New book Tuesday! An Interview with Shayla Lawson
Writer Naomi Elias interviews Lawson about her new book 'This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, And Being Dope'
Today’s newsletter is written by Naomi Elias who interviewed author Shayla Lawson about her new book. Elias is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared online and in print at a variety of publications including Longreads, New York Magazine, Nylon, and The Brooklyn Rail.
by Naomi Elias
“The most neglected person in America,” Malcolm X famously stated, “is the black woman.” This nearly sixty-year-old quote went viral on social media after news of 19-year-old Black activist Toyin Salau’s murder broke in June. Toyin’s story is heartbreaking. She was a highly vocal participant in the recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests who spent her final weeks fighting for the long-overdue respect and protection of Black life. And as is the case with the countless passionate and outspoken black women who came before her, no one was looking out for her life. “Who cares for little Black girls, Black teens, Black women?” actress Gabrielle Union wrote in an Instagram tribute to Toyin. “I can’t shake it. I am her and she is me.”
Malcolm’s quote is also reproduced in poet and writer Shayla Lawson’s new book, This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, And Being Dope. This Is Major, which is formatted as a collection of personal essays and cultural criticism, is a book-length answer to Union’s question. Who cares for Black women and girls? Other Black women and girls. Lawson finds inspiration in herself and other Black women and girls and their largely unheralded status as cultural forces. “I wrote This is Major,” Lawson explains in the book’s introduction, “because we are major.”
In chapters like “Intraracial Dating” and “Love Songs For Thots,” Lawson analyzes SZA’s Ctrl and makes wry observations about the difficulties Black women have dating whether they pursue interacial or intraracial love. In a chapter cheekily titled “‘Black Lives Matter’ Yard Signs Matter,” Lawson explores gentrification and the concept of white virtue signaling. Lawson also explores how Black girlhood is upended when school age black children are criminalized for acting their age, and how dark skinned people are misgendered and dehumanized when computers fail to register dark skin, and what it means that she has been confused for nearly every famous Black woman alive including but not limited to Whoopi Goldberg, Janelle Monáe, Erykah Badu, and “that black woman from Mr.Robot.” While reading, I couldn’t help but feel the book was an antidote to how we are taught to see Black women. This Is Major works as a corrective to society’s de-centering and devaluing of Black womanhood by resetting the cultural narrative around it. It’s about Black women and their dark and dope Black skin and the debt American and global culture owes them.
“When [Toni] Morrison says that black girls hold ‘the world in place,’ I don’t believe she is saying we are meant to hold the world together like tape,” Lawson writes, “I believe she is saying that we are adhesive in ways that are self-sacrificing and supportive but also provocative and threatening.” “We attract and defy. We disrupt. We delight.”
Lawson is an Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College and currently resides in Brooklyn. I chatted with Lawson via phone earlier this month about her new book, how unlearning is the most important kind of learning, and how Diana Ross became an icon of Black girl millennial cool.
In the opening line of the book you write, “the color of this book is Grace Jones strapped into an electrical socket.” It immediately conjures a luminous darkness. What made you want to dedicate this book to dark girls?
It’s a book about Black women and I wanted to specifically look at dark skinned women because within the frame of blackness colorism creates its own levels of invisibility that goes beyond the ways that Black girls collectively tend to be isolated from the mainstream and ignored.
What’s wonderful about Grace Jones as a place to begin the book is this conversation around femininity across the spectrum. Grace Jones represents more than a standard femininity. She’s been a hero not only to women but to non-binary people as well because she presented an affinity for androgyny and expanded the idea of what Black femme or Black femininity was as a definition. Within the legacy of Black women we have a lot of trans activists and heroes, we have a lot of conversations that revolve around non-traditional femininity. That is what I see when I start the book with that image of Grace Jones that was taken by Jean Paul Goude: the idea of her being plugged into something electric, something bigger than her that turns her body into something that is more than just a very particular kind of prettiness that we see supporting white male patriarchy.
Early in the book you reveal that America—with its insistence on white history, white television shows and white toys—turned you into a white supremacist. It’s a really bracing line and thought. Do you think you realized it at the time or is it something you only processed in retrospect when writing this book?
It’s an important thing for all of us to recognize in terms of where information is coming for us especially in the time we’re in now. White people in particular are becoming a little bit more aware of the idea that white supremacy is not reserved for white nationalists. When I wrote that line into the book, I did it intentionally. One of the things that is important for me as an author—and it probably comes from me being a teacher—is a lot of my pedagogy revolves around modeling the things I see in the world on my body; how these things that I see happening in the world get projected, and what it’s like for that to be inhabited by a Black femme person.
