Episode 11! And we’re back! The podcast is back in full swing this April hosted by Black Girl Dangerous herself, Mia Mckenzie, with guests Chanelle (@nellienooks) and Shaadi (@TwittaHoney). This podcast catches you up to speed on everything from the women who took their Twitter beef too seriously to Black Girls Rock! and Beyoncé rumors. You’ll be sure to leave this podcast with a cutting analysis on race and ancestry in 2016 and speculations about the The Walking Dead finale!
Full transcript below!
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Transcript:
Mia: Welcome to the Black Girl Dangerous podcast! I’m Mia McKenzie. We have been away way longer than we expected, actually, and we’ll get to that but we’re back now and we have some great topics to discuss on the podcast this time around. So we’re gonna be talking about Black Girls Rock, we’re gonna be talking about all the anticipation of Beyonce’s yet to drop album, we’re gonna be talking about Ronda Rousey and race vs. ethnicity and also that Walking Dead season finale. Also! My fave story of the week, that woman who made a fight date with another woman on Twitter and then got her ass beat. [laughs] So joining me now is BGD’s own Chanelle Adams. Hey Chanelle!
Chanelle: Hey, Mia!
Mia: So, how are you feeling about… [laughs]
Chanelle: Doing this again!
Mia: Right, yeah. So last week we did a podcast which we’re now calling “the lost podcast”. This was a perfect podcast.
Chanelle: It was amazing.
Mia: It was so amazing. We impressed ourselves, we blew our minds.
Chanelle: No editing necessary!
Mia: Exactly. It was all the things. And then Garageband was like “Sike nah!” So we did not get to post it. It does not exist anymore and the only witness to it is my cat who heard the whole thing.
Chanelle: She said it was dope!
Mia: She said it was so dope, like she was so into it. So here we are back again talking about some of the things we talked about last week and some new things that just happened this week.
Chanelle: So this week, we had the Black Girls Rock Annual Award Show which was great timing because we had Black History Month and then Women’s History Month and then it’s April and it’s like, we have nothing. So let’s be black and a woman this month! So it’s always a good show. I mean, y’know, it can be a little corny and some of the people brought on can be questionable but overall great time. Were you able to see it?
Mia: I did not see it. I don’t have TV, so I see everything like…if it’s a live thing, I see it the next day. But I was on Twitter and I saw stuff everybody was posting about it, images that people were posting, and all the tweets. I thought it was really cool, just the whole concept of it. Just to see this room full of black women, all this inspirational stuff and all this great music and performances and it’s always dope when Black Girls Rock comes around.
Chanelle: Yeah. Everyone can just celebrate being black girls.
Mia: Right.
Chanelle: Watching it going on, watching on Twitter, I saw a lot of people freak out when Rihanna started talking when she said “All Girls Rock” and then she said “But Black Girls more” there was a moment where in that half-a-second Twitter already was like “NOOOOOOOOOO! Rihanna!”
Mia: Right! [laughs]
Chanelle: Like, they didn’t even let her finish the sentence! [laughs]
Mia: Right! She was like all girls rock but black girls, we just on another level. But that pause in between, like no! Don’t do it girl!
Chanelle: People started applauding already, so it seemed like it was maybe over.
Mia: Right.
Chanelle: But she came through!
Mia: Good. Good for Rihanna. Good on you. It’s always good to defy everything that’s happening on social media when Black Girls Rock was going on, the one thing I’ve noticed about Black Girls Rock, while we’re enjoying it, while we’re having all this Black Girl Joy and togetherness and we’re feeling happy, everybody else starts to kind of lose their mind and I think kind of in, just in a regular day, people are really eager to tear black women down. But when something like Black Girls Rock is happening, it goes haywire and people just, their need to demean black women…they just can’t resist in that moment from doing it. I remember last year when Black Girls Rock was happening all the people on Twitter talking about All Girls Rock and “why is it just black girls?” and “What if there was a thing like White Girls Rock?” like everything isn’t White Girls Rock. And this year, unfortunately, that dude who hosts the MTV show Catfish decided to get his little ass up on Twitter while Black Girls Rock was happening and he tweeted “#BlackGirlsRock I agree. They also Catfish a lot, just sayin’.”
Chanelle: That’s just like, trying to self-promote while dragging black women.
Mia: And this bullshit like, “oh I agree that Black Girls Rock, so let me pretend to be complimenting black girls and then this Catfish thing”. It was so, first of all, in terms of… Consider the moment. This moment is happening, all these tweets are happening. I was looking the other day and this is like, the biggest tweeted thing on Twitter that day. Hundreds of thousands of tweets about it. You see all these black women enjoying themselves and being happy and this is what you tweet? This is what you tweet? First of all, you could just shut the fuck up. That’s always an option. You don’t have to say shit. You don’t have to say you agree, you don’t have to say anything, but you’re gonna say something that’s gonna be this really gross, mean thing. And of course, people would jump on him and they’re, y’know, maybe there’s a reason women Catfish. Maybe it’s what the fuck you just said. I mean, maybe that kinda shit you just said is the reason. Y’know and talking to him about racism and misogynoir and the reasons why black women are made to not feel beautiful, to not feel desired but the whole conversation around that, it’s really irksome and annoying. And so he says this and people jump on him. And some people are educating him or whatever and he’s like, “Oh I’m sorry and thanks for communicating with me, I apologize” and then there’s all these tweets – mostly from white people – like “Oh, you just made a mistake! We forgive you!” Like, white people, it’s not your place to be forgiving people for racism. [laughs] Like, you don’t get to forgive him for racism. Stay out of it. [laughs] Black women will decide, it’s not up to you to say it’s cool, it’s alright, you just made a mistake.
Chanelle: They don’t have the final say.
Mia: Right.
Chanelle: No. There’s something about when black women are celebrating themselves that people think it’s a direct threat to them existing or being allowed to celebrate themselves in their own space. It’s like the two can’t happen simultaneous. Like, what do you think we do every day in this world we live in where we’re told that we don’t rock all the time. It’s like, we’re still surviving. We’re still telling ourselves we rock. It’s not the norm. And the second we do, it’s like an existential threat to everybody.
Mia: Right, right.
Mia: Right, right. And I mean, it just goes to show this is how things work though. People who are kept at the bottom are there to prop everybody else up and so what happens when Black Girls Rock, what does that mean? What does that mean for this white women and these men who lose their minds? “Like, oh my God! Black Girls Rock? What is my position in society? How do I step on black women to keep myself up if Black Girls Rock?” It’s just gross. It’s a gross thing to watch and this dude, it’s sad.
Chanelle: Yeah.
Mia: Yeah.
Chanelle: So maybe I’m jumping the gun here but, speaking of Black Girls Rock, everybody wants to be a black girl right now and with Ronda Rousey’s mom bragging that they’re secretly black.
Mia: Right. Right [laughs] This weird thing where there’s a TMZ video of them from somewhere and their mom started to brag about this doctor
Chanelle: Their great-grandfather!
Mia: Their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greatgrandfather! [laughs] I’m exaggerating but I’m saying! Who was this famous black doctor right?
Chanelle: In Nova Scotia. He did immigrate, he came to the country and became a doctor and it was this whole benevolent story about how he worked with black patients. And it was like, yeah. At that time if you were black, you weren’t touching white patients.
Mia: Right! [laughs] Who is he supposed to work with exactly?
Chanelle: Yeah and you have to look up a picture of him. He is light. He is already super-lightskinned. So if he’s her great-great grandfather and she gets to claim blackness, what about all the black people that are actually black right now in 2016?
Mia: Right. The Root had this really ridiculous story. “Is the Black Community Ready to Embrace Ronda Rousey?” I was like, no. Not this member of the black community! I’m not! I’m not. But it’s just really silly. A lot of what’s going on around these conversations around race and ethnicity, I feel like people are super-confused about all of this because look, you know back in his time, maybe he was black back in the day when the One Drop Rule was in full effect and somebody found out that he had some black in you and it was curtains. This is 2016 and that’s not really the way it goes now, a lot of people have black ancestry, they look white, and it’s not you suddenly have access to anything. Your ancestors are who they were and the race of your ancestors was their race and that’s real, and that’s valid, and they are your ancestors and that’s legitimate and I am not telling anybody that your ancestors are not yours to claim. But just because they are your ancestors doesn’t mean that you are their race, that you are the same race as them. You are not living in that same moment, you are not living in that same experience so if your ancestor was black and you’re white and you walk around in white skin and you don’t experience any oppression based on your skin, then you’re not that race.
Chanelle: If you have to go on TMZ and bring up the fact that you have black ancestors, I mean, it’s not obvious. It’s like, maybe you’re not living your life being treated as a black person.
