THREE

LAUGH TO KEEP FROM CRYING

Humor is among our toughest suits of armor against White supremacy. One-liners, irony, tall tales, impressions, satire, signifying, playing the dozens, and trolling are all tools that we’ve used to reinforce our culture, pass down mother wit, and vent our rage without getting lynched, fired, or otherwise destroyed.

Take one Brother Jourdon Anderson. In 1864, near the end of the Civil War, Jourdon, his wife Mandy, and his family escaped during a Union raid on the Big Spring, Tennessee, plantation of Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson. After they were good and free in Ohio, Massa Anderson sent them a bizarre letter begging them to return to the plantation to work, this time for pay.

We’re pretty sure that Brother Jourdon did indeed want to go back to Big Spring—to slash ol’ massa’s face into ribbons. But instead of ending up in a noose, he got his revenge via sarcasm about reparations. He told massa to go fuck himself in an August 7, 1865, letter:

To My Old Master, Colonel P. H. Anderson,

Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you.… Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.…

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me.…

Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’ Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future.

That was 1865. Today Black writers, artists, barbers, activists, video bloggers, Spades champions, and aunties continue to use their legal-for-now voices to expose the lie of White supremacy, hype up our relatives who can’t really sing, and kick people out of the race for tomfoolery.

In “Laugh to Keep from Crying,” satirists, stand-up comedians, and cartoonists explore how we use humor to maintain our culture, sanity, creativity, and safety, because laughing is one of our most important tools of war.

Laughing While Black

Damon Young

On February 1, 2018, the New York Daily News reported that Patricia Cummings, a White teacher at Middle School 118 in the Bronx, instructed three Black students in her class to lie on the floor, and then she stepped on their backs to teach a lesson about slavery.

If you attempt to reverse-engineer, you could find a series of not-all-that-terribly-racist rationales for Cummings’s decision. This story was reported by the Daily News on the first day of Black History Month, which often manifests as a shallow and hysterical salmagundi of contextless tidbits about traffic lights, peanut butter, and Wilt Chamberlain. Cummings could have been trying to be creative. Kind of like when you start adding kale and broccoli to your morning fruit smoothie, except instead of “kale and broccoli” Cummings added “racism.” Or maybe she planned to rent Glory from the school’s library, it wasn’t available, and she remembered that scene where Denzel was whipped because he left camp to find comfortable shoes and she wanted to show her students how even the most comfortable shoes can feel uncomfortable if Darth Becky is cartwheeling on your back.

The most likely explanation for Patricia Cummings’s behavior, though, is that like millions of White people before her, she’s lost her goddamn mind. The pervasiveness of White supremacy has made White people fucking crazy. Patricia Cummings is a natural and predictable consequence of what happens when the possession of Whiteness is so blinding and deafening that it transmutes White people into baby groundhogs unable to see or feel or think or smell or taste anything outside of their vacuums of Caucasity.

Sometimes this insanity materializes as boundless and preposterous entitlement, as was the case with Abigail Fisher, aka “Becky with the Bad Grades.” If you recall, Fisher is the aggressively pedestrian White woman who applied to the University of Texas in 2008, was denied admission, and promptly stated that she was discriminated against because she was White. Her gripe that the University of Texas had the audacity to treat her Wonder Bread ass like Wonder Bread instead of a tasty pancake reached the Supreme Court, where she lost in 2016 as the court finally ruled against her. (According to court transcripts, an exasperated Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “She think she a tasty pancake,” when providing the rationale for the decision.^*)

And sometimes this insanity forces White folks to lie and spin and gaslight so zealously that they no longer know where the truth ends and their bullshit begins. There are myriad examples of this. America sits on a Jenga tower of lies about its inherent goodness, godliness, and manifest destiny, its “free market” economy, and its “exceptional” history. At the time of this writing, my favorite recurring example of this happens when President Donald Trump does or says some demented fuckshit surpassing the demented fuckshit he did or said the day before, and Sarah Huckabee Spicer Scaramucci Sanders squiggles out from the Incubus’s lair to triple-speak their president’s actions into something they think is honorable. This motherfucker could shit on the White House lawn and wipe his ass with a Polaroid of the Boys Choir of Harlem and within an hour one of his minions would hold a press conference to state: “The president is just very serious about going green and conserving energy. Which is exactly what you liberals and the media have been asking him to do, right?”

