“Okaaaay,” the director continued in the singsong voice he reserved for me. He mimed how I should hold a lamp. “You could do thiiiiiis,” he said. “Or thiiiiiiis.”
His tone was so condescending, as if I had just wandered in off the street or won a contest for a Friends walk-on. It’s funny, because I was standing there with Matt LeBlanc. I had four films under my belt that had either opened at number one at the box office or at number two behind blockbusters like the freaking Matrix. Matt, meanwhile, had made a movie with a monkey. Yet the director was talking to me, his guest star, as if I hadn’t accomplished a single thing.
It’s telling, I think, that my scenes were not in the usual Friends settings. First, I was outside Central Perk, a street set that fans know to be pretty rarely used on the show. Then Joey and Ross went inside Central Perk to discuss me, and then I showed up again with both of them at an obviously fake bar. My black face didn’t darken the door of their favorite café, and certainly not the Friends’ apartments. In their ninth year, Aisha Tyler had the weight of integrating the Friends set and storyline like some sort of Ruby Bridges of Must-See TV. They let her character, Charlie Wheeler, stay for nine episodes. In 2003, Entertainment Weekly suggested it was odd that the two black girls were given the exact same storyline. “The déjà vu wouldn’t be that notable except that Friends’ depiction of New York City is notoriously lily-white.” Executive producer David Crane took umbrage. “The other story line [with Union] was quick and funny, where the two guys didn’t realize they were dating the same girl,” he told the magazine. “Charlie Wheeler [Tyler] is a brilliant paleontologist who should be dating someone like Ross, but hooks up with Joey first.” Got it.
By 2016, the whitewashing of the Friends’ world was so apparent in reruns and streaming that series cocreator Marta Kauffman had to acknowledge the situation to the Washington Post. “That is a criticism we have heard quite a bit,” Kauffman said. “When we cast the show, we didn’t say to ourselves, ‘This is going to be an all-white cast.’”
But it was. I didn’t call the director on the way he treated me, which I regret. I thought, No wonder you don’t have black talent on this show. He assumed I didn’t know anything and he felt comfortable dismissing me with condescending directives. It’s actually not enough to just point out that there were so few black actors on the show. We need to look at why, and why it was assumed that I knew nothing. Bias, whether implicit or explicit, hits every industry. To be a black person is to understand what it is to be automatically infantilized and have it be assumed that you don’t have the talent or the skill set required to do your job. It’s the reason Dr. Tamika Cross, a chief resident and OB/GYN, was stopped from helping a man who fell unconscious on her flight. When they asked if there was a doctor who could help, Tamika went into action. And was denied.
“Oh, no, sweetie,” Dr. Cross recalled the flight attendant saying. “Put your hand down, we are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some kind of medical personnel; we don’t have time to talk to you.”
To compare myself to a doctor is a leap, I know, but it’s just how people talk to us. So no, I couldn’t possibly know where my mark was.
My short time on the Friends set was a lesson, though. I had grown as an actress, raised my salary quote, and proved I could open films. But it wasn’t enough. I thought about that speech Dad gave me before I started elementary school: “You’re gonna have to be bigger, badder, better, just to be considered equal. You’re gonna have to do twice as much work and you’re not going to get any credit.”
It was still true, even in the land of make-believe.
ten
CRASH-AND-BURN MARRIAGE
Have you ever had a dream where you’re in a car and you’re heading right for a wall? You’re trying to hit the brakes, but you just speed closer and closer to your doom? Well, you are cordially invited to my first wedding.
May 5, 2001, was a hot day, even for New Orleans. My bridesmaids were all hungover, their faces puffy and shiny from frozen daiquiris and hurricanes, a peril of having your wedding during Jazz Fest. Just before the ceremony, they were rock-paper-scissoring to see who got to go down the aisle with the Heisman winners. The loser had to walk with the groom’s friend who was just sprung from jail. He’d made bail in a murder case and was still wearing prison braids, as fuzzy as his alibi.
Their game of rock-paper-scissors was a convenient distraction from what I was pretty sure could be a heart attack. But once they all walked, it was just me, myself, and my anxiety, standing at the beginning of an aisle that now seemed a country mile long. At the end was Chris, someone I had no business marrying.
I took a step, and my shaking started with the first chords of “Endless Love.” I was on the edge of sobs, but not the usual wedding tears of a bride overcome by emotion. Everyone could tell, especially my father. He looped his arm through mine to escort me, which is to say drag me, down the aisle.
“Stop it,” he hissed in my ear. “Stop this right now. You’re back at Foothill High School. You’re the point guard; you’re leading your team. Stop this foolishness.”
I nodded, trying to turn my ugly-cry into a game face. Two guests I didn’t recognize jumped in front of the videographer to take photos. They paused a beat, each lowering their disposable cameras and smiling as if giving direction. Like maybe I’d get the idea and be happy. Chris and I hadn’t thought to write the number of guests allowed on the response card, so our wedding planner had simply seated, say, fifteen people on a card that went to one cousin. “The girl from Bring It On is marrying that football player, so invite the whole block,” I imagine them saying. “Well, yeah, he got cut from the Jacksonville Jaguars, but he’s hoping to be a Raider.”
As Dad held me up down the aisle, I saw that the pastor that Chris’s mother had insisted we use was not there. My family is Catholic, but Chris wouldn’t commit to doing the Pre-Cana classes you have to take in order to get married by a priest. His mother’s suddenly precious pastor had skipped the rehearsal. I thought if he was a no-show, that would be my out. Then I saw him, blending in and chatting with the groomsmen. Mingling at my wedding ceremony.
I had asked one of my closest guy friends, Dulé Hill, to do a reading. He was playing Charlie on The West Wing at the time, and I had been his girlfriend on the show. Dulé thought this marriage was a terrible mistake, so as he read from Corinthians, he kept sighing dramatically, pausing to look at me like, “Are you getting this?”
“Love is patient,” he said, “love is kind.”
After an eye roll, he continued, ticking off all the boxes on what was wrong with my relationship.
“It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others.”
Long pause. Tick. Tick. Tick.
I heard a plane in the distance.
“It is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”
If Chris and I had kept no record of wrongs, we would have had nothing to talk about. His endless cheating had given me permission to cheat, too. I was just less sloppy about it, so he wasn’t aware. While he dealt in volume, I dealt in quality. A note for the novice cheater: never, ever cheat with someone who has less to lose than you. You want someone who will be more inclined to keep his or her mouth shut.