I watched "Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words" and my eye started twitching
A Rant
This will not make much sense, as it is a rant. I tried to do my best in formatting this with some cohesion and structure, but I might fall short in that regard. Very rarely do I watch something and it fills me, not with sadness or curiosity, but with rage (at least something that isn’t happening in the extended world around me). The kind of rage that makes your fingers tingle when you type. That makes you walk stiff or your head pound.
I don’t know Megan thee Stallion personally. Statistically, I never will. But I enjoy her music and she has proudly been a fan of everything I love. So naturally, when I heard her documentary was coming out on Halloween you know I had to sit down and watch it. What followed was so quietly devastating that I had to pause and take a break every 10 minutes. First, I can’t imagine the amount of loss she’s been through. To lose so much of your family and to be left standing is heartbreaking and I wish her healing and love in that respect. I remember how I felt when I lost my grandmother and I could barely focus on making it through the day at school so to have to perform and succeed under pressure like that is unthinkable.
Now for the rant part. I am so disgusted with how the she was treated by the black community and I feel like if she was lighter, or more demure, or less successful like a lot of the male rappers/podcasters that harassed her, or just not black altogether, or a man, she wouldn’t have experienced even a fraction of that. Not even a little bit. Like, I’ve been black all my life so I KNOW what it is but seeing how it plays out on a macro level really puts in perspective how bad it can be. And yes I said macro because even though this happened to Megan alone, and I hate that she was exploited and harassed like this, the things being said about her are words that are familiar to black women. If you talk about what you’ve experienced, you’re lying. If you fight back, you’re violent. If you do just about anything, you’re in the wrong and that’s really all it comes down to. Please don’t think that dark elf has any real fans. No one cared about that man when he was staging incidents to make himself look less colorist than he is in 2019. Or when his horrible music was coming out, you weren’t buying it because the sales weren’t there. But as soon as he shoots a woman, lies about it, and tortures her online for years, all of a sudden you’ve always loved him and he represents you? What are you saying about yourself? It’s sick and gross.
It is only now that Megan has begun the process of suing the “bloggers” (put in quotes because respectable people on Substack blog, idek what you should call that). An individual so wrapped into celebrity beef and drama, interloping their way into notoriety, that they would go so far as to share A.I. revenge pornography to thousands of people. I can’t even wrap my mind around that. The advanced loserdom in that is beyond me. There are so many intersections here that I don’t know where to start. If I was that person I’d just start selling things so I can pay that settlement.
So many black women move through life being as purposefully inoffensive as possible. We learn very on what the stereotypes are and internalize them, choosing often to try and circumvent them at every turn. I see it in Megan thee Stallion, in my friends, in my family, and so on. Why then is that care and thought never taken into account when dealing with us? Why is that effort never acknowledged, but instead punished. “How dare you not be where I think you should be?” and “How dare you not act like I’ve been told you ought to act?”, seems to be the leading attitudes people take when approaching black women and I’ve far past had enough of it. If a celebrity of this size has had to face treatment like this, you can imagine what black women deal with regularly. I know what I’ve dealt with. Ultimately, I think I’m a little devastated in knowing that every black woman, no matter how kind and beautiful, I’ve ever know has felt the weight of the world’s ire on her shoulders before. And I’m fighting the urge to look for ways to throw it back.