CHAPTER TWO
BLACK-LASH
The biggest audition I’d snagged in the first four years I’d been in New York was for the reality TV competition show The Glee Project, where twelve singers competed for a chance at a guest-starring role on the Fox musical comedy show Glee. Very highbrow stuff. Needless to say, I did not book the job. Despite occasionally getting carded at bars and taking karaoke way too seriously, I guess I wasn’t believable as a teenage singing sensation on a should’ve-been-canceled-after-one-season Fox show.
But following “SWGSTBG,” suddenly everyone wanted a piece of me—after years of celebrating anytime a casting breakdown said “open to all ethnicities,” I had more interview requests, meetings with agents, and audition opportunities than I knew what to do with.
I tried to respond to as many as possible, which translated to leaving early for lunch to take calls away from my desk. At one point I volunteered to “help” one of my coworkers by accompanying her on an office coffee run just so I could take a call with my soon-to-be agent in the Starbucks restroom.
While radio and magazine interviews were exciting, nothing could prepare me for a message from Anderson Live, Anderson Cooper’s daytime talk show, where he covered trending stories that didn’t quite fit into his news beat at CNN. A producer from the show emailed me a few days after “SWGSTBG” blew up. My cue to “head to lunch.”
I’d spent the past few days reading tons of articles about the “Shit Girls Say” meme, so I felt more than prepared to handle the producer’s pre-interview spiel. Besides your usual “Where are you from? What inspired the video?” type of questions, we talked at length about the negative response to my jokes. Was I surprised people thought the video was “racist toward white people”?
I told her I wasn’t surprised that people were upset or confused, but it was pretty revealing that no one had reacted negatively to the original video, “Shit Girls Say,” which portrayed women as obnoxious, dumb, and preoccupied with trivial things. Or to “Shit Black Girls Say,” which was basically just another rehash of the sassy black woman stereotype. Sure, they were supposed to be a bit over the top, but they didn’t exactly present women, or more specifically black women, in a positive light. Apparently, I said, they had gotten a boys’-club pass. I’d seen little to no backlash against those videos. They certainly weren’t being invited on national television to discuss the complicated politics of their two-minute satirical riffs on everyday interactions. I didn’t quite have the language to express it at the time, but in retrospect I can see that the negative response to my video was a clear symptom of a racist and sexist culture that was viscerally offended by the idea of a black woman talking about her lived experience.
The Anderson interview looked like it was going to be a go. Then, right before we got off the phone, the producer asked if I’d invite the old friend on whom I’d based my “SWGSTBG” voice and mannerisms, Megan, to come on the show. I told her I’d give it a shot, but realistically I wasn’t so sure it was an option. There’s just no easy way to say, “Hey, would you be interested in going on national television to talk about all the dumb things you’ve said to me throughout our fifteen years of friendship?” But I must have done an okay job of it, because I called her up and she agreed—I’m sure the free flight from LA to New York, combined with Megan being an aspiring actress looking for screen time, didn’t hurt. The night before the taping, I braided my hair, laid out the dress I planned to wear (it was from Target), and went to bed early. I was nervous but excited—I saw Anderson as a chance to put myself on the map.
My segment was only twelve minutes long, but the taping lasted more than half an hour. Anderson was warm, charming, and even more handsome in person. (For those wondering, yes, his eyes really are that blue. “Silver fox” is a total misnomer—dude straight-up looks like a wolf.) He joked with me between takes and complimented my poise and professionalism, which made me blush. Did I already mention how handsome he was? As I studied the way he read from the teleprompter and bantered with the audience, I knew I wanted to be where he was someday.
Aside from one strained exchange with an audience member, the experience went well. Even Megan seemed to be having a good time when Anderson pulled her out of the audience and we all laughed together about her nasal voice. I felt like I’d nailed it—which was good, because I had to run from the taping to a meeting uptown, where I officially snagged an agent.
In the week between taping Anderson and the segment going up, I had also been invited to audition for Saturday Night Live. This was nearly a year before the conversation about why there wasn’t a black woman on SNL hit a fever pitch, but still: I knew there wasn’t a black woman in the cast at the time, and I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I could be the black woman on SNL. The audition invite didn’t provide many details—just that those auditioning should prepare a character showcase—and my new agent, Scott, told me to “do four characters I loved.”
