When Will Black Women Feel Like They "Belong" at Comic-Con?
Actress Florence Kasumba has one line in Captain America: Civil War. She played the member of Black Panther's personal guard who told Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, "Move, or you will be moved." She's a tall, gorgeous black German woman with dark skin and short cropped hair. Sure, I'd like to look like her, but in reality, we look nothing alike.
And yet I was mistaken for her at NBC's San Diego Comic-Con party Saturday night. Twice.
Despite its name, Comic-Con isn't just for comics. It's an annual convention where fans celebrate some of pop culture's most anticipated films, books, and TV shows, and the executives behind those projects work to promote them. As much as the Con is about the Hall H panels and the over-the-top costumes, it's also very much an industry event, meaning there are network- and studio-sponsored parties where producers, publicists, journalists, and other suits schmooze and enjoy an open bar. I was attending as a member of the press. (And also as a fan ... let's be real.)
The sun had set and the drinks were flowing on the rooftop of the Andaz Hotel when a man grabbed my arm and said, "I'm so excited you're going to be on Emerald City!" He was referring to Florence Kasumba's upcoming TV role. Then another man quoted her aforementioned Civil War line. "Oh, you're not her…" he trailed off, and quickly offered to order my drinks as penance. I'm normally one to excuse harmless mistakes made by others once they're a few cups in. (I was two to three vodka Red Bulls in myself when this happened.) But this wasn't an isolated incident.
On Saturday afternoon, I indulged my nerdier fan side by dressing up as Angelica Schuyler from Hamilton, and someone approached me in the full florescent light of the convention center floor to tell me how much she'd loved me in Belle. After I'd informed her that I was not the star of Belle (that would be Gugu Mbatha-Raw), she said, "Well you look just like her!" I don't.
One woman at FOX's party assumed I was Serayah. "Is that Taylor Swift's friend, the one from Empire?" I heard her say when she thought I was out of earshot. Her companion confirmed that, yes, indeed I was. Later, I overheard someone guessing that I was "one of the stars from the slave movie at Sundance." I can only assume she was mistaking me for Aja Naomi-King in Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation. Later I was ID-ed as Lupita Nyong'o (Black Panther), Danai Gurira (Black Panther), and Jessica Williams (The Daily Show).
I don't look like any of these women. The only thing I have in common with any of them is that we're all black. Hell, we're not even all the same shades of black.
The casual racism of thinking all black people "look alike" is sadly nothing new - but what I was experiencing at Comic-Con was a trend. One I couldn't figure out how to explain until I started my trip back across the country to New York, once again easily blending into the crowds. That's when I realized it's easy to blend in when no one unconsciously tries to justify why I'm somewhere in the first place.
The parties I attended weren't for actors (the "talent") only. Guests also included producers, screenwriters, publicists, film critics, and any other number of people in the entertainment industry (plus fans who managed to score invites). In other words, one doesn't walk in assuming that every person there is some sort of celebrity. In fact, the friends I did the party circuit with - three white men and one white woman - weren't mistaken for talent at all. Nor should they have been, given that none of them resemble any celebrity that I can think of. At Con events, they were just faces in a crowd, the faces people expected to see.
I'm a black female entertainment writer who tends to focus on television. In 2014, only 22 percent of television journalists were people of color. You can go down the list of other jobs orbiting the entertainment industry - from production to wardrobe to film criticism - and find similarly dismal numbers. So it's no surprise that my fellow partygoers didn't automatically assume I was an industry insider. But it's frustrating to know that despite so much of American pop culture being mined directly from black American culture, we've still not been included in the entertainment industry as anything beyond entertainers.
The faces on screen are slowly getting more diverse. Marvel Entertainment's heavy promotion of their Black Panther film and Luke Cage's Netflix series at Comic-Con itself helped to make this the most melanin-blessed Con I've ever attended. Hollywood is normalizing the idea that brown faces can anchor an entertainment franchise. Now the decision-makers within the entertainment industry, including media outlets, need to catch up.
I'd love to think my Con experience was unique to me, but after commiserating with other women of color, I suspect it's not. One friend told me that her sister, an Indian American L.A. native who works for the Producers Guild, was mobbed at a Con event this year by "fans" who wanted pictures with her. This continued even after a coworker loudly shouted her name and it wasn't "Freida Pinto."
I similarly remembered the one girl who grabbed me, shoved a camera in my face insisting that I was Jessica Williams, and tried to get a selfie as my friends watched on, absolutely agog. And the woman who walked past us as we waited to get into the CW/BuzzFeed party, stared at me, and doubled back to introduce herself. I'm not sure who she thought I was, but she looked crushed when I said, "Um ... I'm Kendra."
It takes an intense level of mental gymnastics and literal colorblindness to mistake me for Jessica Williams or Danai Gurira, even in the dark. And it says so much about industry norms that people were willing to jump those hurdles in order to justify my presence in these spaces. Even if it was subconscious, their insistence that I had to be someone more in order to be where I was disturbed me. It was as though I was living the black parent mantra, "You have to work twice as hard to get half as far," in real time.
And while I love and admire each and every one of the women I was mistaken for, I wasn't flattered to be mistaken for them. I don't need a reminder that my presence as a black woman at an industry event still counts as a novelty. I look forward to the day my peers assume I am a writer or a publicist, just as they did the white twentysomethings drinking poolside, looking nothing like a famous person and enjoying their sense of belonging.
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