Where was my Lloyd Dobler?
I didn't exist in the world of teen rom-coms
“You can’t be what you cant see.”
As someone whose job it is to increase diversity in science, I hear this phrase all the time. The idea is that kids from historically excluded groups never see scientists that look like them and that lack of role models makes them less likely to pursue careers in science. That was never the case for me. The fact that I didn’t see another black woman neuroscientist until I was two years into my doctoral program was never a barrier for me. That is probably because I was lucky enough to have parents that told me that I could do whatever I wanted, I am so incredibly stubborn, and I am extremely internally motivated.
When my parents noticed my interest in neuroscience, they bought me a copy of the Ben Carson biography Gifted Hands. I never once cracked the spine of that book. I’d already decided on my career path and didn’t feel like I needed more inspiration. I wonder if my spidey-sense guided me to reject that book because deep down I knew that he would one day go on to become cartoon-villain levels of evil. Ultimately, his story didn’t seem all that relatable to me because:
He is a man
He is a surgeon, not a scientist
He struggled to escape the inner city, whereas I was the most suburban girl to ever spend her summers in the corner of the local Borders Book and Music reading magazines and avoiding the cashier who was trying to flirt with me
The one area of my teenage life where that phrase did apply was romance. Although I had a handful of crushes in high school, I fully lacked the knowledge and skills to do anything about it. When I look at my favorite teen romances of the time, they were useless at giving me any sort of playbook to follow. Not a single teen rom-com heroine looked anything like me.
Diane Court from Say Anything was as close as I could get to finding a teen heroine that I would identify with. She was a shy smarty-pants without any close friends yet somehow knew how to show up at a party totally over-dressed and pull it off. I 10/10 would wear that white-dress-flowers-behind-the-ear combo today. Except for that whole tax-evading dad drama, we were practically twins!
Yet she didn’t have to figure out how to tell Lloyd Dobler that she liked him. He was already obsessed with her and pursued her as hard as he could. Let me be the first one to tell you that when dudes are obsessed with shy smarty-pants over-dressed Black girls, they keep that shit to themselves. And while we’re here, the fact that he was able to stand under her window with a boom box without one single neighbor yelling at him cut it out is one of the whitest things to ever happen on film.
The only memory I have of seeing a suburban brown-skinned teenage girl on a date on tv or in a film was that time on OG 90210 when Brandon Walsh took a character played by Vivica A. Fox to the Peach Pit. Not only did she appear in just one episode, but he was mostly using her to get to the source he needed for a story he was writing on racial profiling. She wasn’t there to be romanced. She was there to teach him a lesson.
Maybe if I’d had more role models it would have been easier to visualize what would happen if I actually spoke to any of my crushes. In the absence of any teen romances featuring Black kids that don’t involve gang violence or some other kind of racialized trauma, I couldn’t imagine that I could ever be the protagonist in a love story.
If only I could get Marty McFly to hop in his Delorian and bring my teen self a copy of the new YA collection Blackout. While the six interconnected stories of Black teen love during a power outage in New York City in this book acknowledge social justice, the main events do not center on trauma. There are the meet-cutes in a rideshare and first kisses at underground masked balls. There is even a love triangle that ends in a trope made famous by 90210 itself. It was the perfect beach read to give me all the young love vibes that I desperately needed in the ’90s but never got.
I was so excited to read that our Forever First Family, the Obama’s, are adapting this book into both film and tv projects for Netflix. Finally, the gap in Black teen rom-coms is will be filled! Sure, it is thirty years too late to help me avoid ALL of that awkwardness, but it is right on time for someone else.
All the rest…
Matt Damon heard I called Ben Affleck our Masshole King last week and was like “hold my beer”. This is… not a charming anecdote. The worst part is that I think his “I’m just a regular ol ’Merican dude” press tour he’s on for his movie where they stole Amanda Knox’s story is actually working.
After posting his sad emo JLO shrine set to a Coldplay song you would think someone would take ARod aside and suggest that he hire a social media manager. Either he doesn’t have a get-a-grip friend or he didn’t listen. Now he is out here making failed BDE jokes and I just can’t.
BENNIFER ALERT: I am totally here for the theory that they are trolling us by doing a shot-for-shot remake of the Jenny from the Block video.