Eager to support their brand-new client, Scott and a group of people from his team said they would come cheer me on. I had been watching the show for my entire life—you can’t claim to want to be a comedian without spending some amount of time proclaiming, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” alone to your bathroom mirror. The opportunity was a dream come true.
More precisely, it was one of those dreams where you’re onstage, you suddenly realize you’re naked, and everyone starts laughing at you. But in my case, not many people laughed.
Almost as soon as I walked into the club, I knew I was going to bomb. The audition invitation had been vague because everyone else trying out was a UCB
-trained comic who had studied SNL auditions, which require a very specific kind of comedy, for years. They didn’t need instructions. It had never even occurred to me to ask my agent for sample audition tapes or to look for audition videos on YouTube—you know, the very platform that had earned me an audition in the first place. (PSA: YouTube has tons of SNL audition tapes and screen tests from talented comedians who did and didn’t make the cut.) To top it all off, I’d been working on my characters for about a week, and instead of trying out my routine beforehand in front of an audience at a comedy club, I opted for the acclaimed “Above the Opera Singer Theater,” aka my living room. Patrick gave me some feedback, but getting one person’s perspective is not the same as having an audience, especially when that one person is like Patrick and doesn’t really know much about pop culture. As much as I love him, he once asked me if Selena was still alive, and I couldn’t help but wonder, aloud, “Who the hell did I marry?” I hadn’t performed stand-up since moving to New York, and YouTube comedy is completely different—you can edit the hell out of yourself to make sure all your jokes hit.
For my character showcase, I had come up with the idea that I’d be at an awards show and play both the presenter and the winners: Tyra Banks was hosting, and Lil Wayne, Britney Spears, my grandma, and Megan from “SWGSTBG” would be accepting awards. Not the most original pitch by any stretch of the imagination, but I figured it would get the job done. This was nothing like what the other comics had prepared. Instead of a generic, predictable location for their impressions, they’d introduce each character with an oddly specific, bizarre scenario—kind of like the premise of an SNL sketch: “This is Tom Hanks, who has stubbed his toe because he’s been helping someone move,” or “Here’s Sofía Vergara as a real estate agent in New York.” I can do a great Britney Spears impression, but I had no context for it. (Example: “Here’s Britney Spears babysitting for a Russian diplomat!”)
Out of twelve SNL hopefuls that night (including Sasheer Zamata, who did eventually join the cast), I was scheduled to go on eleventh, which made the whole thing more excruciating. Over and over, I watched people who were so prepared, so funny, and so on point that I wondered if my agent was going to drop me when I finally wandered onstage. Or if I should just get it over with and drop myself.
When my turn came around, I decided I needed to get through my performance as fast as possible. I introduced each character as Tyra Banks, praying the audience would get my basic America’s Next Top Model references. “I only have one photo in my hand, and it’s of Franchesca’s grandma”; “I was rooting for you, Britney Spears! We were all rooting for you!” It was exactly as bad as I expected it would be. My performance was less professional comedy routine and more Twenty-Fifth Annual Dunder Mifflin Paper Company Talent Show. While I don’t think I’ll ever be right for SNL, I would totally place at DMPC. I swear my Britney is that good.
After the final comic finished, Scott and the rest of the group from the agency walked me to the subway. I was trying very hard to hold it together, but I was humiliated—not just because of my performance, but because I worried they thought I was lazy and unprepared. I hadn’t even met some of them before, and I hated that this was the first thing they’d seen me do. Somehow, they didn’t fire me, but as I made the hour-long trek back up to Queens, humbled and embarrassed, I realized I had let all the attention from “SWGSTBG” go to my head. I had worked for years honing my specific skill set, but that didn’t mean I was an expert.
Though the SNL audition was a bruise to my ego, I was able to bounce back for the airing of my Anderson interview. “SWGSTBG” was well past six million views, and despite a Lil Wayne impression that consisted of nothing more than an aluminum foil grill, shades, and a backwards hat, I still officially had an agent. I was getting called for auditions left and right, and my very first national TV interview was about to debut. I was glowing.
I didn’t have access to a TV at work, so I was stuck reading tweets about the show as it aired instead of watching it live. I didn’t have cable or DVR at home, either, so my friend Dominic recorded the episode and a group of us planned to watch it after work. I spent the entire day refreshing my timeline instead of Photoshopping statement blazers, and at five p.m. I sped out of the office like I had just been told there was an athleisure sample sale in the lobby. (What can I say? I love high-end sweatpants at almost affordable prices.)
