We're Going to Need More Wine

by Gabrielle Union

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.

I was afraid to take the risk of being black by standing next to her.

People don’t know what to do with you if you are not trying to assimilate.

And I went to Red Lobster in a limo. If someone smoked crack on the way home, that was a small price to pay for the adventure. A footnote, really.

None of these people changed. The environment around them did. They were all good people who made choices that ended up having insane consequences. But their hearts never changed. They were playing roles assigned to them, the same way I did in Pleasanton.

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.

Still, I struggle with the questions: Does this wig mean I’m not comfortable in my blackness? If I wear my hair natural, do I somehow become more enlightened? It is interesting to see the qualities ascribed to women who wear their hair in braids or in natural hairstyles, even among black people. We have so internalized the self-hatred and the demands of assimilation that we ourselves don’t know how to feel about what naturally grows out of our head.

I moved from the fear of one random act of violence to another, because I’d seen the devil up close. Once you’ve been the victim of a violent crime and you have seen evil in action, you know the devil lives and breathes in people all day, every day.

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.

It wasn’t my preference for light-skinned guys. It was all about their preference for me.

I met him at this massive sports bar called San Jose Live, and he had such enthusiasm about the music playing that with every new song he was like, “That’s my jam!”

And we don’t need black ladies in airports and white guys in parking lots grading us on a curve, thank you very much.

To be a black person is to understand what it is to be automatically infantilized and have it be assumed that you don’t have the talent or the skill set required to do your job.

Reader, I put the paper in my mouth. I chomped and chewed until I could swallow.

There are only two options for drinking your pain away after a breakup: red wine or tequila. Never mix, never worry.

If I am somewhere and get an attack of the feels, I look for the nearest place to stash myself. I am the Where’s Waldo? of emotional availability.

This is actually not a joke. When I go to school meetings, I come with my books and articles to support what I’m talking about. Whether it’s a Harvard study on implicit bias in academia or research into African American teenagers underperforming because they go to school with the burden of suspicion, I was ready to call them on their shit. That day I brought a copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Written as a letter to Coates’s fifteen-year-old son, Samori, the book is a sort of guide to surviving in a black body in America.

My hero

“What did you tell the kids to say when they’re stopped by police?” I asked him. “Well, I told them what to say in case—” “WHAT did you tell them?” “I told them to say their full names and our address.” “Wrong answer,” I say. “‘I’m Dwyane Wade’s kid.’ That’s what they say.”

I will give blow jobs in a leper colony before I take a dime from a man I am no longer in love with. That’s who I am. I will cut off my nose, or my lips I guess, to spite my face.