and size is going to lodge itself in my throat and take my voice and my very last breath. Therefore, the only reliable protection for me is to speak up.

At least people know I’m no longer a vessel that they can use to act out their racist feelings. They will know that I think I’m worth fighting for. They will know that I have a fire burning inside me. They will know that I’m alive.

Whenever I hear that, my vajeen dries up like an endangered lake that Morgan Freeman is going to provide narration about in a documentary.)

That stuff was just for fun. I need to pay bills, so I need to get a job in an office. I’m going to be an adult. Hmm. Reading that sentence now, I wonder how many other people believe that being an adult and having fun are mutually exclusive.

I was calm and confident like 2000s Prince when he showed up to award shows with his perfectly coiffed Afro, a cane, and a stank facial expression that said, “All y’all’s grandmas know my corn bread and pinto beans recipe is better than theirs, so they need to stop trying and just live out the rest of their days talking about that one time they tried to smash Harry Belafonte at a civil rights rally.” I was that confident.

And by “elsewhere,” I mean Lucifer’s taint, aka Craigslist.

If A-list movie work is filet mignon, then commercial work is an unopened and beat-up bag of Lays, in which all the chips are broken . . . you know, like your dreams will be because you’re stuck in the hell that is commercial work.

The stereotype of the angry, mean Black woman goes unnamed not because it is insignificant, but because it is considered an essential characteristic of Black femininity regardless of the other stereotypical roles the Black woman may be accused of occupying. These stereotypes are more than representations, they are representations that shape realities.

what?!—I couldn’t actually get angry because if I did, then everyone in the room would think, See, she is an angry black woman. He said it and she just proved it.

black women have two options as a means of response: 1. Suck it up, or 2. Hulk-smash everything because the mistreatment is only happening because the person(s) refuses to see black women as humans—and more than anything, we just want to be seen. But if we Hulk-smash, then we’re forever known as the angry black woman, who is to be avoided at all costs or placated with a “there, there” tone that’s used on Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan. Who wants option two? So, the answer to the question “Are you an angry black woman?” is no, I am not. And no, that was not an angry denial of my being angry.

yes, life is hard for everyone—but black women have their own unique battles, a Molotov cocktail of racism and sexism. We have to combat the stereotypes of being at once hyperemotional and stoic, we have a shorter life expectancy than white men and women, we’re paid less than men and white women, we’re three times more likely to be incarcerated* than white women, have a higher poverty rate than other women* and, perhaps, most important, getting our hair done takes as long as the run time of the BBC’s six-episode miniseries Pride and Prejudice. So how do I, or any black woman for that matter, come up against these types of obstacles and remain in mint condition? Not even be the slightest bit perturbed? That doesn’t seem possible. I mean, no matter how idyllic one’s life is as a POC, there always appears to be some BS right around the corner.