That evening, I sat in Dom’s tiny living room with Pat and our friends, drinking and eating snacks as if we were about to watch the Oscars. After Dom’s grand introduction—“Tonight we’re gathered to celebrate Fran because we love her and because we’re all jealous she got to meet Anderson fucking Cooper!”—the segment began to play. My heart was pounding as suddenly I was on-screen in my platinum-blond wig, saying:
Not to sound racist, but you can say the N-word, but I can’t?
My best friend was black—well, she’s still black, but we’re not really friends anymore.
Oh my God, I’m practically black! Twinsies!
This is so ghetto.
So cute for a black guy, right?
Can I touch it? Okay. I’m already touching it a little. Is this real? Wait, it’s not real? It is. So nappy.
I think what I like the most about them is they’re not, like, stereotypical, like, black people. You know what I mean?
It’s almost like you’re not black.
When the clip from “SWGSTBG” was over, we were transported back to the studio, where Anderson and I were sitting down for a one-on-one. While I certainly remembered being there, I almost couldn’t believe how comfortable and professional I looked. My little black dress looked damn good, my hair was piled high in my expertly braided updo, and my eyes sparkled like your grandmother’s favorite holiday shawl. I heard myself explaining how I thought the “Shit Girls Say” videos were funny, but I couldn’t really relate to them. “Being a YouTuber,” I was saying, “I thought, How can I jump on this and get tons of views? Because I want to get views, too—I’m going to be honest.”
The audience laughed, and so did our living room viewing party. Seeing myself on television instead of on my computer screen was surreal. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that all the talk about the camera adding ten pounds was clearly bullshit.
Then Anderson got into the drama portion of the interview—the backlash to my video. Slowly, I began to look less poised. “Have you been surprised at the reaction?” he asked, in that Scholarly Dad voice he has. “Some of the comments online have said it’s racist, what you’ve done.”
I knew this was coming, and I had practiced my answer before the taping. “Well, I think to be fair, my intention was not to label anyone as a racist, because in all honesty, none of those comments are actually racist.”
If you’re thinking: Wait a second, 2012 Franchesca. Those comments AREN’T racist? They’re as racist as a “12 Reasons Obummer Is a Kenyan Muslim” novelty calendar!—well, so were a lot of people. I’ll get to that in a second.
I went on to explain that curiosity was totally understandable, but treating black women like they were animals at a petting zoo was not. “I think a lot of times people are trying to relate to me and show me that we’re cool and we can get along,” I said. “They’re trying to be nice, but then the wrong thing slips out.” It’s almost funny to look back at how conciliatory and nonconfrontational I was being. How could anyone be offended by that?
Anderson took a few comments from black women in the audience, and they said the video was a great icebreaker for racial dialogue with their friends and coworkers. They found it relatable and funny and were happy to share it with their friends. Awesome. But then, Anderson approached an older white woman in the audience. Back at Dom’s apartment, I rolled my eyes—I already knew how this exchange played out.
Salty Lady: Hi. I was just wondering, if you say it had no racism or connotations, why do you use white and black girls? Why didn’t you just say, you know, “Funny Things Stupid People Say to Me” rather than using the black and the white?
Me [visibly annoyed, to some laughter in the audience]: Okay. Once again, the original video…
As I watched my eyebrows rise higher and higher into my perfectly sculpted updo, I felt like I was about to crawl out of my skin. Let me not be the “angry black girl” on national TV! I thought. Even though I had every right to find this woman’s comment infuriating—had I not just explained the concept minutes before?—I was projecting the stereotype onto myself.
She kept going:
Salty Lady: Saying black and white is what I’m getting at.
Me: I know. I’m going to answer your question. The original video that this is based off of is “Stuff Girls Say.” Then the most popular parody of that video was “Stuff Black Girls Say.” So my idea…
Anderson cut in to ask if I had been offended by the previous “Shit Girls Say” videos. I assured him that no, I hadn’t, and was about to explain further when my number one fan cut in again.
Salty Lady: I feel like white people are the only people that can be racist.
Me [obviously exasperated]: Nothing said in the video is racist. Honestly. I mean, asking about my hair, saying that you think someone is attractive despite being black—I don’t think any of those statements are racist. I do think that they are ignorant. I mean, I really am sorry if people are offended or they are upset about it, but I think that if you don’t see anything of yourself in it, then I don’t think it should be offensive.
