Changing Times

 In 2019 I went to Hannah Gadsby's stand-up show "Douglas" in Union Square. To commemorate a hilarious evening I got some Gadsby merch, including a t-shirt with the a light Gadsby joke 'I identify as tired.' I remember the first time I wore the shirt I went for a walk in the park and people laughed. An older white woman yelled 'that's a funny shirt' and I told her it was from a Gadsby stand-up. 

Two days ago I'm going to pick up my laundry. In a rush I throw on my Gadsby t-shirt and I'm walking down the street and I see one person frowning at me. Hmm...that's interesting. Then I go into the dry cleaner and I notice a grimacing guy behind me. When a third person is making a face I become aware that I'm wearing a shirt that says 'I identify as tired' which read different now than from  2 yrs ago. I want to yell 'it's a t-shirt from a feminist lesbian comedian. Yes it's on a black male body, but it's a silly joke about being tired.' But I remember the the old adage: if you have to explain the joke it's not funny. So I come back home and bury the shirt at the bottom of my drawer. 

Times change. Meanings change. Jokes change.

***

I recommended a brilliant Black writing colleague to lead a new workshop at Netflix for young emerging Indigenous writers. He accepted and it hit me: a poc writer teaching other poc writers. Yay, huzzah, woot! 

12 hrs later... I'm sitting and thinking about that again. I realized that all my writing teachers were white. Undergrad, grad, Juilliard, side workshops. Not only that, all my former editors and bosses were white. Not a Latino, not a Black, not an Asian among them. What's even crazier is that I've never processed that fact. It was just something I/we accepted back then. On the one hand, they were all great teachers who taught me a lot. I don't look back on college years and think 'damn, look at all those white professors.' On the other hand, we couldn't have found one solitary POC writing professor at 3 different institutions?

Today each one of those institutions has at least one POC instructor. And now Netflix. A sign of hope? Maybe.