This Is Major

Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope

Shayla Lawson

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780062890603
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Ensayos en sociología

A National Book Critics Circle Finalist in Autobiography * Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award * Named one of the most anticipated books of the year by USA Today, Bitch Magazine, Parade, Salon and Ms. Magazine

From a fierce and humorous new voice comes a relevant, insightful, and riveting collection of personal essays on the richness and resilience of black girl culture—for readers of Samantha Irby, Roxane Gay, Morgan Jerkins, and Lindy West.

Shayla Lawson is major. You don't know who she is. Yet. But that's okay. She is on a mission to move black girls like herself from best supporting actress to a starring role in the major narrative. Whether she's taking on workplace microaggressions or upending racist stereotypes about her home state of Kentucky, she looks for the side of the story that isn't always told, the places where the voices of black girls haven't been heard.

The essays in This is Major ask questions like: Why are black women invisible to AI? What is "black girl magic"? Or: Am I one viral tweet away from becoming Twitter famous? And: How much magic does it take to land a Tinder date?

With a unique mix of personal stories, pop culture observations, and insights into politics and history, Lawson sheds light on these questions, as well as the many ways black women and girls have influenced mainstream culture—from their style, to their language, and even their art—and how "major" they really are.

Timely, enlightening, and wickedly sharp, This Is Major places black women at the center—no longer silenced, no longer the minority.

Love Songs for Thots

A thot is not a slut, Rudo explains. It is three a.m. and you two are sitting in the car with the sunroof open outside her apartment, listening to SZA’s song “Love Galore.” A streetlamp floods the dashboard and you each have one hand on the armrest. She has recently declared this to be The Summer of Thots.

Thot? You’ve never heard the word and she is trying to break it down for you. “Thot” stands for “that ho over there” or “thirsty hoes over there”—“Thirst” being a particularly important part of the acronym. The Indiana summer is dry. And with the arid freedom of hot days stretching out before you, just for you, to absorb the muddy spring as you start compiling a hot girl summer compendium of new short skirts, midriffs, and pinky-baring shoes.

Yesss, boo! Rudo snaps when you meet her out, applauding your thotty clothes. You both look far too cute and your hair too laid for the dive bars that make up the circuit of go-out spots in this cornhusker valley town, but you make the best of it. You carry on romantic entanglements with as many folks as possible, dancing, drinking, and then debriefing in your car under the streetlight afterward, the thirst finally quenched.

One of your favorite intrigues happens when one person you have slept with and another person you made out with enter the bar at the same time and you have to figure out how to maneuver that moment as you try cozying up to a third. It’s a beat that pretty much everyone else you know did in high school (or college) while you were the model good kid in glasses and knee-length skirts. And sometimes you still wear glasses as part of the seduction. Why not? You are smart and intense, and spent your early years studying complex themes you rarely expect your love interests to understand. You pick out a soundtrack: SZA. The Ctrl album. You turn the music on and talk about how you can only make love in hyperbole. You replay each intimate scenario. You analyze every glance and text message, tie your loves to the bed with nylon hosiery and a heavy theoretical framework. You look back at the girl you once were and rethink everything she ever thot.

TRACK ONE

CTRL

Sometimes I wanna break up with a nigga just so I can listen to “Climax” on repeat, says Rudo. It is summer in Johannesburg—Afropunk—but the weather is out of control. You just got caught in a hailstorm, rice-sized nuggets of ice mixed with sleet. You forgo your plan of dancing in the park in thotty outfits and retreat indoors with bad feelings and mucked-up shoes.

It has been two years since The Summer of Thots. You shower off the mud. You take out a hair dryer and turn up the music on your laptop. You get into a late-career, early-noughties Usher oeuvre, rapidly cycling through the tracks on Confessions to decipher at which point he was definitely sure he had herpes. You dissect “Confessions” and “Confessions II.” You and Rudo are both fans of “Confessions,” the interlude, a one-minute, nineteen-second melodrama that begins with Usher play-acting a phone call he picks up in the studio in which his friend informs him that his side-chick is pregnant. The interlude ends in a three-part harmony of grieving Ushers deciding that the best way to inform his good girl that he’s been cheating is to stay in the studio, recording a song about all the mess he’s been up to.