Though I did do an admirable job of replacing every single “Shit” with “Stuff” for daytime audiences, I was starting to feel bad about how I looked on TV. On top of the tense back-and-forth, the way the segment had been edited made me look bored and nervous as I sat listening to the audience’s questions and comments. I’d been on TV before, but only local news (“Florida girl wins contest to go to the Emmys”), and the Anderson segment involved more production than I could have expected. Now, having worked on TV, I don’t think it was malicious—you’ve gotta get that B-roll. I learned an important show-biz lesson that day: As dubious as the name may be, “resting bitch face” is real, and it’s the stuff of TV magic. But at the time, I felt a little manipulated. Patrick shot me a confused, angry look. Was this about to go south?
“Ugh!” Dominic said. “That lady was so obnoxious. More power to you—I would’ve told her off. Seriously, sit down!”
I tried to go back to the segment, which had moved on to man-on-the-street interviews about the video. Most reactions were positive, with lots of black women agreeing they’d heard the statements before, and even a few white women agreeing that the comments were commonplace. Then the segment reached the last young woman.
Carnival Pretzel–Level Salty Girl: By doing it, she’s being racist to me.
It was like I had been transported back to that exact moment and was reliving it in real time. How could she think that me talking about my (very benign) experiences as a black woman was racist? And how did I not scream in the studio the minute she pulled the reverse racism card?
Anderson: It’s interesting. Franchesca, you heard that last young woman saying that you were being racist to her.
Me: I don’t think that talking about ignorance is racist. Like I said, I’m not labeling anyone racist, because that would imply that the statements were saying that someone is better than another race, and that’s not what any of the statements are doing.
After the commercial break, we got to the portion with Megan, and my friends began laughing it off and chatting among themselves. But I couldn’t stop going over my responses to Anderson’s questions. Actually, maybe saying someone is “so cute for a black guy” does imply racial superiority of some kind, right? Using “It’s almost like you’re not black” as a compliment lumps all black people together, and it suggests they’re generally worse than white people. Working through the whole thing felt too complicated to explore in a twelve-minute TV segment, so I told myself to let it go. Even though I can see now where I messed up, I had done pretty well for a girl who’d had no publicist, no agent, no manager, and only a pep talk from her boyfriend and dogs to prepare.
But not everyone was willing to give me so much credit. Or any credit. At all.
If I could go back in time, I would say, with confidence, “My video is not racist because I genuinely do not believe that racism against white people exists. Nothing I say or do could ever oppress white people, and my video certainly has not led to the oppression or mistreatment of white people. It might hurt some feelings, but this video isn’t about hating white people. It’s not about hating anyone. It’s shining a light on the experiences black women and people of color face every single day in a world that says we’re less than or ‘weird’ because we aren’t white. And if that makes you uncomfortable, maybe you should consider whether the problem lies with you, not me.”
Instead of a time machine, I had Black Tumblr.
If I thought my inbox was bad when I first went viral, it was even worse after my Anderson interview aired. A whole new wave of emails, messages, and comments crashed into every social media platform I was on. (Basically all of them.) As the days went on, the comments got more and more vitriolic—it was like my haters were taking time to build the perfect nasty insult. People of all races—or who claimed they were of all races—were calling me names: the N-word, Uncle Tom, slur after slur after slur. I was devastated, and I couldn’t understand it.
Before “SWGSTBG” went viral, I prided myself on being super engaged with my modest fan base, so my YouTube account was set to forward any comments on my videos to my email inbox; I wanted to be able to respond to comments in real time. Now that I was the new face of “reverse racism,” thousands of hateful comments came straight to me, unfiltered. Although I eventually turned off my email notifications, for months I answered angry comments regularly. I was just so surprised by the backlash that I thought I could reason with people.
From one side, there was the conservative white supremacy stuff: I was a racist who hated white people and I should go back to Africa. Having grown up in a fairly diverse and liberal community, I’d never been called a racist before, and I was not prepared. I opted for the kill them with kindness approach: “I don’t hate anyone, but I’d love to visit Africa someday! Thanks for the encouragement! ;)”
Eventually I forced myself to ignore the barrage of racist ramblings—a lesson I would return to over and over again in my career. But the criticism from the other side—from the left—was harder to disregard.