Mia: Right, right. Exactly. If we didn’t know…
Chanelle: If you have to take it to the gossip media like here’s the scoop, “by the way we’re black!” No. [laughs]
Mia: That’s the point. That’s the entire point about why race is constructed to oppress some people, so if you’re not oppressed based on your race, then you’re not a racialized person, so please just stop. Everybody just stop. We’re not erasing Ronda Rousey. And Ronda Rousey is transphobic anyway, so I wouldn’t embrace her ass no how.
Chanelle: Yeah.
Mia: But yeah no, we’re not doing that [laughs]
Chanelle: Big News [laughs] Big News. Mila not Bella – as her Twitter name tells you – despite many people saying do not go, do not get in that Uber… [laughs]
Mia: She got in the Uber, y’all. She got in the Uber. I don’t know if y’all were on Twitter the other day when this happened, but if you weren’t, you missed out. So there was this Twitter fight happening, these two women… The most I can make out it was kind of over a man, though one of em said that it really wasn’t over him, she just didn’t fuck with her like that, but one of their men knew the other one, and they was not…whatever. Something was going on, they didn’t like each other. But they started arguing on Twitter and they decided they gonna fight. She was like “I’m gonna beat your ass, okay?” [laughs]
Chanelle: People say on Twitter and then they just fight on Twitter and that’s the arena. That’s where it’s contained.
Mia: Exactly. But this woman decided she’s really gonna fight this woman and that’s where it gets interesting. She’s like, “Alright, come beat my ass then.” She gave the girl her. She gives the girl her exact address and she says “Come on, fight me.” Pause. If this is me, let’s say I got into a Twitter fight and I’m on there talking shit, I’m like “Bitch! He ain’t your man! He my man! blah blah blah! Fuck you that’s my man! I’ma beat your ass!” The second the girl gives me her address, I’m out. It’s over! No, we’re not doing this. Listen, if somebody gives you their address to come fight them, this is a motherfucker who gets in a lot of fights. I’m telling you right now, this is a person who is just constantly fighting, constantly wailing on people.
Chanelle: Make an appointment, my office is open!
Mia: Exactly! “Come on, I can get you in at 3 PM!” [laughs] Don’t go to that house! Don’t go to her house, that’s her home turf and she knows you’re coming. Everybody’s like, girl don’t go! Don’t go! Just let it go, forget it. And she’s like, “I’ma go! I’ma beat her ass! This that and the other thing.” So she calls the Uber… [laughs]
Chanelle: She’s like I’ma pull up!
Mia: She’s Tweeting, like “I’m outside, where you at?”. Oh my God and so she tweets that she’s pulling up. About two minutes later, she tweets that this girl basically beat her ass. She dragged her by the hair and swung her all around the place. Like, oh my God! What is happening?
Chanelle: Great transparency! She told us what happened play by play. If you can give someone your address, but you don’t have their phone number, this could have moved to the DMs or the text messages.
Mia: It was amazing though! The jokes and the stuff about it on Twitter, had some… This took place in Chicago and the address was given for the fight, it’s an address in a neighborhood that my Chicago tweeps were like, “Oh, no. Don’t go there.” If somebody gives you an address right then, you don’t need none of that. Jamie – @thewayoftheid, one of my favorite tweeps – was like, if I’m about to fight a girl and we’re fighting over a man and she lives in that neighborhood? That’s her man now. [laughs] So.
Chanelle: Yeah.
Mia: Yeah. The moral of the story folks: come on. The twitter fights, it’s fun to fight on Twitter, sometimes it’s very amusing. But y’all don’t need to be showing up at each other’s houses.
Chanelle: Apparently they’d been beefing for a couple of years just on different threads. So this has been coming, but it’s like, if you have a nemesis on Twitter, just keep that on Twitter. Once you bring it to real life, it becomes real.
Mia: Right. It really does become real. We’re too old for this.
Chanelle: She has kids!
Mia: Right! I mean, come on! I was telling this story on Twitter the other day about the last time I went to somebody’s house to fight them was when I was in 8th grade, but I was smart because she ain’t know I was coming. It was unannounced. My frenemy. But she wouldn’t come out, so I couldn’t fight her. But I was 12. I was 12. I wasn’t a grown ass woman.
Chanelle: And these are women.
Mia: Right. So don’t do that, y’all. That’s…yeah. Black Girls Rock! This black girl didn’t rock. She got her jaw rocked though. [laughs]
Chanelle: Oh no! [laughs] Another thing you had going on Twitter this week was the whole Hollywood “pretty people get turned away first” for roles. What is this about?
Mia: Right. [laughs] Charlize Theron – and weirdly we were on the Lost Podcast that we were talking about, when we had a podcast last week that deleted itself – we were talking about Zoe Saldana playing Nina Simone and all the implications of that, all of it. And I make the point that even beyond all the race stuff, I just don’t like it when people who are traditionally thought of as pretty by Hollywood standards are portraying people who aren’t thought of as pretty by Hollywood standards because if the so-called “Pretty Girls” even get to play those roles, then what is the non-pretty girl supposed to play? Like, where is her space? She can’t even play women who look like her, right?
Chanelle: Yeah.
Mia: And I brought up Charlize Theron because she played Aileen Wuornos, the serial killer in Monster, so lo and behold a few days later here comes Charlize Theron talking about the pretty women, they don’t get roles that have gravitas, nobody thinks of them seriously enough to get those roles. Which, a) again, you played Aileen Wuornos, so what? You actually. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for you. And she played, in Mad Max, that character wasn’t no kinda glamourpuss either – Furiosa. You played Wuornos and you get an Oscar for playing Aileen Wuornos and now you’re talking about pretty girls don’t get the roles that they want. And beyond that? Girl, shut up. Girl, shut up.
Chanelle: If you’re in Hollywood, you’re probably pretty in the first place, so.
Mia: Right? Unless you’re playing bit characters or whatever.
Chanelle: Right.
Mia: And I don’t understand. Maybe part of what she’s saying is that, y’know, what women look like determine what people think they can do, what roles they can play. So say that. Don’t say this little pretty tears, the pretty girls don’t get the roles that they want. Because even if that’s true, even if it is true – and it is true – that people look at women and say what you look like this determines what I think you’re capable, the people who are getting the shit end of the stick on that aren’t the pretty girls. It’s the girls who are not pretty.
Chanelle: It’s hard to bring up the conversation about pretty privilege, but bring it up in terms of pretty girls being disadvantaged. I don’t think that’s how it starts.
Mia: Exactly, like pretty privilege is an important conversation, but you coming at it from the reverse racism end, sweetheart. And that’s not what we wanna be doing. Yeah, no. That’s a shit show, Charlize. I need you to not.
Chanelle: So not only was this Lost Podcast perfect, it predicted the future!
Mia: Right!
Chanelle: Like, last week Mia was like, this can’t happen! Pretty people can’t play people that aren’t considered pretty, and then she says this.
Mia: Right! I’m telling you, the Lost Podcast, I feel like we’re gonna be talking about it forever. As the years go by, it is just gonna become this mythical thing.
Chanelle: I was reminiscing over the past week, like things that we didn’t even talk about. Like yeah, yeah, we would have nailed that! [laughs]
[Segment Change]
Mia: You’re listening to the Black Girl Dangerous podcast! I’m Mia McKenzie. So, on Sunday, The Walking Dead had their season finale and I have many things to say, okay? Many things. Many, many, many, many, many, many, many things to say. So joining me now to talk about The Walking Dead season finale is Shaadi Devereaux aka @TwittaHoney! Hey Shaadi!
Shaadi: Hello! How’s it going?
Mia: How are you?
Shaadi: Great!
Mia: Okay, so, you watched The Walking Dead season finale. What were your overall impressions? [laughs] Let’s just start with the cliffhanger. What was your feeling about the way that it ended?
Shaadi: Um, well okay. So we have this really big buildup or whatever in the last episode leading to this one. So this episode, they have you really thinking it’s gonna be lit. But all they do is drive around in this big trailer, 75% of the episode they drive around in this trailer trying to avoid whoever these people are. Like, marauders. It’s like they really coulda packed more into it and given us more, I guess they’re doing this, AMC always does this. They have this realism thing that they do with their shows where they show you the minutiae of everyone’s lives. Every minute detail of everything, they’ll show you. Even the boring parts, to create this sense of realism. That’s really an AMC thing. Like, I have to watch their shows one, or two, or three times an episode just to catch everything. You can’t just skip over it, because they actually pack a lot of information that you may miss within those scenes, so it’s like, you can’t skip over it if you wanna understand why the characters are to the point that they are, because they pack a lot of information in those boring scenes, which probably happened in this episode. But I don’t see myself rewatching it. [laughs] So, anyway we’re left with this cliffhanger where were don’t know who in the group dies, so they’re sending us a stressful space where we’re gonna be taking Vicodin and Xanax until the next season airs. Like, we don’t really know who’s gonna die and maybe by the time it airs, we just really won’t care, which is where I see myself falling.
Mia: Right, exactly.
