Queer Eye: Stories Behind the Stories, Ep. 10
I find myself in a conundrum while writing about this episode. On the one hand, the larger narrative is obvious: gentrification. (If you want to know why I’m focused on larger narratives, click here.) On the other hand, thinking about gentrification exhausts me because it just reminds me that white supremacy takes and takes and takes.
But, first, shout out to Shahada who makes an appearance in this episode! (She appears in Episode 4 first.) One of my favorite parts in the episode is when Shahada helps Nate say goodbye to his locks because she harnesses the power of community to give him permission to let go. Shahada, bless your hands and your wisdom! Follow her on IG: @kinkenvy
This episode features Nate, a personal trainer and gym owner, who is concerned about his future. This concern is a many-headed hydra. First, he split up with his girlfriend (one of his nominators) because he needed to work on himself financially. He has some financial goals that he wants to reach before embarking on a long-term relationship. Second, he is unsure how to present himself to the world because his concerns about the future keep him — stylistically speaking — in the past. Third, he is not sure he can compete with larger gyms and the economic consequences of gentrification.
For those of you who are unsure or unfamiliar, gentrification is the process by which historically Black neighborhoods (like Harlem & Brooklyn, NY; like West Philly, PA; like Jersey City, NJ; like Newark, NJ) transform because of a new, usually white, presence. Usually, these neighborhoods have been affected by urban blight, including the long-standing effects of redlining (discussed in my piece about Episode 2), so the property is rather cheap. For those who cannot afford or grow tired of suburban living, they find these neighborhoods to be great investment opportunities. As a result, rents go up to match what those folks can afford and existing residents are priced out of their own neighborhoods. Those residents also have to bear up under the insult of watching new residents receive amenities that they need, but have not had access to. In the process, multinational corporations (i.e., Whole Foods/Amazon on 125th Street and Malcolm X Blvd in Harlem, NY and on Broad Street in Newark, NJ) and big businesses either buy up the spaces from smaller businesses or shut them out of competition.
Further, new arrivals bring their expectations of a neighborhood with them, which rarely include an understanding of the neighborhood into which they’ve moved. The result is that these new arrivals call the police on Black residents and visitors because they’re standing on their block or they’re on their stoop or they’re having a BBQ. Obviously, there are a whole new set of infractions possible under COVID-19 conditions. If you’ve been reading my work on Queer Eye, you may already be thinking about the link between this episode and episode 4, where I point out that “Black love is Black wealth,” quoting a line from Nikki Giovanni’s “Nikki Rosa.” If you hadn’t thought of that, let me make it plain: in these neighborhoods, the acquisition of wealth is not possible because of redlining and white supremacist banking practices, reductions in income, and ever-increasing expenses. As a result, the love and care in these communities, the history, the institutions, the relationships — all of that comprises the wealth in the community. That’s what gentrification destroys.
Bobby and Antoni point out that gentrification is a valid concern. Antoni helps Nate mobilize his passion for fitness so that he can also better feed himself, a way to get Nate into a cycle of success. Bobby takes him to a business that models how to survive gentrification successfully, by embracing what makes the gym a unique, neighborhood space. Tan and Jonathan do their best to ensure that Nate’s new look (again, shout out to Shahada and the team at Spinning Chairs) bolsters his business. I want to link Karamo’s work to this story.
Karamo has a particularly thorny set of concerns to navigate. In this case, there is a structural issue that the entire cast understands, but there is also a pattern of behavior and thinking that must be addressed. Karamo realizes that Nate can’t move forward with his future unless he brings the past with him. That is a classic Sankofa lesson. In Akan (from Ghana), Sankofa is expressed best by saying It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot or Go back and get it. Sankofa is often represented by a bird that faces forward and looks back, indicating the necessary simultaneity of the past, present, and future. In Nate’s case, he has left some of his confidence and his sense of self in the past. Karamo takes him back to the playing field at his alma mater, Villanova, in order to retrieve what has been lost.
