On ambivalent blackness and watching black films

This time, it happens at the concession stand.

I arrive at the movie theaters just a few minutes before the film is set to begin. Or, a few minutes before the trailers are set to begin—which, in addition to providing extra time to take off my coat and get my movie snacks in order, are a necessary transition from the real world to the world of cinema for this constantly racing mind of mine. I invited one of my new-ish friends from school, a fellow graduate student. He is a black [1], queer, playwright from Harlem. We have known each other for about half a year, and we have never been to the movies together. But, I wanted to see A Thousand and One. And I wanted to see it with him: this fellow lover of stories, this queer, black, boy [2].

So, we meet at the theater in Lincoln, Rhode Island, tucked away in a suburban playground. I drive to Lincoln at dusk for our evening showtime, and am struck by how eerie the drive out of Providence feels—how very Get Out it feels. I am sure there are people who would experience a sense of transcendence among the tall trees that guard the highway, as the sun disappears beyond the horizon. I am not one of those people, at least not when I am alone. And I feel something akin to fear, instead. Perhaps it’s knowing that driving while black, after dark (and into the suburbs), comes with its own set of risks. I finally exit, and nearly miss the theater, unassuming amid the bright lights of Target and Chipotle, McDonalds and Marshalls. I enter the mall, and keep my head down as teenagers film TikToks, run to and from the arcade, and gather in clusters at the concession stand. It has been some time since I have been in a mall that feels quite like this: the freneticism of adolescence and hormones and Friday night.

My friend and I hop in line to get some popcorn. I am anxious that we are going to miss the beginning of the film. But I keep it together because we don’t know each other all that well, and I try to keep my Type A in check around new company. So we stand in line, moving slowly, and chat about the film.

I share that I have opted not to watch any trailers or read anything about it, because I just feel like watching a movie without any expectations. Also, I confide, I don’t know what it says about me, but I am usually pretty aligned with Rotten Tomatoes. And Rotten Tomatoes has given A Thousand and One very high marks.

He laughs. And shares that, he too, has avoided any media about the film, except the fact that Teyana Taylor is in it.

It feels like time stops for a moment, and my stomach sinks a bit.

This is it.

And I know that I have two options: 1) I can admit that I don’t know who Teyana Taylor is. Explaining, quickly, that I know the name, but can’t quite place how I know the name. I can employ a combination of self-deprecation and shame, levity and indifference. Lament my inadequate knowledge and engagement with black culture, all within a span of 20 seconds. And let him (probably) laugh, baffled by my ignorance, and tell me who she is, or 2) I can feign recognition. I can choose to do something like pass—culturally, racially—as knowledgeable, as black. I can choose not to relinquish my Black Card™ tonight.

Usually, or at least often, I will opt for the first. I will be candid about the suburbs that I grew up in. The white music that I grew up on. The white people that I grew up with. The ambivalent blackness [3] of my childhood. I will tell people that I grew up, predominantly, around my mom’s Filipino family and that, perhaps, we all just took for granted that I would come to understand what it means to be black, without anyone ever telling me. I’ll say this, all the while knowing believing that my sister, who grew up in the same family, is not ambivalently black. Not struggling with her identity. Not worrying about her legitimacy. But perhaps that is a story for another time [4].

At any rate, often, I will open myself up to something like playful ridicule or vicarious embarrassment or feigned horror. And I will do this because, generally speaking, I try to adhere to an ethic of honesty—even about the things that bring me the deepest shame. So, I think, at a different time, I would have told him that I did not know who Teyana Taylor was. And I would have steeled myself, as I always do, for the inquisition that follows when you are black but have failed at blackness. And I would show myself something like kindness, or grace, that I could not help growing up in the ways that I did. And that I am doing my best, now, at trying to understand my blackness and its possibilities.

But, tonight, between the fear of missing the beginning of the film, and the freneticism of a Friday night surrounded by teenagers, and maybe the intimacy of going to the movies with a new friend, I just didn’t have it in me.

So I nodded along. Feigned recognition. Wondered if he could see through me. Wondered how my blackness was being read. Wondered if my anxiety was perceptible, as the armpit sweat became palpable against my t-shirt, the nervousness of missing a trailer now completely subsumed by the dread of being found out. Of my blackness being exposed to critique without my careful orchestration. We finished ordering and hustled, concessions in hand, to CinemaWorld’s farthest auditorium. Settling into our seats with a few trailers to spare.