Shaadi: Like, these midseason finales, they do this thing where they cut it in the middle and then by the time the show comes back on, I don’t care and they lose viewers. That’s just me though. Maybe some people will still be completely engrossed.
Mia: One thing I was saying on Twitter was my problem with the whole thing was that, you’re right. It’s been building up and building up, right? And we were talking about how I’m attached to all these characters, like six or seven of them, which I feel like I shouldn’t be because this is a zombie apocalypse show. But I am. I’m attached to them and it’s been building up and building up and building up and in that moment, I cared. I really cared. I had to stop and Google it because I can’t see one of my favorite characters get that bat. I have to know what’s happening, I can’t just watch it. And then I Googled it and I was like oh my god, what the fuck? And then I watched the last three minutes mad. My emotions in that moment were so, I was so in it. And I feel like in a few months after talking about it and seeing all the theories on it, I’m not gonna be in the same emotional place that I was then.
Shaadi: Okay, but like, this is the thing though. I was not really attached to the moment because this season has been such a whirlwind. All of a sudden, all of these things started happening, which maybe if I were to look at again, the minute details of every season, I would get it. But a lot of this stuff really seems like it came out of nowhere. I need to be walked along to the moment we arrived at, so I don’t have as much connection to the actual moment as I feel like I should have because I really don’t entirely see how we got there. Because okay, so, everyone just runs off. It completely makes no sense, it’s just like. You know it’s a tightknit group, they have this system that works, they’re really good, they always think things out, they’re super careful. And in this moment, this new girl dies, and I think maybe for Darryl, it’s like a situation where this is now the second white girl that has died on his watch. [laughs] So I think he has some sense of personal responsibility. It’s the zombie apocalypse! So people are gonna die! These people are really really petty for a zombie apocalypse. [laughs] Both the antagonists and the protagonists! These people, there’s like millions of zombies wandering around aren’t enough. These people have to have all these personal grudges against each other. They are extremely petty. This guy who Darryl helped, I don’t even know why he’s mad right now. Like, he still has this elaborate revenge plot that nobody knows about, he just pops out of the blue and shoots somebody in the eye. Like you guys need to all sit down, you have enough to worry about with these zombies wandering around, you’re holding these elaborate Twitter beefs in the zombie apocalypse, I’ma need you to just chill. [laughs]
Mia: Speaking of the arrow through the eye, now they have to drive Maggie to the hospital. Who takes the only doctor in the place on a damn scavenge?
Shaadi: Not only a doctor, this chick was like a surgeon. She had it together. So I understand if she had that she needed to feel like she was doing something. She needed to take her power into her own hands. But I’ma need y’all to tell that hoe to sit down girl. Everyone shoulda had a sit down moment because no, you cannot go. There’s too much going on out there. Like, you just need to sit down. You’re the only one who knows how to sew people up, like Carl’s eyeball is still falling out somewhere, half hanging out of his socket. Homegirl, you need to just sit down and do this for us right now. You’ll have your moment sure enough, all that stuff will be coming on. They could have gone home. Y’all are just doing too much.
Mia: Too much.
Shaadi: Too much! Yes, exactly. You’ll take the only surgeon and doctor in the group and it’s so random that Maggie is having these pains at that moment. It has to be rushed, or whatever. I’m like, it’s just too much.
Mia: It’s too much, it’s too much. And listen, speaking of too much, the Saviors. Okay, first of all, this episode I’m sorry, it didn’t make any sense. It didn’t make any damn sense. So like, the Saviors are doing all these roadblocks on every road apparently out of Alexandria, they set up a roadblock. If I’m paying attention, it’s a matter of hours because Darryl and them just left. They just left and now the next people to leave, there’s roadblocks everywhere. Okay so, no matter how they set up all these roadblocks, okay fine I’m gonna believe that because there’s a lot of them. I still don’t believe that tree thing, because how the fuck? How the fuck? But anyway. [laughs] I don’t believe that. How do they know which roads they were gonna choose at which time? How did they know which roads to have the dude on that they were using as an example? How did they know the first road? How did they know the last road they were going to go to so they could be waiting in the woods when they somehow knew they were gonna get off the RV and try to pull a switcheroo? How could the Saviors have known all these things? It’s like Harry Potter and the Saviors are wizards and they know everything that’s gonna happen. I mean like, the Alexandria people don’t even know themselves what they’re gonna do. Should we go this way? Should we go that way? [claps] I. Don’t. Get. It.