The greatest Easter egg of “Confessions II” (or “Confessions Part II,” depending on which release of the multiplatinum Usher album you’re looking at) is its mention of “Confessions Part I” in its first verse. It’s easy to assume, as most people do, that the “Part I” referred to by Usher in “Confessions II” is the interlude called “Confessions” on the American release. But humiliating his beloved through that one-two punch on the second-bestselling album of the aughts wasn’t enough for the pop star. Prior to creating “Confessions”—the interlude everyone totally stans for (Put that on everything.)—Usher wrote an actual song called “Confessions Part I” that ended up as a B-side on the album released in the UK. The four-minute, twenty-second song is complete trash.

You love me? Unconditionally? Usher croons talkily on “Confessions Part I” before he bursts into his fabled falsetto, envisioning how to explain to his real-life girlfriend he’s having a baby with another woman through a fake-ass love song. Confessions is Usher back in 2004 when he was filling stadiums of screaming teenagers. Back when Usher was basically dimples and five-foot abs. During the Confessions tour, he reenacts “Confessions” live, pulling a brick-sized flip phone out the pocket of his low-slung jeans while an industrial fan blows back his orange silk button-down. A half-naked superhero, he stands in the spotlight making hand gestures of anguish and awe.

WE LOVE YOU, USHER!! some lone lady-fan screams in the dramatic pause between Usher’s apologetic ab-lib at the end of “Confessions” and the downbeat to “Confessions II,” the up-tempo catharsis to Usher’s cheating nonsense. He ticks across the stage in the pop-and-lock contortions that made him famous, pauses for a moment, and smiles.

When Usher released Confessions, he was dating TLC bandmate Chilli. At the time Confessions came out, you were still a closet TLC fan, although the band’s legacy had already dissolved into pop passé. TLC was the first female band to make health-conscious sex positivity an integral part of their message. To see Usher date someone who was an artist and not a groupie, someone as successful as he was, felt like filling the lacuna of the black girl achievement gap. Chilli was seven years Usher’s senior, and had had a complete career before Usher’s 8701 album made him a pop icon—which meant his partner was big in the music industry but not competition. They strode along on red carpets with the easy confidence of a power couple who looked like they could make it, each claiming a comfortable space in the spotlight.

Then, Confessions.

It’s rumored that Usher decided to wait until it was time to release his seventeen-track list of infidelities before explaining to Chilli what the autobiographical album was about. Instead of coming clean to her while in the throes of his self-flagellating album production, he waited until it was time for him to run through the entertainment newsreels, discussing with the world how the lyrical inspiration for his latest album had been his guilty conscience.

But how could Chilli not know Usher was writing an entire album about cheating on her? Well, Chilli was busy. She’d essentially stepped out of the music industry by the time Usher got his big break and probably didn’t have the energy to get invested in Confessions beyond hollering out “Yes, baby, that’s my song!” to the opening notes of the album’s first single, “U Don’t Have to Call.” Have you ever dated a dude who sings? Ever dated a dude who wanted you to sit and watch him play PlayStation? Memorized the complete Premier League starting lineup? Blown up your phone data streaming video because your dude plays triangle for the number one band in Eritrea? Whatever sacrifice you have made to keep your love alive is probably pretty much the same thing Chilli did, except instead of getting flowers and a thank-you card, Chilli got a revenge album.

Usher’s Confessions is a revenge album because Chilli never recovered from the press circus that was its release. Aside from a brief stint on a VH1 reality series, What Chilli Wants, Chilli disappeared from the public eye almost entirely. In What Chilli Wants, the star of the black girl-band who taped condoms to their baggy clothes and talked openly in their music and interviews about STI education and female gratification is reduced to a rip-off of The Bachelorette.

When Usher released Confessions, he revealed how little respect he had for his partner’s professional background, breaking down the barriers that judge feminine people by their sex lives. His songs on the album separate women into categories—bad and good—the wantonly sexual women he lusts after in the club and the pious, devoted girlfriend (presumably, Chilli) who’s sitting at home waiting for him. Thots vs. Wifeys. Both Chilli and Usher wrote panty anthems, but only Chilli’s work uplifted people who wore panties. Confessions sought to bury TLC’s era of nuanced sexual liberation.

If that ain’t some mad anti-feminist shade work, what is?

Back in Johannesburg, you switch the music from Confessions to “Climax,” a song from Usher’s deluxe Looking 4 Myself album. A song written after Usher’s two failed marriages, after his relationship with Chilli, “Climax” sounds tired. You try to imbue a bit of Usher’s breathy nineties innuendo into the music and find none. Even if the climax rendered by the song’s two characters was intended to be sexual, this song isn’t about the end of a romp. It’s about the end of a relationship. It’s the end of Usher pretending like he has any intention to do anybody right. If “Climax” is about sex, it’s about the kind of sex you have when you live with someone, but you love yourself so damn much you don’t wanna give you up. You’re a bleary-eyed wreck and you’re worn out. And you know on the other side of this you’re gonna go back out into the thotty uncertainty of your worst-case scenario. But damn it if “Climax” doesn’t make you want to be single. “Climax” makes you believe.