Existing as a Black American while pressed against this force is terrifying. Not consciously. At least not all of the time. But sometimes, when stepping back and fully processing the vastness and the depth and the transcendence of it, it’s not unlike what happens when you accidentally glance at the sun. And this condition is rage-inducing. It makes you want to fight sometimes and duck and hide some other times. It makes you want to be sure you’re holding and hugging and loving the Black people around because you know they need to be held, hugged, and loved because you do too, and they’re Black like you. It can, if you allow it, make you so consumed with a white-hot animus toward them for what they did to you, and toward people who look like you for what they did to you, and toward yourself for what they did to you—that it swallows you. You become ensconced in it.

Resistance, of course, is vital. And sometimes that resistance looks like what happens when you plug “resistance” into Thesaurus.com and scan the most antagonistic results. It’s defiance. It’s friction. It’s blocking. It’s a struggle. It’s combat. But then sometimes you need to go to Facebook or GroupMe and send an invite for a game night at your house this weekend. And you invite all of your best and Blackest friends. And you lure them in with promises of properly seasoned and appropriately cooked chicken wings and an array of the brownest of liquors. Maybe you even name the games you’ll play. Taboo. Cards Against Humanity. Mafia. Spades. And you ask them to bring nothing except maybe some chips, some juice, and even a thoroughly vetted friend. And they come, and you have a fucking blast. But even as you’re playing an especially intense round of Spoons, the real reason for this gathering lurks beneath the surface and occasionally bubbles up:

“Nigga, did I tell you about what Susan in accounting did today?”

“I swear to God that if Conner brings another Caucasian casserole to the company potluck I’m gonna choke his Patagonia ass.”

“White people age like bodega bananas.”

“Don’t you know this chick French-kissed her Shih Tzu and then tried to give me a hug? I told her my insurance doesn’t cover White people dog cooties.”

Sometimes these jokes turn into a morbid and numbing reminder of exactly how unwelcoming and dangerous it can be to exist while Black in America:

“Ayyiyo, who’s on y’all’s ‘I Just Got Pulled over by the Cops for No Reason and I Need to Hurry and Put Something Nonthreatening on My Stereo’ playlists? Mine has Taylor Swift, Creed, and the Golden Girls theme song.”

One of the reasons that existing while Black in America can be exhausting is that it entails an endless search for safe spaces and opportunities to exhale. But once that space and that oxygen is found, perhaps at a game night or during a flag football outing or maybe just on a sparsely populated Twitter timeline, sometimes the best and only thing to do is make fun of these mindless motherfuckers with no worries.

There will always be time to be sober and serious. But sometimes finding a way to ridicule a Patricia Cummings, an Abigail Fisher, or a Darth Chad provides a necessary catharsis. A moment of respite when you recognize how you’ve been forced to be fully human in a way they’ll never be, when you become tickled with the irony of them considering themselves to be the superior ones. And then sometimes the laughter itself becomes a weaponized tool, a vital piece of resistance-encouraging and Whiteness-withstanding hardware that allows you to love Blackness even harder and louder and longer than you did before. Maybe they’ve lost their goddamn minds. But our humor keeps that from being contagious.

Damon Young is a writer, critic, humorist, and satirist. He’s the cofounder and editor in chief of VerySmartBrothas, a columnist for GQ.com, and the author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker.

Dismantling White Comfort Is Our Wakanda

Russ Green

If you come see me perform, we gon’ talk about some shit.