Shaadi: Well, so first of all. Let me just say that when I watch the Walking Dead, I have no sense of time. The way that they film it,I have no idea whether it’s yesterday or two days or one hour. Like, I just. I just don’t know what time anything happens. But the only thing that I can really imagine is that the Saviors, they knew they were coming after these people, so maybe they pre-arranged these roadblocks. They were like, these people are gonna have to leave sometime so maybe they pre-arranged them. I don’t know. But like, there’s so many of them maybe they just really know the roads. I don’t know. I’ll work with the writers on that, okay? [laughs] But even if I’m to work with the writers, there’s still this element of how when they got out of the woods did everybody just in this one space know where everyone was gonna be? That’s too much. Like, first of all, whose idea was it to send Eugene’s behind? Like, sure enough, five minutes later he’s sitting there like with the silliest look on his face like, “oh oops”. No. No.
Mia: And ain’t nobody’s dick to bite now. Ain’t no dicks to bite. He can’t get out of this. [laughs] That whole thing with Carol and Morgan. Okay. Lemme say something about this whole Carol situation. I love Carol, I feel like Carol is badass and I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know why they’re doing this ridiculous story about how Carol now, Carol who will kill any motherfuckin’ body, Carol like, “I will kill my mama if she’s sick and that bitch ain’t gonna get better, she bout ta infect us all”. Carol is so hardcore and now, all of a sudden, out of nowhere Carol doesn’t wanna kill people so she decides she had to leave, because if you love people, you’ll have to kill for them, which makes no fucking sense because even if you don’t love people you’re gonna have to kill as demonstrated by the fact she left and two seconds later, she has to kill like 4 people. It actually makes more sense that if you’re in a place now, Carol, where you don’t wanna have to kill anybody that you would stay because in Alexandria, you got your peeps. And your peeps are willing to kill for you. They willing to hold it down so you don’t have to do that shit. They’re not making Morgan kill nobody. Y’know, they chill about it. Alright, you don’t have to kill nobody but we still do. So if you really in this position that you don’t wanna kill anybody, then why did you leave? Staying makes the most sense. I don’t like what they’re doing with Carol and I don’t like it.
Shaadi: So Carol is like my favorite character. I’m really trying to backtrack and place her trigger because clearly, there’s been a trigger here and one of the interesting things about Carol’s character is, you really have no gauge of when she’s actually distressed because I’m so used to her playing, she does this innocent, “I’m a housewife whatever” role to her advantage to disarm her opponent before she totally takes out everyone. So I’m used to this Carol. So I’m like, “oh she’s not really having a panic attack. Carol is good. Carol got this” You know what I mean?
Mia: Right.
Shaadi: And when she grabs the crucifix I’m thinking this is all an act. But this is actually what was going on with Carol, so I think that was kind of a cool thing with the rhyming and Carol’s having this elaborate breakdown but I as a viewer and probably the people in her group don’t understand or know Carol because she went from this woman who was suffering from the violence from her husband, protecting her daughter, and she’s gone through all this trauma and has emerged this character who comes off as cold, but is really in survival mode. So maybe she’s been in survivor mode this whole time. I’m still really trying to place what is the trigger that has marked the difference and the only thing I can kind of place is Maggie having a baby but there’s already a baby in the group. So I don’t know, maybe it’s the act of birth or whatever. I don’t really understand what Carol’s trigger is. Maybe it’s, I was gonna say, maybe it was having to kill so many people within that setting when they were locked up with that group of Saviors. But she was having a panic attack before that. So I really can’t, I really haven’t placed her trigger exactly. Maybe I need to rewatch some of the episodes but I really would have liked maybe even a little more as far as development and walking me to that point, which is why I said I’m not as invested in the ending of this episode because I feel like there are a lot of those missing links for me, in this last episode of this season. There are a lot of missed thingies for me, so I don’t know. I don’t feel as present in the final moment so, but you know I’ve noticed this thing. There’s a lot of this writing with the women right now. It’s Carol, it’s also Sasha and Rosita. There’s this tension between them because of Abraham. It seems like their characters have fallen by the wayside this season, which Rosita we’ve never gotten her backstory. We’ve never really found out anything about her, she’s the only Latina character on there, so we’ve never really found out much of anything about her except for the fact she came from a big family. The writers are kind of doing this thing where these two characters are written around their relationship to Abraham and outside of that, we really don’t get that much. And there’s this weird tension between the only two women of color, well not the only two, there’s Michonne who is not thinking about them. So it’s like another interesting thing is that because of Michonne and Rick now, we have every women of color character this season, their storyline is around their white male protagonist. They’re in a relationship but they’re kind of flat this season. I don’t know, I feel like that. They’re kind of flat, we don’t really get a lot from them. They’re just here to like, have these. Which is cool, I’m glad they’re receiving some love and care I guess, except for Rosita. They’re letting them chill but we don’t get a lot by the way of these characters. Maybe it’ll come up later, I don’t know.