You hear “Climax” at a rooftop bar one summer as you are sitting next to a man you desperately want to break up with; the singer covers it as a folk ballad, but its message is the same. You and the man have been dating long-distance for several months before you both decide he should come spend part of the summer in your apartment, a decision that at the time feels very adult. He’s supposed to be writing a book, but instead spends most of the summer chain-smoking and fretting—which is basically writing—or getting blazed on legal marijuana and watching Stranger Things while you cook and look up art museums to go to, hiking excursions to take.

You were not opposed to this small tryst in monogamy, after the long FaceTime conversations—the weeks you waited to see him, spurning advances from your usual hookups who were not entirely convinced you had an out-of-town boyfriend. For a while, sitting at home alone, and then sitting at home tending to your own personal tortured artist, felt satisfying—very “girlfriend experience”—much like you imagined in your high school sex dreams about Thelonious Monk. You got lost in the romance of it until it occurred to you that you had your own work to get done. And that being the full-time lover of a tortured anything didn’t fit your agenda. This is why you are prone to kick men out. But you love him. Instead of writing, you start ordering takeout and spend the rest of the summer beside him, getting blazed on the couch watching Stranger Things in thotty protest of your stagnant courtship.

You know you wanna break up with the nigga when you hear yourself on the roof, belting out the climax to “Climax” alongside the folk singer, in full-throated harmony. To belong to nobody. To be unbothered. To mind your own business, like the girl SZA writes about in the chorus of “Go Gina.” You got to get him out your house, and bitch, get free. But you wait. You wait until that moment is over. You break up with him months after he moves back to his home city, through a phone call or an email, like a punk.

But really, that was the remix. You didn’t just date long-distance. You met at a hotel bar while each of you wrote, both of you on assignment out-of-town. You fell for each other pretty quickly. You made each other laugh until you teared up, and you moved into a bigger hotel room together so you could play house. You were supposed to be a one-night stand. A business-trip fling. But you could barely separate from each other by the time your flights took off in different directions, and you vowed to spend the summer together right there and then.

By the time he landed at the front door of your apartment, his work had taken a momentary downturn. He was chain- and weed-smoking because he was depressed. You both talked about this. You both tried to keep him happy. But the pressure was getting to your sex life. By the time “Climax” hit on top of that rooftop bar, you’d stopped having sex entirely. He couldn’t. You had tried a few nights before. He still could not. Perhaps, he suggested, it is because when I met you I assumed you would be a one-off and not my girlfriend. Perhaps I’m not turned on because there isn’t any danger left. You’d turned over on your side and tried not to make noise while you sobbed into your pillow. You woke up with his arms around you long after you’d cried yourself to sleep. You believe that he cares but when he says what you were meant to be—“a one-off”—he shames you. This is something you have no control over. Him saying this is what you always are: fun, quick sex. As if there is nothing to what you feel: like an afterthot.

TRACK TWO

ALT

A thot is not a slut, Rudo explains in your passenger seat under the streetlight. A “thot” offers an alternative to equating sex with an act that causes one to give up autonomy. A “thot” does not think of their body as something lessened by sexual intimacy. Adapting to this new knowledge, you break down the adage handed down to you by older women since childhood: nobody wants a “slut.” A used woman.

What is “used”? You ask to absolutely no one while naked in your room alone. You think of the lattice of scars, calluses, cellulite, and stretch marks that compose your body. Your body put into practice. Your body put to use. You tried but could not survive in a glass box. A padded room. You choose to use your body. You choose.

You and Rudo draw a distinction between “slut” and “thot.” You are a black girl—part of a class of bodies at whom “thot” is hurled more regularly than “slut,” as an insult, and is deployed with a greater sense of threat. You recognize that the terms were, to the best of your knowledge, invented by men. The primary purpose of each word is to destroy you. This language is an alternative to domination. The words push you into being worthy of a man’s sexual approval. If a slut is a toy, you think, a thot is a trap. “The fantastical nightmare of the thot,” Amanda Hess writes in Slate, “is a woman who pretends to be the type of valuable female commodity who rightfully earns male commitment—until the man discovers that she’s a cheap imitation of a ‘good girl’ who is good only for mindless sex, not relationships or respect.” But ...