As a stand-up comedian, when I walk onstage, my intention is to question everything. Why are we walking around acting like we have a government? Do Black lives really matter? How am I supposed to raise children when it’s illegal to be Black in public? These questions need answers. I’m on a mission to find the truth, and I invite the audience to join me on the journey. If it goes well, it’s liberating for everyone, and if not—at least no one got shot.

It doesn’t always go well. I’ve been accused of being anti-White, which is absurd. I don’t hate White people; I hate the idea of Whiteness, a social construct that entitles people to live rich fulfilling lives as long as their skin is absent of melanin.

The reality is that if jokes that call out the societal ills associated with White supremacy make you uncomfortable, you are probably complicit in upholding the institution. I would imagine the opportunity to elevate your consciousness and awareness would be cathartic, like a warm rain to wash away your obliviousness to your privilege. But my White hecklers say otherwise.

I hear people say all the time that comedians are fearless. I’ll take it, I guess, though I’m not blocking highway traffic in protest, investigating corrupt police officers, or blowing the whistle on corporate greed or sellout politicians. People don’t send me death threats or deliver explosive packages to my front door.

The bravest part of my evening is when I leave the comedy club, get into my car, and drive home in the middle of the night. The reality is, there is always a chance that I will never make it. Once, after a show, I made a pit stop at Taco Bell—the one true king of late night grub—and was pulled over by a cop who claimed I had a taillight out.

The moment the squad car started trailing me, I thought, Fuck. Then the dormant respectability Negro voice in my head started cataloging all the things I did wrong that night. First mistake: Leave home. Second: Drive car. Third: Be Black.

Driving while Black is scary. The fear of being pulled over is so extreme that when sirens go off during songs on my playlist, my heart races. I shouldn’t be as afraid of police officers as I am of sharks, but to my ears, blaring sirens sound like the Jaws theme song. So when I looked in my rearview mirror to confirm that I was indeed being pursued by a known superpredator, I was equal parts afraid and furious—I was five minutes from my house.

The Bagger Vance in my head assured me that if I simply relaxed and remained rational as the officer approached my vehicle, the Dirty Harry in his head wouldn’t be saying, “Go ahead, make my day.” The officer opened with, “Is this your vehicle?”—standard-issue microaggression. I confirmed it was by handing him my license and registration. A beat passed, then the officer stopped blinding me with his Maglite and instructed: “Wait here. If everything checks out, you’ll be on your way soon.”

I’m fairly certain officers write 1,500-word essays while reviewing your driving record. In the time it takes them to figure out the perfect ending (will this be a comedy or dramatic thriller?), I’m usually playing through Choose Your Own Adventure scenarios, hoping I stumble on the right sequence of page turns that lands me safe in my bed. Turns out my third taillight, the one that’s near the roof, was out and I found myself “fortunate” enough to go home with a warning.

My XXL Grilled Stuft Burrito with Fire Sauce was bittersweet that night, and the Wild Cherry Pepsi couldn’t wash down the realization that things could have ended calamitously. Unlike Sandra Bland and Philando Castile, the patron saints of traumatic social media clips, I made it to my house, exhaled deeply, and kept breathing. I sat in my car, finished my junk food, calmed my nerves, planned my trip to AutoZone, and thanked God that I was pulled over and not my wife. She can’t die—somebody has to take care of all these kids.

What compels me—a husband and father of four—to leave the safety of my house to tell jokes for strangers? I have no idea. What punchline is worth dying for? The risk of making people uncomfortable by telling my truths should be worth more than the reward of validation from people I will never see again.

But is what I do any more ridiculous than walking around pretending that we don’t see the daily injustices Black people experience? Are White folks’ ears too fragile to hear a narrative that differs from theirs? Are we only allowed to be free in our own homes, as long as those homes aren’t in predominantly White neighborhoods? Not on my watch, fam.

We underestimate the value of Black joy; it should appraise much higher. It is imperative that we experience more than pain. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to perform. I get to be in service of Black joy in a communal setting, initiating boundless conversations where my premises construct new realities. It’s straight up carefree, liberated hysterics—our own little Wakanda. Fuck the colonizer’s feelings; I risked my life to tell these jokes.

