Language as Rugged Glass: A Review of Tajja Isen’s SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS: ESSAYS ON LIP SERVICE

As a Black woman often grappling with racism in my own work, I know intimately how writing about these experiences also means finding a way to set oneself apart from other narratives. How thrilled I was then to encounter Tajja Isen’s debut essay collection, Some of My Best Friends, which examines racism through multiple lenses with the dexterity of a compound microscope. Isen’s essays move through a wide range of subjects, both sampling hot button topics like “the diversity hire” and tracing the changing demands of the personal essay genre. But at the core of each essay is a linguistic excavation — a deeper study into how language is used to both enact change and distract from it. In the introduction, Isen defines “lip service” as “the pull of our attention away from foundational cracks to point toward something prettier out the window…that bait and switch” (xiii). In her mining, Isen finds that language is also rugged glass waiting to cut and wound if you don’t hold it carefully enough (OR if you know exactly how to wield it).

One of the glaring strengths of this essay is the groove Isen finds between her own experience and her journalistic reporting on society. From this balancing act, we are gifted moments of endearing vulnerability. Isen sees the systems of oppression clearly, and she also holds no illusions as to how she must operate within it.

In the first essay in the collection, “Hearing Voices,” Isen comments on the systemic racism built into the voice acting industry. She takes the language of casting calls to task, citing how they “will often contain boilerplate language like ‘all ethnicities welcome’ — not because they’re courting cross-racial controversy; more like the opposite. (If the breakdown said ‘whites only,’ the backlash would be very different)” (13). This “openness” to diversity feels instead like a strategic maneuver to avoid criticism and seem inclusive. This maneuver also crumbles under the weight of what characters get written and who actually gets hired. Isen touches on recent incidents of white actors stepping down from their roles voicing characters of color — in June 2020, Jenny Slate relinquished her role of Missy, a Black girl in the show Big Mouth, and suddenly other white actors were following suit. And while Isen acknowledges that these actions could signal a change in the industry, it doesn’t address the extreme lack of Black characters to be voiced in the first place.

In one of many brilliant moments of self-awareness, Isen observes that while the lack of Black characters posed an issue, there was a particular benefit to voicing white characters. She admits that she “liked playing white girls…The truth of it is that the white voice can sound like anything” (13). In the system’s failure (and whiteness), Isen finds a small refuge of freedom and a wider range of possibility for what her character can sound like. When voicing a Black character, this freedom is replaced by casting directors’ racist expectations laid bare in a common question, “Could you do that a little more street?,” or the even more confusing ask to “sound natural” (3, 25). As a result, Isen finds herself in a complicated middle ground in which Black people must choose between integrity or survival.

This middle ground is a historical one, as illustrated by Isen’s inclusion of Lillian Randolph who famously voices Mammy Two Shoes in Tom and Jerry. Although Mammy Two Shoes was a racist and stereotypical character, Randolph had a stable and lucrative career filling the role. Isen writes that the concerns of Randolph and other Black voice actors of the 40s are “dizzyingly contemporary. Today’s call for character-actor alignment have similar side effects to yesterday’s anti-stereotype activism: both are well-meaning efforts to eradicate a problem and position equality as their slightly foggy end goal…Neither avoids the risk that the pie might end up smaller than it was in the first place” (19). Again, Isen returns to the sometimes meaningless (and dare I say reckless) language of social justice. While the language suggests a real investment in improving the working conditions of Black voice actors, both efforts fail to consider those conditions more fully and to recognize how those realities are borne from a larger racist system.

The Black artist’s battle between integrity and survival continues in the essay “This Time It’s Personal.” Here, Isen studies how the genre of the personal essay and “the first-person boom” has carved out new space for marginalized writers while also forcing those same writers to meet the demand of a widespread appetite for trauma; “the problem with creating an audience hungry for pain is that you have to feed it constantly” (88). I found myself sighing in tired familiarity at “reactive story commissioning,” a “facile engagement with an elemental social problem while saving the time and money of having a staff writer report [it] out” (82–83). In particular, I was reminded of an infuriating issue of Cleaver Magazine, a Fall 2020 “Reparations” Issue with the word “nappy” on its cover, an issue that was almost exclusively filled with white authors. Isen adeptly hits at the irony of these asks and their disingenuous language. In my own experience, publications’ attempts to “amplify Black voices” and “give underrepresented voices a platform” are often undermined by the insult of little to no pay, no real investment in the writer’s work outside of the commissioned piece, and editors who already have their own ideas about what “urgent, raw, and necessary” mean (91). While the language suggests that the publications are uplifting the writer of color, it becomes clear that these commissions are largely self-serving, providing short-cuts and cheap labor to industries who want to appear plugged in and “woke.”