Here’s the part in the episode where I started to lose it. I got so choked up watching Karamo pile on weight after weight. Then, I watched Nate travel with all those weights up and down the field. The man was sweating buckets. Each weight was supposed to represent all the things Nate was convinced he had to do on his own and all the negative narratives he was carrying about himself. Having to navigate a world that is literally not meant for you to survive (pace Audre Lorde) is a rack of weights.
You might think this is a personal issue and, in part, it is. I want to think about the large part that isn’t. Nate does not necessarily assume that he must be financially secure simply because of patriarchy nor does Nate’s desire to take care of his business as an individual necessarily indicate a misplaced trust in narratives of American exceptionalism. What is true and just as valid is the history that accompanies Black business ownership and upward mobility in the United States. Black business owners have had their successes rendered financially meaningless because of redlining (which we covered), lynching, premature death, and white competition.
Consider Tulsa, OK’s “Black Wall Street.” It was burned to the ground because a white mob went after a Black man falsely accused of sexually assaulting a white woman in an elevator. The real story is that the Black man stumbled as he entered the elevator, the woman screamed, and white people assumed. That white mob destroyed the entire town and that wealth was never rebuilt. Koritha Mitchell’s first book, Living with Lynching, argues that lynchings occurred as a result of white jealousy over Black upward mobility. White women-as-rape-victims were the excuses used to string up some Black person (note the gender neutral term) who had gotten too big for their britches. As Ida B. Wells noted in her work, reports of those rapes were greatly exaggerated. As a reminder, this is the history Amy Cooper drew on. Side note: this is why I was initially wary of the fact that Nate has three white women nominators. That dynamic, given the focus on business, made me ill-at-ease. My feelings did not dissipate when his ex-girlfriend, upon seeing the renovated gym, crowed “Show me the bedroom!” History wears on you.
Consider also sharecropping. After slavery, the country had to continue to produce cotton because it was such a significant part of the US’s economy. So, Southern planters broke up large plantations into smaller plots of land and devised a system whereby Blacks could share their crops at the end of the season. Hence: sharecropping. However, all the supplies needed for that endeavor were sold by former planters. Not only did whites control the capital and the supply chains needed for that business, they also controlled the market. Those former slaveholders decided how much a sharecropper’s harvest was worth at the end of the season. Depending on the landowner, some sharecroppers would break even at the end of the season. Most would be in debt. In addition, those who refused to work were corralled into prisons because of vagrancy laws or crimes of status. For instance, if you could not prove you owned land, you were tossed into jail. Further, that jail could use a convict leasing program to hire you out to the very person you would have been working for in the first place. This wasn’t just about restarting the economy, it was about total control over Black life.
Those histories repeat elsewhere in the United States, which results in Blacks owning 2% of wealth in the United States. Successful Black business, then, requires that one be self-sufficient, not necessarily out of pride or vanity, but out of safety and survival. Nate’s concerns about his business and his finances are not misplaced. His concerns dovetail with long-standing issues in Black business communities: fear about whites having too much access, fear about white competition, inability to secure capital from white supply chains, the limitations of social capital when a clientele is seduced by white competitors and, the list goes on.
So, when Nate is handling all that weight, I felt it in my body. I felt it in my spirit. I know his feelings about future and finances are bound up in historical realities.
History wears on us.
But, I also know that those are not separate from his feelings about himself. Knowing about history does take away some of the weight. Karamo points out that community takes some of it as well. It is only when Nate draws on the power of Karamo standing next to him that he can shed the literal weight (and then dust Karamo in a foot race). As I mentioned in an open letter to my Gen Z family, Black literature openly acknowledges the potential power of community in a system when the odds are stacked against an entire people. Though the power of community cannot substitute for structural and institutional change, it makes bearing up under the weight a little easier.
Thanks for reading this whole series! Check out other writing here:
[Episode 1] [Episode 2] [Episode 3] [Episode 4] [Episode 5] [Episode 6] [Episode 7] [Episode 8] [Episode 9]
