During a year filled with so much pain for so many, my mantra has been: “Try not to complain.” After all, I’m healthy. My immediate loved ones are healthy, and I’ve been fortunate to keep working in a profession I love, in a year when the pandemic drove plenty of Americans to food pantries. Yet like most human beings with a heartbeat, I couldn’t escape being emotionally impacted by traumatic events of the past year, and subsequently my work was impacted as well. For instance, after George Floyd’s killing, I was moved to add a scene to a script that was supposed to be a celebration of Black hair. As written, it’s simply a moment of two Black women preparing their hair in silence. Only when it ends does the audience realize that one woman’s son who is also the other woman’s husband was killed by a police officer and they are dressing for the funeral. When director Bianca LaVerne Jones added Billie Holiday’s haunting lynching ballad “Strange Fruit” to the scene, I accepted that our streaming production was no longer going to simply be a celebration because the moment we are living in demanded more. It’s still hard for me to watch that scene, but I realize it was necessary, and it has emerged as one of the most memorable among audiences. [Editor’s note: Goff’s The Glorious World of Crowns, Kinks and Curls premiered in March 2021 at Baltimore Center Stage.]
Like others I’ve spoken to, I’ve found myself overcome with emotion at unexpected moments this year. Despite the laughter and light that has filled most of my days in Zoom writers rooms, tears flowed when the subject of race, or injustice of any kind, or the Black men in my life, came up. And I used to be someone who prided myself on not letting my emotions get the best of me in writers rooms. But in a year filled with moments representing the worst of human behavior, it was not only hard to be at my best, but frankly I questioned whether I even had a right to be. Writing and laughing for a living can feel like self-indulgence when the world is on fire around you.
My bosses and colleagues, some of who were facing their own unique challenges thanks to the pandemic, could not have been more gracious. But I wondered how other writers of color, particularly Black- and Asian- identifying women writers, were holding up in a year filled with such heartbreak and horror for our specific communities. So I asked some of them. Their responses broke my heart and sustained my hope in equal mea- sure. Some talked about writing through the intense emotions, recalibrating their lives to maintain balance and refining their sense of purpose in their work. Because storytellers, in reminding the world of its humanity with its many colors and cultures, are essential to the quest for equality and justice, and for some of us, the most powerful political act we can undertake is to simply keep writing.
This story first appeared in the May 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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Amy Aniobi - Writer/Executive Producer, 'Insecure' (HBO)
Image Credit: Frances Ampah This year has been filled with so much pain that escaping into writing has been practically therapeutic for me. At first, after the George Floyd murder, I couldn’t write at all. I was up against so many deadlines that I had to say, “I’m sorry, but yeahhhh, this is gonna be late.” It was impossible to be creative and think of senseless things like jokes during such a heavy national disgrace. That bubbled up again around the election, and again during the attack on the Capitol. It’s just been a heavy-ass, dark-ass year. But eventually, writing gave me my calm back. It became something that could help me escape, and writing Black joy felt almost … revolutionary given everything we went through as a country last year. But I also had to learn to forgive myself for the days that my soul was too heavy to write a vagina joke, you know?
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Racquel Baker - Staff Writer, 'Good Trouble' (Freeform)
Admittedly, this was one of the hardest years to be a writer in Hollywood. As a woman of African American and Japanese descent, having to deal with the barrage of violence on both sides was disheartening and draining to say the least. But the isolation of 2020 reminded me of the gifts put inside me and the privilege afforded to create for a living. In spite of all the tumult, this year showed me why my voice, my stories, and my communities’ representation is needed now more than ever. While I feel privileged to be a writer and tell all of my stories in general, something in particular that this past year inspired me to do is ensure that none of my work centers around oppression. That’s not to say that my stories won’t include obstacles, but the real world inflicts enough harm on us as it is. There was no way I was going to amplify that in the narratives I imagine and aim to produce one day.