This call for a specific marginalized narrative didn’t escape Isen’s own writing. She recalls some of her earlier attempts at the personal essay and realizes that she, too, fed the trauma machine:

An essay could be about anything — books, music, cartoons, films — and I’d always be able to stitch in examples of a time when I’d felt marginalized or underrepresented. Sometimes an editor pressed on the bruise harder than was comfortable, but I would let it go, thicken my skin and amend my sentences…At it’s best, that’s what the persona-essay economy does: It gives writers a way to reclaim stories and moments that life wrenched away from them. At its worst, it might push writers to express a pain that comes off looking worse than how they really feel. Or it might become the broken-finger problem, where pressing on a thing that hurts becomes your whole refrain. This is what happened to me. (81)

Within the genre’s shifting requirements, Isen noticed her own writing contort within it, becoming formulaic in its beats and conclusions. I have also looked at a project of mine and found myself catering to the belief that I had to bleed on the page. Amongst my marginalized peers, I have had many discussions where the same question was asked of our works, “Yes, but does this feel Black enough?” As an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus, I still find words like “urgent,” “raw,” and “necessary” appearing in my fellow editors’ comments on essay submissions. It becomes painfully easy to see how marginalized pain and trauma is incentivized. But Isen forces us to consider: who really benefits from these stories and their pain?

Isen’s reckoning with her previously unconscious buy-ins to white supremacy continues most notably for me in the essay “Barely Legal.” This essay tells the story of Isen’s desire to become a lawyer and how her early illusions about law and justice were quickly replaced with something more sinister. After taking the LSAT, she realized that “denying large segments of reality is also what makes the law powerful…Legal reasoning speaks the language of neutrality while coming down harder on the groups and people who have less power to fight it” (122). Isen then goes on to illustrate why law has a vested interest in remaining detached from reality and focusing only on “facts.” Citing Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights, she zeroes in on a Louisiana case from 1835, Icar vs Suars, “about flaws in merchandise for which a buyer might seek a refund…the defective merchandise in question…is an enslaved Black woman named Kate. The ‘flaw’ is that she tried to run away” (132–33). Because the law remains detached from Kate’s material circumstances and humanity, and solely focuses on the “invalidated contract,” the court rules in the plaintiff’s favor and deems Kate “flawed merchandise” and an inconvenience to her buyer.

This example, and Isen’s following reflections, are arguably one of the collection’s strongest arguments for how law is “lip service,” how language reinforces systems of power. This horrific example so clearly demonstrates how law willfully ignores what doesn’t benefit it. This “standardization of reality” seems to code anything outside of whiteness as deviant and therefore unworthy of fuller consideration. The result is a legal system that disproportionately punishes marginalized communities, even in the present. As Isen realized that her law school education lacked a larger social conscience, her unease surrounding her career path only grew until she decided not to take the bar exam. Although there is value in more people of color pursuing these fields to upset the status quo, sometimes there is also the realization the system is simply too large and intricate for you to make the impact you truly wanted.

Perhaps the sharpest investigation of language’s manipulations takes place in my favorite essay of the collection, “Diversity Hire.” Currently in academia myself, I’m well acquainted with the language of these institutions and their quests for “diversity.” Isen points out that “the ‘diversity hire’ has a vexed relationship with equity. Warring within the term is a deep-rooted problem…and a quick, self-satisfied fix…But the solution it proposes isn’t a solution at all. It’s been well documented that hiring a so-called diverse candidate, or several, is different from enshrining inclusion as part of a company’s culture” (50). It’s laughable how applicable this sentiment is — as I work on this review, I also have The Root’s recent article about Netflix’s most recent layoffs open in another tab. The headline blares “Netflix Announces More Layoffs, This Time to BIPOC, LGBTQ+ Verticals” and highlights how most of the employees that were let go were responsible for putting forth more diverse content for the streaming service. The existence of those spaces (such as Strong Black Lead, Most, Con Todo, and Golden) would initially suggest that Netflix was making substantial and permanent changes to its company and mission. And yet diversity was one of the first sacrifices it made to save itself amid a sharp dip in subscribers after raising its monthly subscription price.

Isen makes a brilliant comparison in this essay, likening the word “antiracism” (and I would vote to include “diversity” here as well) to “folklore’s Candyman: just saying the word calls something into being” (55). In this instance, the language of social justice is so overused that it has become simultaneously devoid of meaning and a stand-in for tangible action. By naming the thing, as companies tend to do after highly publicized social occurrences and tragedies in marginalized communities, one might excuse themselves from having to actually do the thing. We say we are an antiracist organization, and so the work is done. Our mission statement claims that we are committed to diversity, and so diversity is called into existence. Like the rugged glass in the hand, it can perform tricks of light while also cutting deep.

This essay collection triangulates the personal, the historical, and the linguistic with ease. As a Black reader, I felt Isen digging into familiar pressure points then quickly soothing my discomfort with her charm. In these brilliant marriages of the then and the now, Isen reveals the large gap between how far we think we’ve progressed and how far we’ve really come. And she does so with empathy and understanding. Like an older sister, she takes our hand and leads us through it, saying, “I remember when I didn’t see it this way, too.”