Russ Green is a writer, comedian, husband, and father of four from Washington, DC. The Howard University graduate finds humor in the absurdities of life: White supremacy, race, and identity politics. Russ has performed at The Kennedy Center and the Knitting Factory.

I fight White supremacy by actively reminding myself that it’s a man-made perversion. It’s a real thing, but it’s not the truth.

—Kimberly Shells Wilson, human resources adviser

Comedic Actress and Producer Amanda Seales on How She Challenges the Concept of Whiteness

I fight White supremacy by existing in the unabashed way that I do, as a creative and as a speaker, and I encourage others to do the same. I also work to make White Americans denounce their Whiteness.

I always say there’s only two kinds of White people: those who are White, and those who happen to be White. And so I challenge White people with that question on a regular basis: “Do you define yourself by your Whiteness?” And when they fire back and say, “Well, do you define yourself by your Blackness?” I say, “They’re not the same thing. Whiteness was created for the purpose of oppression. Blackness was created in spite of oppression. We’re not coming from the same place, so don’t try to conflate equality where it does not exist.” In my talks at universities, I’m inserting this real questioning of White people to no longer just question racism as a concept, but to question their own positioning within that and how that affects what they’re doing. We have to start having conversations that are different than the ones we’ve been having. I talk about racism of course, because it’s real. But I accompany it with what I feel could be possible.

A Eulogy for the White Gaze: A Tale from the Future

Jamilah-Asali Lemieux

The year is 2080, and Black people are finally free. Yes, really. It’s true!

I know, I know.

You want me to tell you everything so you can go and get things started, but I can only give you these seeds to plant, the seeds that will grow the revolu—just listen.

Certainly, you recognize the absurdity of challenging the authenticity of someone’s Negritude based on their particular dialect—or the absence of one. You know that “real” Black people can prefer rock (which is African at the root) or rap (which was decidedly African until around the late-aughts, when our folks gave the mic to every tattooed druggie who wanted a piece). You certainly realize that Black cannot be vanquished by an inability to dance or a dislike of soul food.

However, in your day, there were some cultural markers so linked to our experience in the Western world that, well, we couldn’t rightly say you were really Black without having encountered them.

Prior to the, umm, liberation, it would have been virtually impossible to be a Black person raised in the United States who had never heard or uttered some variation of a common African American proverb:

Don’t embarrass me in front of these White folks.

I talked about this with a group of kids just the other day, and they couldn’t fathom the idea of being concerned with how they behaved in the presence of White people, let alone having that concern presented as a mandate from someone who loves them. They really don’t know how good they have it.

Yes, I’m serious. We don’t say that shit anymore, ever. Okay, no more questions or I’m done talking.

Back when I was young, the White gaze was often one of the most difficult places that a Black person could find themselves in, and God forbid you ever did something to make a Black elder who had lived through Jim Crow feel even more uncomfortable while there. As I explained to those kids, the DEMIFOTWF rule was so much more complicated than the language may have indicated. It’s super-easy to assume that it was little more than older Black folks assigning undue value to the thoughts and feelings of White people.

Among some of the likely circumstances that might summon such a command:

Acting like “you ain’t never been nowhere before” at a nice restaurant, department store, gas station, city bus, or anywhere they may be watching—especially when you were in the minority in said location;

Cutting up at school and forcing your mama to leave her job and be scolded by some White folks essentially telling her that she failed as a parent;

Doing anything that was a painful reminder of racism, like ordering fried chicken and watermelon in their presence, or using terms like “baby mama,” “ghetto,” and the “n-word” in mixed company.

Yes, I said “the n-word.” I can’t say the real version because that word is totally banned now. No one says it and if you say it again, I swear I’m done talking.

