Next, Tarell addressed the issue of people in communities who allow or welcome outsiders to do certain things, when many in the community think they shouldn’t have the right. Essentially, the idea of “not all skinfolk are kinfolk.”
TARELL: I trust all people to look out for their own self-interests at some point, and when they don’t, that’s a happy surprise. So I’d rather be happily surprised than shocked at my own understanding of what human nature is. I mean, I can only speak from my experience, but poor Black people have always been politically sophisticated in that way. What I’ve observed from the elders in the community has always been a distrust of anybody who doesn’t live in the community. And even within the community, there are folks who have varying degrees of understanding of what’s good for the community, what’s not, and that everybody won’t be on the same page.
At this point in the interview, I was becoming less nervous and more comfortable. So I decided to pivot the questions to focus on moments when communities created opportunities for outsiders to learn and grow. In reality, it was a selfish question. I wanted to talk about Moonlight, and to discuss my appreciation for him creating a story that helped people like me.
Expecting him to say yes, I asked whether Moonlight was partially a letter to people outside of the community it was about.
TARELL: Not sure I understand. Was Moonlight a letter to people, to not-queer Black people?
ME: To a certain extent. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
TARELL (quickly and firmly): No.
Like a self-centered person, I responded by saying “Really?” demonstrating my surprise that this queer Black man didn’t write one of the most important queer Black stories for a young heterosexual Black man.
It took all of two seconds for me to understand how wrong I was. But the deed was done, and Tarell was silent.
It was at this moment that I felt my heart drop to my shoes, and I started sweating.
TARELL: Moonlight was a letter to myself. I wrote Moonlight when I was twenty-two years old. My mom had just died, and I needed to remember moments with her and our life. When Barry adapted the original screenplay into Moonlight, there’s no part of me that didn’t know that his central focus was to make a love letter to Liberty City, which is where we both grew up. And all the people, queer or not, who existed there, who lived there, to the crackhead, to the crack-addicted mothers that we both had, to the drug-dealing, surrogate fathers or coaches that we had, to the Kevins, to the Chirons. Certainly he was writing to them. And I think other folks came in and saw that and thought, “Wow, this is a really intimate letter that I’m being let in on.” But they weren’t the audience; it wasn’t for them.
I felt like a complete a**hole. In all my time thinking that I was waving the flag of this story and understood its impact, I didn’t realize I was centering myself in someone else’s story, someone else’s world, someone else’s community.
While it meant a lot to me, and even changed me, it wasn’t for me.
“Some sh*t is just for us.”
I gathered the pieces of myself off the floor and asked Tarell a question that I didn’t realize would end up creating the second moment in which he changed my life.
I asked Tarell what his thoughts were on the importance of storytelling and how it can help change people’s perspectives and lives. Especially in relation to young white people reading this book.
TARELL: I can’t really speak to it. I’m not from a white community, and even though I work in and around white people, I rarely see young white people. I hear about what their communities are going through in the newspaper. I don’t know their trials and trauma. I’ve seen Euphoria, and maybe that’s a window into the suburbs. I don’t know. I mean that in the most earnest way that I can, and that I don’t engage in that way. However, I will say that the purpose for storytelling for me, and what I try to do, is specific.
I walk out of the door and most times I’m in a neighborhood now that doesn’t look like me. So the first story I’m being told is I’m alone.
And then I’m socialized through that the whole day, and then I kind of fight really hard—and they don’t even know that I’m fighting really hard—with people to make them understand my point of view. Make sure I’m heard, make sure I’m treated with the delicacy and the kind of roughness that is needed in my community for growth. And that’s exhausting. So I tell stories for people like me. It feels good to sit in a room and sit down in front of an MBJ [Michael B. Jordan] film or television show. It feels good to sit down and go, yes, yes. To be reminded that I do exist. I’m reminded that there is a community that comes from a place like me. Even if it’s not exact. I’m reminded, I’m allowed to know, that I am not alone and that I do exist. Those are the stories I want to tell.
Tarell helped me understand two things. One: Whether it’s clothing, foods, words, anything, it’s important that people not only understand that some things are historically off-limits to noncommunity members, but that “some sh*t is just for us” also means creating new sh*t sometimes that belongs to the community.
Which leads me to the second thing I came to understand: Like our foods, words, and clothing, our stories are also ours to keep in our communities as we decide to do. Our traumas, our struggles, our joys—they are ours. This book is part of not only my story, but my community’s story.
Tarell’s story wasn’t for me, and like many other things, it didn’t have to be. Maybe it’s best that it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean I can’t watch it, enjoy it, and learn from it. It means that it was made with a very specific community in mind, to make them feel seen, to help them feel loved.
It’s a testament to how powerful Tarell’s story is: even being on the outside looking in, I still learned to love a community more than I did before and in the process became a better person. Which is the same thing I often want for people who aren’t from my communities, people like many of you.
Just because it isn’t yours doesn’t mean you can’t still treat it with love and care.
I actually had another revelation while talking to Tarell. (That’s three, for those keeping score.) The idea of doing things for your own community made me want to make a point to my white readers that I haven’t made yet.
While this book is meant to be a guide for white people to understand and be better, it’s important that white people also understand that it isn’t the duty of Black people or people of color to explain things. I’m doing so because I hope it can ultimately make change for my community.
But it’s important to understand that this book is a gift, not an obligation.
The gift is in the form of an opportunity. It’s an opportunity that I thought was my duty to give, but it’s not.
That’s what makes this book special. It’s an opportunity to learn, grow, and share where many may otherwise never have the chance.
It’s me hoping that you’ll understand and appreciate that much of what you’re reading is normally some sh*t that’s just for us.
We’re friends now. Well, at least, I’m hoping we are.
I think people become friends by sharing moments. By laughing together, hurting together, learning together. I feel like by this point in the book we’ve done that.