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Lisa Takeuchi Cullen - Consulting Producer, 'Law & Order: SVU' (NBC)
Image Credit: Matt Dine As an Asian woman and creator, I’m sobered by the responsibility of this moment but also fired up by the opportunity. We wield the power as TV writers to seed empathy by planting people who look like us into your very living rooms. You’ll see we laugh, we cry, we eat, we play, we talk, we fight, we fall in love. Invite us in to tell you our own stories, and maybe we’ll find some common ground because there is power in the ordinary. While a few Asian-centered shows have made it to air, the journalist Mo Ryan pointed out they focus on martial arts and/or our historic suffering — in other words, our otherness. But when I and other Asian creators develop shows with Asian leads, our execs ask us why the characters are Asian if they don’t do Asian things. In the show I am creating now for a streamer, one of the leads is an Asian American businesswoman gutted by her husband’s affair. She cries, she rages, she argues with her teenage daughter. She’s flawed. She’s human. Her favorite dish is rice and beans. Put our ordinary characters onscreen, and in them maybe America will see our humanity.
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Erika L. Johnson - Co-Executive Producer, 'The Good Lord Bird' (Showtime)
Image Credit: Jamaal Murray Out of all the tragedies that occurred last year, Breonna Taylor’s death hit me the hardest. It always brings me back to this feeling that Black women are invisible. Not truly seen, heard, appreciated or protected. After grieving, feeling powerless and not knowing how to express that, I decided one way I can push back is in my writing. My latest project, The Bottoms, is about a woman who has recently returned home to Columbus, Ohio, to take a new position running a social services program. I wanted to create a series that examines the notion of defunding the police and really explores what that looks like in a deliciously dark, complicated family story. After working on The Bottoms, I realized there can be beauty and empowerment in tackling difficult issues. There can be triumph in the face of despair … and light can coexist with the dark.
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Erica Shelton Kodish - Writer/Consulting Producer, 'The Equalizer' (CBS)
Image Credit: Courtesy of Michael Patrick Calas The social unrest following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor heightened the sense of responsibility I felt as a Black woman writer to represent “us” well. But getting words on the page had never been harder. Many nights, I couldn’t sleep. And the pandemic and anxiety about the election had already created this mental noise when I sat at my computer, like a jackhammer outside the window.
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Felischa Marye - Creator/Showrunner/EP, 'Bigger' (BET+)
Image Credit: Courtesy of Subject I thought the isolation of quarantine depressed me, but George Floyd’s murder took me to a new low, and with production of Bigger season two on hold due to COVID, I had scripts I needed to revise and a finale to write but wondered how I could be funny when the real world was the literal opposite of that. The thing that helped me get through this creatively was incorporating the real world into the Bigger scripts, which producer Devon Shepard and I did, treating Bigger’s world like our real world: masks on and off in restaurants, folks afraid of anyone sneezing or coughing, references to protests, a Breonna Taylor mural right outside of the main character’s business. Finding the lightness in living during these times while writing characters who have fun and thrive despite the state of the world was a gift to me and way for me to get out of a rut.
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Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence - Story Writer, 'Twenties' (BET)
Image Credit: Courtesy of Jesus Acosta As a Black and Asian American woman, I’ve carried the double weight of this year’s escalation of centuries-long American racial violence against my communities and struggled to work and write through the daily trauma it brings. Last summer, I had to get off of Twitter because it just became too emotionally draining — the constant barrage of racial terror, the images and videos of police killing and assaulting Black people became too much — and I had to remove myself completely because that was the only way to take care of myself. And only then could I write. And then you feel guilty for avoiding it, but sometimes, that’s the only way to function, to be “productive,” to literally do our jobs. I remember I had a Zoom pitch the day I found out about the [March 2021] Atlanta [spa] shootings, and I still had to get on there and smile and perform and be on and sell. That’s the hardest part — having to push through the pain and get the job done, even when the news is telling you every single day that they are trying to kill you.