Thus, “Don’t embarrass me in front of these White folks” wasn’t a plea; it was a universal rule that Black folks had better not run afoul of. The “me” most often was a woman (your mother, grandmother, auntie, play-auntie, godmother) or any other trusted authority figure. But it could be any other Negro on the planet. Hell, it could be yourself, your internal monologue cautioning you against setting everyone back by doing some totally human shit.

As you know, Black folks’ obsession with decorum had its roots in being told that we were inherently broken. That we were three-fifths of a person. That we were unintelligent, unsophisticated savages in need of constant correction. If the people who had enslaved us had constructed an idea of Blackness vile enough to justify lording over us for centuries, what might they do when we provided actual evidence of some sort of shortcoming?

Our elders felt like they had no choice but to prove White folks wrong early and often. Absent the empowerment to go to war or simply say “no more,” the best they had was to embody the goodness they believed we lacked.

They said we were dirty, and so we obsessed over the cleanliness of our homes and bodies, so much so that we’d put toxic shit like baby powder and douches in our most intimate places in order to refute that.

They said we were sexually deviant, so we policed our own desires so rigidly that our only release would come via shouting and hollering in churches built as monuments to White gods.

They said we were too loud, and so we tried to shrink in their presence, tried to speak softly and be less vibrant. Most of us never mastered this one, thankfully.

It wasn’t until we truly recognized the hypocrisy of their gaze that we finally broke free of its cold, steely hold on our lives.

We were dirty, but compared to whom? Surely not those folks we saw kissing their dogs on the mouth at the park, the people who went on social media to defend taking showers without washcloths, that infamous woman on the internet cooking without the slightest bit of concern for the litter-caked cat paws that walked through her casserole pan just moments prior. (We still joke about these things, but dammit, it stings!)

If we were both sexually irrepressible and immoral, why couldn’t they keep their hands off our bodies, in every sense of the phrase, for centuries?

Our women were beneath their standards of femininity, yet White mothers outsourced the rearing of their children to us from the moment we arrived on these shores—and would later begin to emulate our hairstyles, modes of dress, and even the shape of our bodies. Our men were somehow shiftless and lazy, but also terrifyingly powerful and strong? That math doesn’t add up.

Around 2014, the term “respectability politics” ventured outside of the academy and entered the regular Black people lexicon. This was a good thing. Ideas that can improve our overall quality of life are pretty useless if they aren’t made accessible to the masses. The better our people understood why they’d been taught to contort their humanity to weather the whims of White folks, the easier it would be for them to divorce those unhealthy habits, right?

However, as these things tend to go, it didn’t take long for some young people to confuse having any sort of behavioral standard with “tap-dancing for massa” like a self-hating “coon.” This caused some of our elders to suffer some serious discomfort as a number of Black kids willfully gave them their asses to kiss in an effort to, well, give White folks their asses to kiss. The rebellion against respectability politics was a complicated one, but ultimately it pushed our people in the right direction: toward a standard of behavior that centered our own ideals and identities.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration would inspire two very different reactions among our now-former oppressors that would power the beginning of the end to our traditional respectability politics—and set the stage for the revolution that finally saw us get free.

Scores of White kids proudly emulated the boorish behavior of the unapologetically racist, sexist, and charmless forty-fifth president of the United States. This was a pretty understandable reaction: if someone can make it to the highest office in the land by acting like a petulant child and claiming superiority over other groups, why not indulge in all the antisocial behavior you could ever dream of ? White privilege is a hell of a drug.

Meanwhile, equally large groups of White young people were so turned off by Donald Trump and his ilk that they would form the largest group of progressive White folks that the United States had ever seen. Like, for real progressive—nothing like those “White moderates” that Martin Luther King Jr. identified in his famed 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as “the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom.”

As a result, Black millennial and Generation Y parents were less inclined to caution their own children against shaming themselves (and their families) in the presence of the melanin-deficient because they had less to prove to them than ever. How self-conscious can you actually be in the presence of pussy-grabbers who don’t even believe in truth, human rights, and washcloths? And the White folks on the other side of the political aisle were so deeply—and rightly!—ashamed of their own kind that they didn’t dare parrot the sort of judgment and contempt that their parents had once used against Black folks.