I’d been on the microblogging site Tumblr for a few years, steadily building a loyal audience by posting my hair tutorials and comedy videos and by reblogging viral content and occasionally adding personal commentary or jokes. After keeping a journal throughout high school and college, and abandoning LiveJournal when it was taken over by tweens, moving to Tumblr was a logical next step for me. The site served as a collaborative digital scrapbook—the community was just as much of a draw as the ease of publishing. It took all the work out of finding an audience of like-minded people with similar interests, and the site allowed microcommunities, ranging from fan fiction writers to conspiracy theorists to natural-hair bloggers, to proliferate.
Among these groups, Tumblr is probably best known for its active social justice community; it’s a particularly good platform for marginalized folks to organize, vent, and boost news stories about race, gender, sexuality, mental health, and disability that would otherwise be ignored. When “SWGSTBG” went viral, I unwittingly attracted the attention of this community. They rallied behind me when Perez Hilton reuploaded the video without permission on his site (which lost me views, and money). They also used the video as a jumping-off point for lengthy discussions about the dangers of unchecked white privilege, power dynamics in majority-white spaces, respectability politics, and microaggressions. But as Tumblr users unpacked the issues, I was nowhere to be found—I was busy imagining my life as a celebrity, complete with a late-night comedy show gig and an extensive new wardrobe.
While I was riding high from my Anderson segment, my newfound Tumblr audience wasn’t impressed. Why hadn’t I shut down the woman who accused me of being racist toward her? Why hadn’t I explained that racism against white people doesn’t exist because there’s no social structure oppressing white people? Why didn’t I explain the concept of white privilege? Why had I said none of the comments in my video were racist when they clearly were? Why had I not used my new national TV platform to define the term “microaggression” for the masses? How did I not know about microaggressions? How dare I express sympathy with some of the people who’d been hurt by my video? How dare I have a white boyfriend? How dare I be so stupid?
I was used to white people saying they were upset by or didn’t understand my video, but these messages were coming from black people, some of them even from academia. I was transported back to my middle and high school days, when my black peers would tell me I wasn’t being black in the right way, that I “sounded like a white girl” or wished I were white. To hear Black Tumblr tell it, I had bombed Anderson, and no amount of praise from my agents or parents—or especially from my white boyfriend—was going to change their minds. I knew I’d started a conversation, but only then did I realize I’d suddenly been handed a gigantic platform to talk about race. It was becoming painfully obvious that I was far from prepared. I hadn’t understood how much “SWGSTBG” meant to the people who felt they needed it most, and to them, I had fumbled the opportunity to turn it into something bigger than just a viral video.
The backlash, or black-lash, as I started to call it, came to a head when I posted a video sent to me by a white fan. Titled something like “Why ‘Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls’ Isn’t Racist,” the clip consists of a twenty-something white guy explaining power dynamics, institutional racism, microaggressions, and the fallacy of “reverse racism”—basically everything Black Tumblr had wanted me to say on my Anderson appearance. I thought it was a perfect breakdown that, in a tight five minutes, gave voice to things I’d captured in the video but hadn’t been able to quite put into words. So I posted the video on Tumblr, adding a “disclaimer”: The video repeated things black people have been saying for ages, but the sad truth was that some people would only listen if they were coming from a white person.
Wow. This, too, was the wrong thing to do. More than a few people responded that a white “translator” shouldn’t be necessary for people to understand the issue. I agreed, but did so while holding my ground. I wrote a response on my Tumblr: “This shouldn’t be an ‘us vs. them’ situation. The fact is that some people will refuse to digest the original message simply because it’s coming from a person of color… Call me an idiot if you’d like, but I don’t see how supporting someone (regardless of race) whose goal is to educate others deserves a side eye.”
I shared this and sat back to wait for cookies and agreement for my excellent points. Instead, I got called out, in posts like “Chescaleigh, sit the fucking fuck down”:
I was absolutely crushed. I cried for what felt like an eternity. But instead of logging off, I went down the rabbit hole, hoping to find a way out. As I read every message, comment, and reblog trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong, I felt like my computer was going to burst into flames. I’d fallen into “callout culture”—as quickly as I’d become internet famous, I was in danger of losing the trust of the audience I’d built with those two minutes and thirty seconds of satire. I was ripped to shreds because I didn’t know what I didn’t know during my Anderson appearance, and now I was being ripped to shreds because I didn’t know how to respond to being ripped to shreds. I’d gone from confident viral-video-star Franchesca to the high school version of myself—insecure, uncertain, and trying to balance my true self with the woman the world, and especially other black people, wanted me to be. I had just started to shake off the silly “racist” label from trolls and confused white people. But how could I shake off being a “coon” to the very black people who had, just days before, championed me for telling their stories?
