The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae Read Free Book Online Page A

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    She has to have a baby with Down syndrome!
    Now we care about this lead character. Oh my God, she’ s so tragic . Oh my God, the ghetto . Oh heavens, what a cautionary tale! Oh to be black and poor in the ghetto . No wonder they’re so mad and defensive all the time .
    Precious was the anti–Tyler Perry, Tyler Perry–co-produced black film of the year and one of the many straws that broke the camel’s back (my camel is a masochist). While I was grateful for our introduction to the amazing Gabourey Sidibe (Senegal, stand up!), I needed to see more from my movies than the extremely tragic black woman, or the magic helpless Negro, or the many black men in dresses.
    You could say I have an entertainment complex. It stems from growing up during the golden age of nineties television. I look back and realize what a huge and amazing influence it was to have an array of diverse options to watch almost every night of the week. The Cosby Show was a variation of my own family—my doctor dad, my teacher mom, and my four siblings. A Different World made me want to go to college, talk about smart-black-people stuff, and find my own Dwayne Wayne. (As an aside, I looked for Dwayne’s double shades forever, and when I finally found them in the late nineties, nobody was checking for me. Their loss.) The nineties produced The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air , All That , Living Single , Kenan & Kel , New York Undercover , Martin , All-American Girl , Moesha , and Family Matters (Does anybody know what the hell happened to Judy? She went upstairs and literally got grounded for life.). Nineties television produced a plethora of images of people of color, and don’t even get me started on all the different film options we had. It was encouraging. Back in the nineties, we were relatable. Audiences cared about what we had to say and studios recognized our value, at least as far as ad revenue was concerned.
    Then as the decade made way for the new millennium, cable exploded with its own original content and film studios began to obsess over international box office sales. Somewhere along the line, we became unrelatable and invisible to the Hollywood system. Our images and diverse portrayals just weren’t worth the dollars and effort anymore. The images I had grown up with and grown so accustomed to seeing slowly disappeared, and it seemed to happen all at once. When I was in Potomac as the sole black girl, these shows were my access to black culture in some ways. When I moved to Los Angeles and the kids said I talked white but had nappy hair, I found a sort of solace in knowing that Freddie from A Different World and Synclaire from Living Single were napped out, too. I could be worse things.
    Right around the time I moved to Los Angeles, my passion for writing increased. I was in the hub of film and television and felt a need to take advantage of this, as quickly as possible. Also around that time, the new Cosby show came out on CBS. Since I related to the first show so much, I decided to write a spec script and send it to CBS. The episode, called “The Tongue Ring,” centered around Cosby’s character coming to terms with his daughter’s suggestive new piercing. (It was 1996 and I was eleven, so tongue rings were still very controversial.) I showed the script to my grandmother, who happens to be very computer savvy, and she encouraged me to submit it, so I did. It took nothing but a general internet search to find the address and BOOM, my talent was out there. Not wanting to put all my eggs in one basket, I wrote another television pilot, called Ronnie , a high school dramedy about gang violence, kind of like the short-lived television show South Central . I looked up NBC’s address, wrote a cover letter about how much I enjoyed their programming ( Saved by the Bell , California Dreams ,and City Guys ), and sent it off. Though I got no response, I continued middleschool content that I’d tried and optimistic that I’d have plenty of