Many of our people had started to resemble what Dr. King said about those White moderates, “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” so I gotta give some props to both the radical Caucasian defectors who sought to shed their privilege like dead skin and the MAGA-hat motherfuckers who clung to theirs for dear life. Without both, we might not have ever gotten to the point when we were ready for revolution.

Of course, it was young Black folks who actually led the charge, starting with…

No, no. I want to tell you, seriously. I wish I could say more about how it all went down, but I can’t. And we’re out of time. You have to go back home now. Don’t cry! You’ll be fine and we need you to be fine. We need you to get your folks ready so that this world exists someday. I can’t tell you how to do that, but I can offer this one last bit of advice:

We move differently without our chains. Pretend yours are gone, and they will be someday.

Jamilah-Asali Lemieux is a renowned cultural critic and writer who focuses on issues of race, gender, and sexuality. The award-winning writer is a leading millennial feminist thinker and new media maven.

I fight White supremacy by teaching people that it is okay to embrace our culture and not just adhere to the norms of the dominant culture.

—Jamie Parker, entrepreneur

Ben Passmore Is Not Interested in Your Space Coffee Shop

Don’t get him wrong—your café in the sky might be spectacularly rendered. But cartoonist Ben Passmore would much rather make art that pisses off racist trolls in all corners of the internet. Here, the Your Black Friend author talks to Kenrya about his creative foundation, why he puts himself in his art, and the tradition he’d like to see flourish.

When did you realize that you were an artist?

I guess I’ve always known. My mom paints and sculpts, and as far back as I can remember she had me drawing on placemats and scraps of paper. It’s weird, but I started making my own toys at like six, seven, eight. Everyone wanted GI Joes and stuff, but we couldn’t afford it. So I’d make my own. It was very sad, but I was super into it.

What were you making them out of?

It was napkins and tape at first. And then I was making them out of—you know those ties you get off bread? They come in lots of different colors and are very flexible. I’d make them out of those and pieces of plastic.

Word! So how would you describe your aesthetic these days?

Someone said that I was both quintessentially millennial and nihilistic, which maybe fits. I make Black punk comics.

Do you identify as a Black punk?

I did. I had already been disappointing women with my terrible haircut and ratty clothes for a while when Afropunk popped up. But it got sexy when I was in my late twenties. So I have some resentment about that. I don’t identify as a punk now, though. I realized subcultures have a tendency to repeat the fails of the mainstream.

How do your Black punk comics fight White supremacy?

My hope is that what I do inspires people to act, or at least to think about contending with White supremacy in ways that seem intentional and sort of fun. It feels like we really need people out here just being brave, people who will go out and confront racists. There’s a long history of punks chasing skinheads and Nazis out of their communities, and I feel like it’s a good tradition. I would like to see it keep on going.

You often put yourself in your work. Why?

I think I did it at first because I didn’t know a whole lot of people like me. I didn’t know a whole lot of Black punks who squatted in abandoned buildings and valued living more freely rather than spending a lot of time working, people who lived outside of society in the same way. So it was self-affirming to write about myself and sort of process. And also, Black people are often presented two-dimensionally in comics. A Black man is just a big aggro man with a gun. I really wanted to make comics about someone who was complicated and not masculine in these very contrived ways.

You’re talented, right? You can draw literally anything. So why do you do this work that brings racists to your mentions?

It doesn’t really feel like a choice to me. I can’t imagine going off and writing about, I don’t know, space people operating a coffee shop or something. Or drawing Mickey Mouse. Even though I guess technically he is a Blackface character, so that would still be related, now that I think of it. We live immersed in White supremacy. And I’d rather not. But as long as it’s something that we’re subjected to, I want to write about fighting it in ways that feel inspiring.