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Aundrea Posey - Writer, 'Love Life' (HBO Max)
Image Credit: K Ray Harrison As a queer Black woman, it has been a tremendous challenge to write and create art in a year dominated by pain, tragedy, injustice and sorrow. I remember times when myself and many industry peers found it nearly impossible to escape the grief plaguing communities of color and the nation as a whole. We also reached a place where we found it impossible to stop, to fall silent, to ignore the call to amplify our voices and say something. So we kept going. One day at a time. One page at a time. One therapy session at a time.
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Chandra Thomas - Writer, 'Mom' (CBS)
This year has highlighted the urgent need for nuanced stories centering Black and brown communities. As a Black woman comedy writer, these narratives stand at the heart of what I create, which makes this time complicated — recognizing the importance of the art while also trying to negotiate the deep pain of this past year. I have a project going around that focuses on two immigrant families: one West African, the other Dominican. In a recent meeting about the pilot, a conversation emerged about the often broad reference to “Black people” as “African Americans.” This nuanced story sparked a discussion about the importance of sharing the full breadth of our narratives in our own voices, through our own lenses.
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Loy A. Webb - Story Editor, 'Ms. Pat' (BET+)
Image Credit: Courtesy of Charli Williams A year that has been filled with so much pain has given me permission to take a step back and remind myself that I am a creative well. And it is imperative that I take time and set professional boundaries to fill myself up with emotional, mental, spiritual and physical wellness. The art can wait, but if that well (aka you) is not taken care of, the art won’t matter.
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Josephine Green Zhang - Staff Writer, 'The First Wives Club' (BET+)
Image Credit: Rozette Rago With each act of violent white supremacist terror, I feel such a deep mix of rage and sadness, like a sheet of paper set on fire — burnt, crumpling and shrinking. Seeing the collective consciousness grow is the spark that keeps me going. I pick myself up and write furiously because my experience as an Asian American woman has been gaslit for far too long. After a lifetime of hearing hack anti-Asian jokes, seeing grotesque caricatures and feeling the erasure of our narrative in history books and media, I’ve used this time to write, to burn the model minority-Asian fetish dichotomy down to the ground with all the fucked-up, dehumanizing stereotypes that go along with it because we, as Asians and Asian Americans, are full, whole, complex human beings who deserve to feel safe as we take up space.
At this time, I’m developing a Netflix animated show about a Chinese girl who comes into her power, and also I’m in a writers room on Hulu’s Dollface that has two Asian women leads. It’s too early in the process to share specific story points, but rest assured, I am writing these Asian women as full, complex people that step into their power but also are flawed. In early 2020, in a staffing meeting on an animated show with Asian themes and Asian characters centering on martial arts, I was talking to a room of four white men about what it was like for me growing up in an Asian American community in the San Gabriel Valley (shout out to the 626), and the showrunner, in a spiteful tone, asked me if I grew up across the street from a dumpling shop. It was a hack, bad joke and a microaggression from a clearly insecure person. At the time, without skipping a beat, I answered truthfully, “No. It was a 99 Ranch Store.”
I didn’t end up staffing that show (thank God), but this last year, I thought about that question a lot after the interview and why it hurt me so much. Why I didn’t realize it was so racist until hours after the meeting and why I sat in my car alone in the parking lot, pondering and imagining how I should have flipped the table or gave a poetic, heartfelt speech (’cuz that would have worked). But over this last year, the change for me has been more internal: I resist making a joke of racism to make others feel comfortable. In my career, I speak up for myself and say no to the opportunities that want a soy sauce pass for optics. I confront old friends who say casual racist jokes that are lame and lazy on top of being racist. I never want to be in that position again or for any other Asian or minority writer to be made to feel small like I did. The want for this change keeps me going, to tell my stories, and to be in the room where I can share my experiences without being gaslit or reduced to a hack stereotype. Also, even though loving kung fu films is a stereotype, I openly do love the shit out of them, but it’s gotta have authentic Asian inclusion.
‘Dollface’ Ali Goldstein/Hulu