I thought I was hot shit for making a viral video, but it was becoming clear that I had a lot to learn if I wanted to get to Anderson Cooper status someday. This is not an arena where you want to wing it, but I was not ready to be thrust into the role of activist and spokesperson. Like at my SNL audition, I hadn’t even realized there was something to wing.
Though many of the commenters were totally off base, some of them had a point. There was no reason to prioritize a white voice in a conversation about black experiences. And while sarcasm and passive aggression made me feel superior to the trolls who slung personal insults and racial slurs, there was no place for it when interacting with people who called themselves fans.
One of the only reasons I didn’t collapse into a puddle of hopelessness after the one-two punch of my failed SNL audition and incurring the wrath of Black Tumblr was that not everyone was calling for me to be permabanned from the cookout. A few black women reached out with some constructive criticism. They sent me reading lists and invites to private Facebook groups, and suddenly my Tumblr dashboard was filled with blogs like Fuck-Yeah-Feminists!, POC Creators, Colorlines, Racialicious, and RacismSchool, which is basically exactly what it sounds like—a primer on all the concepts I’d experienced all the time but had never heard of. My eyes were being opened to new ways to talk about race, the media, and politics. I was starting to feel like I was back in school again, but for a different reason: I was cramming. I wanted to learn as much as I could as fast as possible, not only for myself but because all of a sudden people were coming to me for advice, and asking me for answers I didn’t have. Soon I realized that my great talent lay in what I’d been doing, accidentally, in “SWGSTBG” and for years on YouTube: I had a knack for explaining things with jokes and pop culture.
Somehow, my agency didn’t drop me after I bombed SNL, and it was really cool to realize that the team believed in me and saw my potential. (It helped to remember that Scott had no interaction with Black Tumblr, so he had no idea there was a corner of the internet that believed I should be banned from speaking publicly ever again.) And while it was becoming painfully obvious that I needed to proceed with caution, I now had the support of new online friends and mentors I could vent to and ask for support.
Meanwhile, at my day job, I was sneaking around so much that I felt like I was trying to hide an affair. Thankfully, my manager didn’t really care that I was balancing my new life as an activist/actress with my full-time job; I always managed to get my work done on time and had no problem staying late to finish projects. Nevertheless, I quickly realized that if I wanted to take advantage of all the opportunities in front of me, I would have to quit. My boss didn’t seem surprised when I told him I needed to resign, but I couldn’t help but cry—I really liked the job, and I had just discovered the beauty of my employee discount. I’m not sure why, but people really sleep on Ann Taylor and their sister store, Loft. I’ll admit I wasn’t hip to it until I worked there myself, but now let me pass this totally not-sponsored good word on to you: Both brands have cute work and casual wear and bomb accessories, their shoes go up to size 11, and while most people know them as petite-friendly brands, they also carry tall sizes and go up to women’s size 18. Now do you understand why I cried so hard?
While I didn’t have a job to fall back on, I was able to quit because, soon after this whirlwind of a month, YouTube sent me a huge check—about $30,000 initially, and then $15,000 more after the popularity of “SWGSTBG” sent traffic to some of my other videos. I had no idea people were making that kind of money on YouTube—and neither did my bank teller.
When I went to deposit the first payment at my local branch, a little giddy, a little terrified that the check would somehow disintegrate in my hand between the front door and the counter, the man working asked, “Whoa. Why is Google giving you this much money?” It didn’t register at the time that I probably should have interpreted this as a backhanded compliment, if not outright racist—I was wondering the same thing myself. Instead of asking to speak to the manager, or just getting a new teller, I asked him if he’d seen the viral YouTube video “Shit White Girls Say… to Black Girls,” and explained that my check was payment for the ad views my video had racked up. He admitted to somehow missing the “Shit Girls Say” craze. I whipped out my phone so we could watch right there at the counter.
Thankfully, he laughed. Although it was a small thing, it gave me some much-needed perspective. Since the nesting dolls of controversy had taken up residence on my desk, my life had felt like it was taking place in the computer, in angry blog posts and furious messages. Getting a chuckle out of this random guy reminded me that my audience wasn’t just made up of the most vocal or most online people. Reaching local bank employees was just as important as reaching Tumblr influencers, and slowly but surely, I was developing the vocabulary and confidence to have important conversations with both.