It can seem jarring for me to say I was turning into a white supremacist, but I was. The first time I started to realize that was very early as a Black girl. In that chapter I talk about a moment in a carpool full of white girls my age when I make a joke about welfare and my mom—as soon as the rest of the people leave the car—makes sure to inform me that welfare was the way that my grandmother was able to raise her and my aunt and uncle. I knew what I was saying was wrong and it supported an idea that made white people seem better or more important than I was. I felt a necessity to promulgate that because of my proximity to whiteness, because I went to a nearly all-white school, because I was in an all-white carpool, because I lived in an all-white neighborhood. In order to prove my worth, I needed to signal my things weren’t that important; my things weren’t culturally important, my things weren’t relevant.
This happens to a lot of dark people. I like looking at the term ‘dark’ as opposed to Black or brown to kind of situate us in a narrative in which there are a lot of us. We like the term ‘people of color’ for its ubiquity but one of the things the term denies is that across cultures, dark skinned people suffer the most.
I talked to my friends who are Persian, Palestinian, Venezuelan, and they all have very similar experiences. They felt this necessity to make whiteness the prominent narrative of how they told their lives. We change our names, we change the music that we listen to, we adopt all the accoutrements to give us the appearance of being acceptable in white culture and it’s something that our white associates probably never think about as part of what our school education is. At the same time, they’re being indoctrinated into these same things as well. You are being told a very specific narrative about America that was constructed. It’s a narrative that makes it seem like there was nothing here and that this land was pioneered by early European settlers. We completely deny that the majority of our history is native, we deny the overwhelming contribution that Black people and Black bodies have made to allow this country and its capitalist structure to function and all of us are forced to align with that story and figure out a way to make our bodies fit into that space. Often, if you’re a BIPOC, and if you’re a dark person, that means that you have to deny the fact that you have any kind of history or significance that comes from your own personal culture and comes from the color of your skin.
“Often, if you’re a BIPOC, and if you’re a dark person, that means that you have to deny the fact that you have any kind of history or significance that comes from your own personal culture and comes from the color of your skin.”
On occasion you add the typographic symbol for a registered trademark after the word America. Can you explain what that signifies?
When I talk about that idea of an America that we have been handed over as a narrative, it is a manufactured narrative and that narrative is manufactured to promote capitalism and to sustain capitalism. I felt like it was important to acknowledge that there is America as a nation and then there is America as a concept. So many people have been massacred and ignored in order to preserve this idea of America the registered trademark. We proudly talk about assimilation culture, we proudly talk about the American dream that fosters this model minority myth. That is another one of those stories that was created to cover over the consistent abuse of Black people by telling dark people abroad ‘see you can come here and make it, the problem with African Americans is not the subjugation, the problem is they don’t know how to take advantage of such a rich American™ culture.’ I wanted to start building in the nuances of that conversation by moving back and forth between using the registered trademark symbol and not.
This Is Major examines the careers of many Black female figures from TLC’s Chilli to Tatiana Ali to Nina Simone to yourself to look at the ways society places restrictions on their privacy, sexual expression, and success. But as the cover lets on, the book is also heavily invested in the life and legacy of Diana Ross. Can you explain why she is such a potent icon of Black womanhood to you?
One of the things that I wanted to do with the story of Diana Ross was kind of redeem it. I know that sounds silly because Diana Ross is so famous and so beloved but I think there’s this place that is Black girl culture where she has been put above us. For instance, when I first started researching the book I found an article in Marxism Today that talked about Diana Ross as the only Black person—male or female—who had ever become successful in the ways of male whiteness. I was really interested in that because I’ve never seen that written about any other celebrity. I grew up in the ‘90s in a very specific period of time when we were talking about divahood and there was a lot of work being done not only to discredit Diana Ross’s blackness but also her commitment to Black people, to Black women. She was often painted as an adversary to Black women and this is still a heritage that I see proliferated by the media.
We still haven’t entirely recovered from the idea that Diana Ross isn’t for us, that she is above us. When we look at the color narrative, one of the things that even Nina Simone criticized Diana Ross for was the fact that people say a lot of her success came from fitting a Eurocentric stereotype of ‘pretty.’ I thought it was really important to go back and look at her in totality and go back into the world in which I teach by putting models onto my body and just think about the number of times people have made similar kinds of references to me and what did that mean in terms of my success, and what did it mean in terms of my joy and my sensuality.