Mia: Right. I had this thing, I know when I. What you say about them, all the women of color being in relationships with these white main characters, when Abraham as first trying to get with Sasha and Sasha was like, nah, I was really happy. Oh good. I didn’t see it as her not wanting to embrace life, I just thought she’s not into him. [laughs] I never see a black woman- Every TV show, it’s like a white man wants a woman of color like she’s down. So I really like the idea of being “nah, not you, I don’t like you like that” and was really excited with her just staying friends with him and not being into him like that or whatever just because he’s corny. And I just don’t see it. Sasha’s one of my favorite characters and I just didn’t like it. It turned out like, oh she’s just scared, of course. And so now she’s like, okay fine, let’s do this. And then when I saw her, that moment where she’s interacting with Abraham and her and Rosita have that look. I was just like, I do not want two of the only women of color on this show and now we’re fighting over and we have tension over Abraham. Like, ugh God. Over any white boy. Over any man. But Abraham? And I’m like, please don’t do this. Please don’t do this. Please let’s squash this. Have a conversation, do whatever you gotta do because I just don’t want it.
Shaadi: To be fair, I guess during a zombie apocalypse your standards will slide. [laughs] but let’s get that outta the way, the thing that was most upsetting about that to me was maybe it’s happened before, but this is one of the first times where I’ve seen Rosita and Sasha interact as characters, which made me think like, between Michonne, Sasha, and Rosita, I never see them interact. They have these tests where they ask how many women interact with each other in a scene.
Mia: Yeah, like the Bechdel Test.
Shaadi: Yeah, I haven’t even thought of that but these three women of color? If this were a real situation, I’d be looking at them like: girl, girl, girl, GIRL. You would think they’d have some type of cohesion, like some type of something. I mean, not only because they’re women of color, they’re the women in the group, but like rarely do you see them interact or talk to each other and the first time you see that invisible wall kinda melt away is when these two characters interact with each other over this guy and his attention. That made me think of that, there’s this huge undeveloped angle in the story that you never see develop because the writers really obviously don’t know how to write women of color or their relationships or have any idea that maybe these two actually talk to each other outside of some scrubby white guy they wanna have a relationship with. So yeah.
Mia: Right. And I think that Michonne and Sasha there was some of that last season where Sasha was going through her whole thing where she had a death wish. I remember Michonne and her having a few scenes where Michonne was like, girl what’s going on? What are you trying to do? But that’s really been the only interaction between the women of color characters that I remember.
Shaadi: Yeah. To me, even that fell flat. Like, it was out of nowhere. Why would Michonne have been the person to have this conversation? Like I said, it seemed like the women of color would have bonded, but this is the first time Michonne is taking any interest in her and given the relationships that Sasha had with the other characters, it seemed weird. I don’t know, all of a sudden Michonne is like…I don’t know, maybe it was okay. But even that seemed really flat. It was like, now that’s over, now you’re good and everything’s okay. Everything around that seems really flat. I don’t know. But yeah, you’re right.
Mia: But no, you’re right. And I feel like, yeah, like you said if I’m in the zombie apocalypse and I’m Michonne and Sasha and her brother Tyreese where they show up, I’m instantly gonna be like tryina make friends with them. I’m mentally gonna be like, I’m surrounded by white people and in reality, that’s what you’re gonna do. But there’s no, you’re right. Even if they’re sometimes having these really flat conversations, there’s no relationship. There’s no bonding. And it doesn’t make sense. But, of course, when you have writers that don’t understand those relationships and aren’t even looking at those characters with that much dimension or thoughtfulness around their inner lives, their emotions, beyond “I’m going crazy because it’s the apocalypse”, that’s what’s gonna happen.
Shaadi: Yeah, I mean, now that I think about it, the writers set it up this way. They set up this universe. I wonder if you remember from like the first one or two seasons where they set up this colorblind world and they have this thing, where the guy gave – what was his name? T-Dog or something?
