We're Going to Need More Wine

by Gabrielle Union

“The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”

I remember the moment I realized I was free, looking in a mirror and saying, “I choose my motherfucking self.”

So cheers. Here’s to us being afraid and doing it anyway.

Most black people grow accustomed to the fact that we have to excel just to be seen as existing, and this is a lesson passed down from generation to generation. You can either be Super Negro or the forgotten Negro.

Super Negro, the magical special black person who has all the knowledge and is never caught out there looking ignorant.

Now that I am on the other side of it, and proud of my blackness, they wouldn’t know what to do with me. People don’t know what to do with you if you are not trying to assimilate.

The pressure to assimilate infused every choice we made, no matter our race. Kids who didn’t use the slurs certainly didn’t speak up against classmates or parents using them. They adopted the language or they kept silent. Because to point out inequality in the town would mean Pleasanton was not perfect. And Pleasanton had to be perfect.

“You were fly, dope, and amazing from birth,” I would tell that girl now. “From the second you took your first breath, you were worthwhile and valid. And I’m sorry you had to wait so long to learn that for yourself.”

But how was I supposed to know where my vagina was? From a young age, most girls are not given the most basic information about their bodies. And we grow into smart women who often don’t go to doctors on a regular basis because we are too busy putting others in our lives first, and don’t share personal medical information with each other, either. People talk about our bodies solely as reproductive systems, and we remain just as clueless as The Virgin Mary’s learning she was but a vessel for something greater.

It was never lost on me that society thinks a woman should be allotted one dick to use and she should be happy with it for the rest of her life.

“Look, you can’t take your pussy with you,” I said. “Use it. Enjoy it. Fuck, fuck, fuck, until you run out of dicks. Travel to other countries and have sex. Explore the full range of everything, and feel zero shame. Don’t let society’s narrow scope about what they think you should do with your vagina determine what you do with your vagina.”

So repeat after me: I resolve to embrace my sexuality and my freedom to do with my body parts as I see fit. And I will learn about my body so I can take care of it and get the pleasure I deserve. I will share that information with anyone and everyone, and not police the usage of any vagina but my own. So help me Judy Blume.

What was it like for my mother to sit there for hours upon hours, watching these black girls she wanted to raise to be proud black women become seduced by assimilation? And then to see her child screaming and squirming with open sores on her scalp because she wanted her hair to be as soft and silky as possible.

But I have traveled around the world and I know this to be true: there are assholes who wear natural hair, and assholes who wear weaves. Your hair is not going to determine or even influence what kind of person you are.

I don’t want to actually connect. I just want to be a voyeur.

Everything you remember is what you remember.

“There are so many more people than you realize,” she told us girls, “people who look up to the same sun and the moon and the stars. It’s your birthright to explore this world.”

So my instincts said, “Run. Run. This is a bad situation.” But my racial solidarity and my “good home training” as a “polite” woman said, “Stay put. Don’t feed a stereotype. Don’t be rude.”

The other question I get asked is “What were you wearing?” I got raped at work and people still want to know what role I played in what happened to me.

That feeling of surveillance, of being hunted, never goes away. Fear influences everything I do. I saw the devil up close, remember. And I see now how naïve I was. Of course I can never truly have peace again. That idea is fiction. You can figure out how to move through the world, but the idea of peace? In your soul? It doesn’t exist.

I often get asked if my fears have decreased as I move further from the rape. No. It’s more about me moving from becoming a rape victim to a rape survivor. I am selective about who I allow into my life. I can spot people who make me feel anxious or fearful, and they are not welcome.

My instinct in so many situations when I feel threatened is to run. As fast as I can. But just as that night at Payless, my good home training keeps me frozen in fear.

Issues of colorism run so deep in the African American community, but more and more I see it spring up on social media as #teamlightskin versus #teamdarkskin. It’s an age-old us-against-us oversimplification that boils down to the belief that the lighter your skin tone, the more valuable and worthy you are. The standard of beauty and intelligence that has historically been praised by the oppressor has been adopted by the oppressed.

We darker girls should not be pitted against our lighter-skinned sisters, but our pain at being passed over also shouldn’t be dismissed by people saying, “Love the skin you’re in.” You can love what you see in the mirror, but you can’t self-esteem your way out of the way the world treats you. Not when we are made to feel so unloved and exiled to the other end of the beauty spectrum.

Darker-skinned people face a subset of racial inequalities related to discipline at school, employment, and access to more affluent neighborhoods. In one study, Hunter found that a lighter-skinned woman earned, on average, twenty-six hundred dollars more a year than her darker sister. In her 2002 study of the color stratification of women, Hunter also presented real statistical evidence showing that light-skinned African American women had “a clear advantage in the marriage market and were more likely to marry high-status men than were darker-skinned women.”

When I got divorced and I went flying through my bucket list of dicks, they came in all shapes and sizes. This new approach was liberating. I felt open like a twenty-four-hour Walmart on freaking Black Friday.

This is the white cousin of “pretty for a dark-skinned girl.” To fully understand colorism, we have to acknowledge the root. Just as dark-skinned girls are often only deemed deserving of praise despite their skin tone, black women as a whole are often considered beautiful despite their blackness.

That’s the thing, though. Having more black people around increases opportunities to learn and evolve, but that alone doesn’t undo racist systems or thought processes. That is the real work we all have to do.

