Reflective Encounters

““Do you start your morning with a twerking session?” The radio is switched off before we hear how Jade responds to the question, but we can guess: a nervous laugh, a swift brushing away of the blithe microaggression, the same bottling up that she will will have to perform when she is inappropriately touched by a customer in the restaurant in which she works. These are two kinds of silence: the former an internally patrolled reticence, the latter because her ‘tips and shit chips’ depend on it.

Carbon Copy elucidates the intersection of the economic, gender and race-based social expectations Jade faces, but especially this expectation of silence. Polite society may do as it pleases, but a young black woman wanting to speak out about the transgressions she faces knows she will be seen as disobedient and ungrateful: A Problem. As Sara Ahmed argued in her recent book Complaint!, to complain is not to be heard but merely to paint oneself as a complainer. #MeToo may have opened some doors for such stigmas to be lifted and for certain silences to be broken, but other truths have yet to be given permission to be spoken out loud.”

— Jonathan Bygraves