And the film, indeed, was stunning. Filled with tension and beauty. Heartache and the briefest moments of levity. I left feeling grateful for black art: for black filmmakers and writers and actors and creators, who make what they know with such tenderness and vision. And for my friend, the black playwright, who left the auditorium feeling just as moved as I was. Wow, was all he could say.

We need to write about this, he exclaims on the ride home, as we wonder at the fact that we really haven’t seen anything about the film yet. How do people not know about this? Why did we have to travel out to the suburbs to see it?

I agree, excitedly, while also racking my brain for the ways that I might write about this black film, as a person who feels ambivalently and complicatedly, and maybe illegitimately (depending on who’s asking), black. I drove home and thought that, instead of writing, perhaps I could just interview my friend, who is from Harlem, about his experience watching the film. This, I thought, could be particularly poignant, given that the film was shot on the street that he grew up on. We could talk about what it was like to see that environment on screen as itself, what it was like to witness the story of Harlem’s gentrification, what he thought about the acting and the writing and the shots. I couldn’t, however, imagine what I could possibly offer to the film’s critical conversation given my own upbringing: in a multiracial, upper middle class home, in an affluent and conservative southern California suburb.

Still, I left the theater wanting to think more about Inez—Teyana Taylor’s character—and her hair. Out loud. On the page. But I know that I won’t. Because, somehow, I am convinced that it is not my place. That I will do such a telling, such a meditation, a disservice. That I don’t have the right language, or the right culture, or the right experience.

The thing about ambivalence, though, is that it is complicated. Somehow, I am both lamenting my seeming lack of connection with black culture, with black people, with the blackness of my self, while straddling a deep awareness that I loved so much about the ways that I grew up. I love my people, most of whom are not black. I love that I grew up knowing enough phrases in Tagalog (one) to make my Filipino grandmother laugh. May uhog ang mukha mo [5]. I love that the place in my world that has felt most like home is the house that she gathered us in: feeding us lumpia and adobo and longganisa, and a buffet of fruit from Costco. Setting up the karaoke. Or chatting about school as the day’s soap opera of choice streamed into the living room on The Filipino Channel. I loved growing up this way, and can’t imagine who I would be without the care that I felt in that home. Still, this is to say that, despite the fact that I look unquestionably black (i.e. this is not a story about passing or presenting as racially ambiguous) there was so little about my childhood that felt intentional about or militant towards or celebratory of my blackness. And, about that, I feel both heartbroken and a sense of acceptance that has taken decades to grow into. A sense of acceptance that I am still trying to grow into.

This, in brief, is where I have come from. And what I mean when I try to explain something like the ambivalence of blackness: It’s like having a voice that is perpetually, just ever so slightly, off key. Or feet that cannot find their way around the music. Or eyes that don’t see all of the things that they are supposed to see. It is an existence that is imprecise, and edges that are too fluid. To be ambivalently black is to be perpetually aware of the ways that your blackness might be tested, without ever being taught the answers in the first place. It is to be haunted by all of the black context(s) that your childhood failed to provide. And to try to pass as something called black anyways.

—

Endnotes:

[1]  I recognize and respect the practice of capitalizing the b in black. Doing so in my own writing is under consideration, as I grapple with the why and the aesthetics of it all. Not doing so, at this juncture, is not an indication of a lack of intention, but rather, an indication of my deep conviction to do something only when I fully understand my personal reason(s) for doing it.

[2]  I use the term “boy” here with the utmost laxity toward gender and its supposed binaries. I, too, born with ovaries, and deemed a girl some 30-years-ago, often call myself a boy. Boy, as a love letter to queerness and the fluidity of its edges. Boy, as imperceptible. Boy, as somehow both feminizing someone perceived masculine, and masculinizing someone perceived feminine. Boy, as gender fuckery. Boy, too, as ambivalence made manifest.

[3]   Here I am thinking ambivalence, as in: 1) colloquially: without intention or care, e.g. black simply and only by virtue of my complexion, or 2) per the dictionary: the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone, e.g. here, mixed feelings about the state or legitimacy of my own blackness, or black with the perpetual threat of having my Black Card™ revoked for listening to the wrong music, watching the wrong films, taking the wrong lovers.

[4]  After inviting my sister to read this essay, I feel compelled to clarify some things: Most importantly, that the ways that I perceive her relationship to blackness are not necessarily an illustration of what is true for her. Rather, at most, my perception of her is an illustration of my ever-present anxiety—even around the person whose upbringing was most similar to mine—about how I inhabit my blackness.

[5]  Which loosely translates to, you have snot on your face. I was nine.