We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,39

with all the other rabbits. Then something picks up my scent, and I’ve gotta flee.

When we’re out with the boys we raise, Zaire, Dahveon, and Zion, we try to say, “Hey, guys, it’s family time.” Not so long ago, we were all at brunch in Miami and an entire family came over. Mind you, we were in the middle of a family discussion, and also just really enjoying being together. It was one of the very few times I was not completely on edge out in public, looking around, checking for the emergency exits.

Zaire, who was twelve at the time, took the lead and jokingly said, “Not a good time.”

The mom looked at me. “Is this what you’re allowing?”

“We’re just trying to enjoy breakfast,” I said in my sweetest actress voice.

She grabbed my arm. Like you would grab a kid who is about to fall in the pool. She used full force. She wanted my attention.

“That’s a shame,” she hissed.

This woman snatched me, right in front of my family. I try to teach the kids about boundaries and sticking up for yourself and not letting people show you disrespect, and then I am grabbed in front of them.

“What is a shame?” I asked. There was no answer.

It happened so fast. It was so shocking.

D intervened. “Not now,” he told the woman.

It is twenty-four years later. My instinct in so many situations when I feel threatened is to run. As fast as I can. But just as that night at Payless, my good home training keeps me frozen in fear.

And then, sometimes, we humans perceive each other.

I will be in the ladies’ room, washing my hands next to another woman. She will take a few glances, which I notice, and as I’m readying myself to walk out the door, she’ll say, “Me, too.”

She doesn’t have to tell me what she means. I nod. I have been doing rape advocacy and sharing my own story since the beginning of my career. We don’t hug. We don’t cry. She nods back at me. Just two women in a moment of mutual respect, acknowledging the truth and consequences of our experience. Feeling, in that moment, less alone on our respective islands.

eight

BLACK WOMAN BLUES

“You know, you are really pretty for a dark-skinned girl.”

The woman placed her hand on mine as she said this. We had just met. This black lady had stopped me at the airport to say she enjoyed Being Mary Jane. She delivered her remark about beauty with a tone of assurance, yet surprise.

For years, whenever I heard this I would tighten my lips into an impassive smirk, tilt my head as if I didn’t really understand what the person was saying, and move the conversation elsewhere. Or simply end it. I know, it sounds like I was just called pretty. I get that it can be confusing. The phrase is used in the black community as if a unicorn had just been spotted prancing across 125th Street. Through God all things are possible, and it’s even possible that He sometimes makes dark-skinned women who aren’t ugly. Somehow, some way, I escaped the curse of my melanin and Afrocentric features to become a credit to my skin tone. “We found one!”

An ex-friend I came up with in Hollywood used to say, “I just think it’s great that you are so dark and still able to book jobs.” She was the slightest shade lighter than me. I let it go until I simply let her go, but recently, I’ve grown tired of ignoring these remarks and what they mean about all darker-skinned women. Issues of colorism run so deep in the African American community, but more and more I see it spring up on social media as #teamlightskin versus #teamdarkskin. It’s an age-old us-against-us oversimplification that boils down to the belief that the lighter your skin tone, the more valuable and worthy you are. The standard of beauty and intelligence that has historically been praised by the oppressor has been adopted by the oppressed.

This value system has become ingrained in us. As a teen, I became obsessed with the attention of boys, and equally fixated, if not more so, on the light-skinned girls who, I felt, would walk into a room and immediately snatch that attention away. I disliked them on sight.

My mother is light skinned, and she grew up having girls say to her face: “You think you’re so much better than me.” Mom and her sisters saw their light skin as a