This cannot be a group hug of women validating women. Men must mentor girls as they grow into women, guiding them to find their own validation so they don’t seek it elsewhere in negative ways. Tell your daughter or niece she is great and valued not in spite of who she is, but because she is exactly who she is. Because dark skin and Afrocentric features are not curses. We are beautiful. We are amazing and accomplished and smart.

His endless cheating had given me permission to cheat, too. I was just less sloppy about it, so he wasn’t aware. While he dealt in volume, I dealt in quality. A note for the novice cheater: never, ever cheat with someone who has less to lose than you. You want someone who will be more inclined to keep his or her mouth shut.

I am a “measure sixteen times, then cut once” person. And then torture myself in the middle of the night about how I kind of did a half-assed job on that sixteenth measurement.

Carrie Fisher had a line I love about why she and Paul Simon ended their marriage: “Things were getting worse faster than we could lower our standards.”

As you refocus your energy on someone else’s privates, you save yourself the drudgery of going over in your mind what went wrong. Bitch, you know what went wrong. Unless this is your first guy, you’re not that clueless. By your early to mid-twenties, you’ve been through this a few times, so you gotta know there’s a common denominator in these equations—and it’s you. I, like many women, know what the hell is wrong with me. Whether we choose to do something about it remains to be seen.

I know a lot of people talk about closure, “giving yourself time to mourn.” Ehhh. Let’s not play these games. I think the whole “pussy moratorium” thing is just some puritanical garbage to keep women chaste.

When you’re in a place where you don’t know what makes you happy, it’s really easy to be an asshole.

The problem is, there’s always an audience for negativity. There could be someone with a bullhorn screaming, “I’ve got a beautiful script here that gives a deeper insight into the human experience.” And few in a crowd would pause. And then someone says “I’ve got Jennifer Lawrence’s nudes,” and a line will form. Negativity and the exploitation of other people’s pain drive so much of our culture and conversation.

Looking me in the eye, she said: “An empress does not concern herself with the antics of fools.” She smiled, so I smiled. That kindness, one empress to another, one woman to another, released me from the bullshit.

Because we’ve all seen a pal replaced for a younger, cheaper model with lower expectations and more free time for overtime or courting clients. Modern business is set up to squeeze out women who “want it all”—which is mostly just code for demanding equal pay for equal work. But the more empowered women in the workforce, the better. The more that women mentor women, the stronger our answer is to the old-boys’ network that we’ve been left out of. We can’t afford to leave any woman behind. We need every woman on the front lines lifting each other up . . . for the good of all of us and the women who come behind us.

That’s the real story. Gabrielle Union’s Baby Hopes: “Everyone Needs to Get Out of My Pussy!”

How are we supposed to give them all the knowledge, all the power, and all the pride that we can, and then ask them to be subservient when it comes to dealing with the police? “This is how you have to act in order to come home alive.”

They are the boys I adore. And people don’t value their very breath. It could be extinguished in one second, without thought, leaving a dog to run, dragging its leash the whole way home. A dog, safer from harm than black boy bodies.

There’s this idea that you will be safe if you just get famous enough, successful enough, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, move into the right neighborhood, do all these things to fully assimilate into the America people have been sold on. We all bought in, and we keep thinking if we just get over this mountain of assimilation, on the other side is a pot of gold. Or maybe a unicorn, perhaps a leprechaun. Any of those is as plausible as the acceptance of the wholeness of me. But there’s just another mountain on the other side. And someone will be ready to tell you, “Don’t be breathing hard. You need to make this look easy.”

discussion of race is often dismissed or talked over unless it is in a sanctioned space. You can talk about your experience at a roundtable on race, but don’t talk about yourself at a “regular” roundtable.

Some have climbed the mountain and have been able to assimilate so thoroughly, they think they are in a parallel universe. “You’re sabotaging your own success by limiting yourself to being a black woman,” they say. They tell us that if we just stripped away these layers of identity, we would be perceived not for our color or gender, but for our inner core. Our “humanness.” My humanness doesn’t insulate me from racism or sexism. In fact, I think I can deal effectively with the world precisely because I am a black woman who is so comfortable in my black-womanness. I know what I can accomplish. And anything I have accomplished, I did so not in spite of being a black woman, but because I am a black woman.

He was freed. But I was resentful. Hell, I am still resentful. Which is why when I make him my #ManCrushMonday on Instagram, I say, “As per the prenup, my forever man crush Monday.”

Here’s the thing about the #OscarsSoWhite discussion. Hollywood films are so white because their art happens in a vacuum. It is made by white filmmakers, with white actors, for imagined white audiences. No one even thinks of remedying the issue through communal partying. Inviting one black actor to the party isn’t enough—sorry, folks. We all know you can create even better art by truly being inclusive, but you’re never going to get inclusive in your work if you can’t figure out how to get inclusive in your social life.

In all the times I spent with Prince, I wish I’d just once had the balls to ask him, “What is it you see in me? That maybe I am not seeing in myself?”

“I want you to tell people that fear can kill you,” Sook said. “I was afraid, and it killed me.”

At the end, we are our stories, some shared and some lived alone.

Sookie made me promise to tell you not to act out of fear. I can only add that you can be scared to death, as I’ve been while sharing these stories with you, and do the thing you need to do anyway.