I loved going back to Diana Ross and going to different periods of her career that definitively marked ways that Black women started to change the ways that they thought about themselves. I love reexamining the wigs and thinking of it as Diana Ross speaking to us from the future. She is such a Black millennial icon. I’ve heard Morgan Parker talk about that black and white photograph of Diana Ross eating a rib in one of her readings, Jamila Woods has a song where she references that photograph. I wanted to reclaim that iconic image in the way that photographs of certain men—James Dean, Sammy Davis Jr., Bruce Lee—register masculinity in this very particular way. Men get redefined and reshape the way that we think about ‘cool.’ Diana Ross for me is that; she’s the primary icon of Black girl millennial cool. I wanted to write an essay that tried to reset a lot of the discrimination that I grew up with. Diana Ross’s legacy made what I could turn into so much bigger and so much broader, and filled me with so much love for myself and love for my blackness and pride in my beauty and pride in my ability to have moments of repose where I can just lay out on a chaise lounge and wear silk pajamas.
I’ve spent a lot of COVID in silk and satin pajamas just trying to lay out. Yesterday it was like 3 p.m. and I was just like, fuck it, I’m gonna take a bubble bath and drink Prosecco and those to me are things I’ve gained out of an icon like Diana Ross. I love the idea of channeling my Diana Ross. What would Diana do? Well, she would take care of herself because that’s part of the revolution as well.
You cover a wide range of issues at the intersection of race and technology from digital blackface to racial bias in facial recognition apps and the behemoth that is Black Twitter. Why was it important to you to explore the digital frontier?
Because we’re killing it, we’re doing some really interesting stuff out there. It’s also another place where a white supremacist narrative is creeping in. One of the things that I saw and found in my research is that there’s not a ton of documentation that’s being done about the significant contribution of Black people to these social and digital spaces. I worked at a marketing firm and one of the things that they would always refer to in their marketing materials was how important it was for us to be modeling what we did off of Black Twitter or Black Vine videos or Black memes. We see a lot of that. We see these videos that go viral and then turn into very whitewashed commercials in which people are pantomiming the same thing but they turn it into a white family learning a TikTok dance instead of going back and actually hiring the Black family that became famous for doing it on the internet. Or we think about Kayla Newman and how her Vine video made the phrase “on fleek” super popular but then you turn around and she can’t even get enough money to sponsor the hair salon that she wanted to start. It’s part of a historical loss when it comes to Black creativity.
One of the conversations that’s coming up a lot in this anti-racist dialogue is the number of times that people knowingly steal from Black culture. They will try to reconstruct their body, they’ll steal the shape of our lips, they’ll steal our hair style, they’ll steal the way that we shade our eyes to make them look more like Black women but then they want nothing to do with us and they give no credit to the idea that we have provided them the opportunity to be. The minute they get to where they want to be, they start to discredit blackness. Lana Del Rey just wrote that crazy post in which she basically tore down all of the women that even allowed her to have her first album, all the Black women for whom trying to build space around sexual autonomy took a lot of work. We had the same thing happen with Miley Cyrus. It’s an ongoing conversation. There’s this period in time in which a white celebrity wants to do everything they can to mirror us and then there is this quick shift to denigrate us—denigrate is a funny word to use just because etymologically it’s tied to that idea of de-Blacking something. A lot of Black people who are using the open source opportunities of social media to build networks in which they are seen and can build careers out of their talent see the things that they created stolen from them and then collectively put on these non-Black bodies. It’s a very serious digital blackface offense and it was just another thing that I wanted to open up a conversation about.
Your use of footnotes in this book reminds me of how Carmen Maria Machado uses them in In The Dream House, as a vital addendum to her writing that carries equal weight with the main text. What appealed to you about footnotes as a narrative tool?
I have not read Carmen’s memoir but I was really tied to, in her first book, this idea of establishing a meta-narrative. “Black Girl Hipster” is the only chapter in the book that has footnotes and I did that purposefully. I wanted the footnotes there to play around with that meta-dialogue and that question about nuance and the importance of legibility that’s at the heart of the essay since the essay is my take on that conversation of ‘can non-Black people use the n-word?’ and ‘what context gives Black people the right to designate a word and say that it belongs to them?’ I felt the issues were primarily of white culture being comfortable with somebody else adopting a double standard, a hierarchy in which their needs are more important than somebody else’s, so I wanted a hierarchical text. I wanted a text that required you to do some auxiliary reading, some auxiliary thinking, as a way to kind of enact what it means to have a conversation with yourself about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of using the n-word in whatever variant it starts to show up. Footnotes felt like a good way to do that and be playful.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Buy Shala Lawson’s This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, And Being Dope here.
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