Mia: Mhm
Shaadi: They had this speech where it’s like, “There’s no color in the zombie apocalypse because there’s zombies and there’s people and we have to stick together” and they really tried to make this colorblind, racial rainbow zombie apocalypse world. Like, that sounds like it’d be weird to say but whatever. [laughs] So they kinda set it up to where they’re not really gonna deal with race, they’re like okay! We don’t have to worry about that. So I think the writers are writing all of these people from the space where they’re like not really considering any racial, any dynamics of race or tension around that beyond some kids coming from the wood who we can obviusly polarize as separate from everyone else. So, there’s not really any, they’re not really exploring that angle of the zombie of apocalypse and what those relationships would really look like. So I guess that’s what we’re seeing reflected in these characters, so.
Mia: Right. The one thing, they had Merle. Merle was hella racist, they had Merle being really racist.
Shaadi: Right. They can polarize Merle. He’s the hick from the country, he’s that and we’re all different.
Mia: No, yeah definitely. Besides Merle, there’s been no real concept of race on the show.
Shaadi: Right. We have this really underexplored scene I think in, I can’t remember which season it was, but we have the nursing home where we have all these black and latino people who have bonded together and they’re taking care of the elderly. That is a spinoff, well nah. I don’t wanna see a spinoff because in my head they lived happily ever after. We don’t have to explore what happened to these characters, we don’t have to get attached to any of them. But to me, that’s really the more interesting story, the story of cohesion and how people come together in community, like people of color. To me, all these white people are sociopaths. They’re just out here doing whatever, so the alternative. But I know, the entire world can’t be living like that.
Mia: Hopefully it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out. I personally think they should have just killed somebody and got it over with and let me grieve and then tune in for the aftermath or whatever, but yeah. We’ll see.
[segment change]
Chanelle: Another thing that we were still talking about last week because it’s still on everyone’s radar is that we’re all waiting for this Beyonce album to drop and people thought it was gonna come out on April Fool’s Day. April Fool’s didn’t happen but she did release her clothing line when everyone was watching for the album, which was smart. But we were talking about the fact that there’s some news that Beyonce has met with a bunch of mothers that have been instrumental in the Black Lives Matter movement right now and they were, I think the three moms listed were mothers of black men specifically. So Tamir Rice’s mom-
Mia: Trayvon Martin’s mom, I think.
Chanelle: Yeah.
Mia: And uh, Michael Brown.
Chanelle: I don’t know if that they’re gonna be in one of the music videos, they’re gonna be on the album cover, nobody knows how they’re gonna be involved. But it’s definitely in line with Beyonce showing a more political message.
Mia: Right, yeah. Yeah, it’s really interesting. I saw that story and a couple of people on Twitter, @TwittaHoney, and maybe a couple of other folks that I saw were kinda asking the question of is Beyonce’s approach to these topics, on police brutality, and Black Lives Matter, gonna be centered on black men? Because it’s just the mothers of these men being involved, which is a really important question. And I, as someone who has never been a Beyonce fan and have not disliked Beyonce, it’s just, I’m mostly indifferent to Beyonce. I’m old. I don’t listen to the young folks’ music. But recently with the last video that came out – Formation – really started me like, oh this is cool. I’m really into this. I’ve been interested in Beyonce as kind of a feminist figure and watching the ways that her politics and stuff has been kind of rolling out. This is a really interesting question around, okay if she’s doing these more overt messages around Black Lives Matter and the stuff that we’re dealing with, what’s that gonna look like? It’s really interesting to think like, what that’s gonna look like, who’s gonna be centered, yeah, all of these questions.
Chanelle: Yeah. I was really impressed that her all-women dance crew was dressed like the Black Panthers, because that’s something that’s been really erased in history that women have been involved in the movement.
Mia: Yeah, the Black Panthers was more women than men which most people don’t know that.
Chanelle: I think that was a really cool thing. I don’t know if that was intentional, I hope so. I always try to give her the benefit of anything because I’m obsessed.
Mia: Right, yeah. [laughs] It’s gonna be interesting to see. I don’t want us to fall into this trap where we do this Beyonce has to be everything for everyone in every movement. It has to be exactly perfect for everyone. Because that’s not possible. We don’t expect that of people who are not black women, so chill. So whatever the parts are, whatever it looks like, I’m excited to see what that is. I would like there to be a woman-centered, because black women are also brutalized by the police and killed by the police, so it would be great if black women are included in her message, whatever her message turns out to be.
Mia: Okay! That’s our show! [laughs] Thanks, Chanelle! And thanks, Shaadi! And thanks, everyone for kicking it with us! If you like the podcast please share it! We’ll see you next time!
Mia: The Black Girl Dangerous Podcast is a production of Black Girl Dangerous Media.
