If Hating Lawrence is Wrong, I Don’t Want To Be Right

The Lawrence Hive? Maybe it’s not all love.

Just so y’all know, the following piece is not a Season 2 spoiler.

The premiere of the second season of Issa Rae’s prime-time hit, Insecure came on yesterday. I neither have cable nor an HBO subscription so blackily I had to get out in these streets and beg the negro people for their HBO log-in. Happily, I was successful at my begging. Successful in that some gracious, Black soul gave me their log-in and then that shit didn’t even work. So I finally settled for a free 7 day trial, I cozied into my bedding, and I hit play.

To be completely honest, I was preemptively angry with Lawrence’s ass even before the captivating scenes of South LA appeared in the opening seconds of the episode. The end of last season brought combat between the Issa hive and the Lawrence hive in part because Lawrence slept with Tasha - a woman he had been talking to and priming long before the end of his relationship with Issa. Lawrence f*cks Tasha but not before contacting Issa and expressing what seemed like a desire to reconcile. For me, it wasn’t about the f*ckin. That too was a symbol, but in itself, by itself, was not what made me angry. It was about something else.

It was about Lawrence not showing up after telling Issa that he would. It was about her pain over that rejection and abandonment both of which pissed me off to no end. I’m certain it was a trigger for many a Black woman because we as Black women have all been there. We have all felt that build up of anticipation from a lover, a parent, a mentor who we’ve cared for, supported, given all of our love to, and once we’ve exploded under the weight of carrying the bulk of the relationship on our own, we’ve been alone to experience the dismissal and the disappointment when those same people we showed up for and sacrificed for didn’t show up for us.

Now before any hoteps try to come for me for writing this on a corn heavy diet, this is not me saying Lawrence’s feelings and his hurt don’t matter.They do matter.

This is about the ways mostly Black men hived around Lawrence as if not showing up to speak with Issa after he asked for that and then having sex with Tasha wasn’t an attempt to bury his pain in a vulva, as if his expression of hurt from Issa’s betrayal and his running away from his fear of failure in his professional and personal life is a great and healthy thing we should all be doing, an act that didn’t cause him harm.

We cheer on Lawrence’s feigned ambivalence because we see not feeling or really pretending not to feel as a badge of honor. We cheer at Lawrence’s indifference not because we love him, but because we have been taught to hate who we are as Black people when we feel. To see a Black man healing and feeling and being open about his hurt is something we think makes him weak and makes us weak by association. Our lovers, the Black women in our lives, are only as good as their capacity to stand the test of loving us in all our ambivalence and the moment that ambivalence impacts them and moves them to make decisions that hurt our relationship they must be cast out of our lives ceremoniously, because how dare they feel in the first place? Because how dare Black women break under the weight of being denied the space to tell us they are disappointed in us or hurting because we have forced them to be invisible so our lives can be more convenient? Because feeling was their first mistake.

Remember in that final scene of season one when Issa returns to a home that Lawrence has cleared of his belongings? The apartment had been tidied and his clothes and his books and his shoes taken with him, but the one thing he left was his Best Buy shirt, an article of clothing that, for him, had been a symbol of life not working out like he wanted, of dreams going unrealized and existing as a reminder of his “failure” to have made his business work. Lawrence used his hurt to cover over the impact of years of relying on this relationship financially, emotionally, mentally while missing that neither he nor his partner Issa were getting what they needed in the relationship. That happens in relationships all the time. Hopefully, we talk it through and either we change and stay together or we stay the same and draw apart. In this case, both folks pretended to stay the same and stayed together in a stagnant relationship that offered them little of what they needed. In that last episode of Season 1, Lawrence asks Issa to meet him at the apartment and then doesn’t show nigga style with no calls and no texts. That shirt was a symbol of this struggle that Lawrence had chosen to pursue his dream as an entrepreneur and in his oh so careful clearing of his things from the space, he left it almost as if to say “this struggle is yours now. Yours to keep.”

Niggas applauded his absence, his dashing of this expectation that he himself set. And in that they also applauded a Black man full of fury and fear that he had failed in his work and his relationship who thrusts his tears and his feelings of betrayal into the body of another woman he has no love for. Still, pretending not to feel.

What does it mean to cheer on the emotional stoicism of a Black man? It can’t be an expression of love because humans have feelings and we are all deserving of space to feel those feelings fully and without burial. So it makes me question: Maybe the Lawrence hive ain’t all love after all? Maybe some of it fulfills our own need to believe that relationships really are just about f*ckin and not feeling. It would seem pretty convenient for that to be truth in a world where Black folks feelings are painted as being worthless. It would also be convenient in a world where the role of the Black woman is to please everybody but herself and to act as if her own repression isn’t an act of self-harm. That being said, I do hive for Lawrence. I hive for his healing, but I won’t ever hive for his harm.

Thanks to Melissa Toler

Boundary Keeper. Writer on all things gender, justice, race, and relationships. We’re in this together. Visit mckensiemack.com for more. They/Them

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade