Four years ago, the state decriminalized all drugs. Now it’s trying to course-correct — and might make a mistake in the process.
In 2020, it looked as though the war on drugs would begin to end in Oregon.
After Measure 110 was passed that year, Oregon became the first state in the US to decriminalize personal possession of all drugs that had been outlawed by the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, ranging from heroin and cocaine to LSD and psychedelic mushrooms. When it went into effect in early 2021, the move was celebrated by drug reform advocates who had long been calling for decriminalization in the wake of President Nixon’s failed war on drugs.
Now, amid a spike in public drug use and overdoses, Oregon is in the process of reeling back its progressive drug laws, with a new bill that aims to reinstate lighter criminal penalties for personal drug possession. And while the target is deadly drugs like fentanyl, the law would also result in banning non-clinical use of psychedelics like MDMA, DMT, or psilocybin — drugs that are unconnected to the current overdose epidemic and the public displays of drug use.
By treating all drugs as an undifferentiated category, Oregon is set to deliver a major blow to advocates of psychedelic use who don’t want to see expensive clinics and tightly controlled environments be the only legal point of access. While regulated and supervised models for using psychedelics are showing growing promise for treating mental illness, decriminalized use allows for a much wider spectrum of user motivations — many of which have occurred for millennia — no less deserving of legal protection, from recreational and spiritual to the simple pleasure of spicing up a museum visit with a small handful of mushrooms.
“The biggest threat to psychedelics is from people who would claim to be for them in extremely limited contexts and against them in all others,” said Jon Dennis, a lawyer at the Portland-based firm Sagebrush Law specializing in psychedelics.
It would be one thing if arguments against the decriminalization of psychedelics were being made. But that’s not the case. Instead, the lumping together of psychedelics and opioids seems to have gone largely unnoticed, setting up personal use of psychedelics to become an unintended casualty of Oregon’s opioid crisis.
How Oregon decriminalized drugs
The idea behind drug decriminalization was that investing in health services and harm reduction are more effective and humane responses to substance abuse than incarceration. The hope was for Oregon to serve as inspiration for other states, and eventually the nation, to follow suit.
But in the years that followed, Oregon fell deeper into an opioid and drug overdose crisis that has been surging across the nation. In 2021, the US had over 80,000 opioid-related overdose deaths. Beyond the death toll, critics — fairly or unfairly — connected decriminalization to the rising visibility of drug use and homelessness in Oregon towns and cities, including open-air fentanyl markets popping up in downtown Portland. That put increasing pressure on Oregon legislators to do something to change the state’s drug policy.
The new solution crafted by state Sen. Kate Lieber and state Rep. Jason Kropf — House Bill 4002 — is intended as a compromise between the full decriminalization of Measure 110 and the status quo before that leaned heavily on incarceration for drug possession. While improving access to substance abuse treatments — like reducing barriers to receiving medication and encouraging counties to direct offenders to treatment programs rather than court — the bill recriminalizes personal possession of all controlled substances (except for cannabis), bringing back the possibility of jail time for possession of even relatively small amounts.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek last week announced that she intends to sign the bill within 30 days of it clearing both state legislatures with bipartisan support. It’s been widely described as “this very precise amendment that’s only going to address the problems with Measure 110, which were thought to be opioids and meth,” said Dennis.
But the bill turns out to be much larger in scope than advertised. Instead of specifically targeting the opioids and methamphetamine that have been behind most overdose deaths, HB4002 also recriminalizes personal possession of psychedelic drugs like psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, and LSD. Unlike the concern around opioids (including synthetic ones like fentanyl, which are responsible for the majority of overdoses) or meth, neither the public nor experts have reported significant negative effects from the decriminalization of psychedelics.
“All of the conversations around the legislature didn’t think to distinguish between these different classes of drugs,” Dennis said. “I think this was just a broad oversight on their part, rather than nuanced policy discussions.”
There are no op-eds being written about tripping hippies filling public spaces in grand displays of love and cosmic beatitude. The streets are not littered with acid blotter paper or mushroom caps. Psychonauts aren’t seeking out encounters with DMT entities in public parks. No argument for recriminalizing psychedelics has been made, and yet, they’re being swept into a recriminalization bill by the debate around opioids.
Psychedelics have uncommon but potentially serious risks of their own, including short-term encounters with intense anxiety and long-term battles with destabilizing experiences. Access to safety information and support is crucial for their use. On the whole, psychedelics are far safer than many other legally accessible substances, and the list of therapeutic, spiritual, and creative benefits seems to grow each month, from alleviating depression and addiction to combating eating disorders and helping find meaning in life. Expanding access through decriminalization (together with public education and clinical resources for those in need) could help make the most of these benefits.
What HB 4002 will do
Before Measure 110, possession of a controlled substance like LSD or heroin in Oregon could be charged as a Class A misdemeanor, carrying a maximum of one year in jail and fines up to $6,250.
Measure 110, which passed November 2020 with 58 percent of the vote, was intended to treat substance abuse as a public health issue, rather than a criminal one. It created a new category for possession of small amounts of controlled substances — Class E violations — that came with no jail time and a maximum of a $100 fine that could be waived if the individual chose to complete a health assessment. Effectively, it meant that getting caught with illegal drugs could, at worst, get you the equivalent of a traffic ticket.
The new bill, HB 4002, scraps the Class E category altogether. If it goes into effect on September 1, possession of small amounts of controlled substances will once again be punishable with criminal offenses, though less severe than the way things worked prior to Measure 110.
Instead of Class E violations, personal possession of controlled substances will be considered a “drug enforcement misdemeanor,” which carries a maximum of 180 days in jail, though with a series of intervening steps designed to “deflect” individuals toward treatment rather than incarceration.
Even after HB4002 goes into effect, “Oregon will be in a better position than it was prior to Measure 110,” said Kellen Russoniello, senior policy counsel at the Drug Policy Alliance. The new criminal penalties are designed to try to get people into treatment, rather than prison. “But it’s still a step backward from decriminalization.”
Sen. Lieber’s office provided me with a diagram Thursday to show all the steps meant to reduce the odds that someone charged with a drug enforcement misdemeanor will wind up in jail:
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Courtesy of Sen. Kate Lieber’s office
The bill does not affect Measure 109, which implemented Oregon’s regulated access to psilocybin mushrooms. Under that model, adults can sign up for a supervised psilocybin session at a licensed facility, which can cost anywhere from about $1,000 to $3,000. Regulated ketamine clinics, where people can receive ketamine under supervision to treat conditions like depression or anxiety, are also unaffected.
But it does ensure that regulated access is the only way to legally use psychedelics, walking back the decriminalization that allowed for more affordable and unconstrained personal consumption on one’s own terms.
The opioid crisis created support for quickly passing HB-4002
While decriminalization has become a focal point in the debate over drugs, Oregon’s opioid crisis was escalating before 2020. From 2019 to 2020, unintentional opioid deaths in Oregon rose by about 70 percent. After Measure 110 took effect in February 2021, the surge continued. In 2021, deaths rose another 56 percent, and another 30 percent in 2022.
Despite the trends predating decriminalization, critics felt that the rise in overdose deaths, public displays of drug use, and crime were attributable to Measure 110. That provided a strong base of support for HB-4002. An April 2023 survey of 500 Oregon voters found that 63 percent supported bringing back criminal penalties for drug possession while continuing to use cannabis tax revenue for drug treatment programs. The bill was sold as a compromise that would stem the chaos that Measure 110 had allegedly unleashed.
But during the post-decriminalization years that saw Oregon’s opioid crisis continue to worsen, the same trends were taking place across the country, including in neighboring states that hadn’t decriminalized opioids, like California and Nevada. A study led by the New York University Grossman School of Medicine and published in JAMA Psychiatry found that in Oregon and Washington, both states that had drug decriminalization policies in 2021, there was no evidence for an association between decriminalization and drug overdose rates.
A second study, led by public health researcher Brandon del Pozo of Brown University and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, replicated the findings for Oregon: no link between decriminalization and drug overdoses. Instead, most of the spike was attributed to the introduction of fentanyl into the general drug supply. Fentanyl is up to 50 times stronger than heroin, and is often laced into unregulated drugs like heroin or cocaine, making it far more likely than other drugs to lead to fatal overdoses.
Much of the public sentiment’s swing against decriminalization centers around the visibility of drug use, rather than the numerical impact on overdose deaths. So it’s worth noting that the same year that decriminalization was passed, Covid-era eviction protections also expired. After plummeting in 2020 and 2021, the eviction rate shot back up in 2022 by nearly 25 percent. Between 2022 and 2023, the state’s homeless population rose by 12 percent.
None of this is to definitively say that Oregon’s decriminalization did nothing to worsen the opioid crisis, but their less-than-ideal implementation certainly seemed to amplify the visibility and social disorder associated with it. By failing to fund programs that would have trained law enforcement (who were generally skeptical of decriminalization to begin with) on how to direct drug users toward rehabilitation or designing a ticketing system that emphasized treatment information, even advocates of Measure 110 were dismayed with the form it took through implementation.
“Certainly, there’s a sense among Oregon voters that what’s going on isn’t working,” said Russoniello. But blaming Measure 110 has been called political fearmongering, rather than evidence-based policy. “The opposition was able to take the frustration with all of these social issues that Oregonians are facing and direct people’s frustration and anger at the big red herring of Measure 110, even though it isn’t backed by any sort of evidence.”
And wherever the debate falls on what’s fueling the opioid crisis, psychedelics are another matter entirely.
Why are we punishing psychedelics for an ongoing debate about opioids?
There’s reasonable and urgent debate to be had over the best way to regulate opioids and support users. Advocates maintain that a well-implemented decriminalization approach is both more effective and equitable (minority groups are significantly overrepresented in Oregon’s criminal justice system) than returning to criminal penalties, even if recriminalization comes with “deflection” programs in place designed to make incarceration the sanction of last resort.
And yet, when it comes to psychedelics, the same questions, concerns, and sense of urgency present in the opioid crisis are notably absent.
The therapeutic value of psychedelics in regulated settings is well on its way to federal recognition, with the FDA expected to approve MDMA for treating PTSD as soon as this August, and psilocybin for depression to follow suit. But decriminalization can serve as a complement to the shortcomings of medicalized psychedelics, helping to mitigate concerns around access, affordability, and preserving the diversity of purposes for which psychedelics have long been used.
Critics of what has been called “psychedelic exceptionalism” argue that the law should not encode moral judgments that label some drugs as better or worse than others. The logic of decriminalization applies to all drugs, not only those that are more politically or culturally palatable. In fact, “The impact of decriminalization of heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine will be greater than for psychedelics,” said Russoniello, “because more people are incarcerated for those drugs than for psychedelics.” Even so, that shouldn’t mean that progress on decriminalizing psychedelics should get stymied by the ongoing debate over opioids.
So far, experts I spoke with who were concerned about criminalizing psychedelics despite the lack of evidence or argument for it could point to no public efforts to change the bill or clarify its effects. “I don’t think most legislators even really knew that this [HB4002] was recriminalizing all drugs,” said Dennis. HB-4002 now awaits Gov. Kotek’s signature.
A new study highlights why accurate medical data matters so much.
An apparent spike in maternal mortality rates in the US has been raising alarm in the last few years. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the country’s maternal mortality rate increased roughly 40 percent in 2021 compared to the prior year. That jump translated to 32.9 deaths per 100,000 births, compared to 23.8 deaths per 100,000 births in 2020.
Vox and a number of publications have reported on this increase, which has been a source of serious concern. This week, however, a new peer-reviewed study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology suggests that the US’s maternal mortality rate, while still high for a developed nation and troubling, is lower than the CDC’s data had indicated.
In the study, outside researchers led by KS Joseph, a physician and professor at the University of British Columbia, used a different method than the CDC’s to calculate the maternal mortality rate, concluding that it was 10.4 deaths per 100,000 births from 2018 to 2021, rather than the higher figures the agency had for that same time frame. They argue that because of the way the US collects its data, the CDC has been overcounting deaths due to both clerical errors and the inclusion of fatalities not directly caused or exacerbated by pregnancy (for example, including a pregnant woman who died because of cancer).
They also reaffirmed another troubling reality: Researchers continued to find stark racial disparities using this new calculation method, including that Black women were three times more likely to have a fatal complication as white women.
One thing worth noting is that the authors of the study acknowledged that their methodology could result in an undercount. “My opinion is that, probably, the true maternal mortality rate is somewhere in between what these authors are proposing and what the [CDC’s] National Center for Health Statistics puts out,” Alison Gemmill, a Johns Hopkins School of Public Health professor not affiliated with the study, who specializes in maternal health, tells Vox. “CDC disagrees with the findings,” the agency also noted in a statement to NPR, adding that the approach researchers used is “known to produce a substantial undercount of maternal mortality.”
Gemmill says that data on this issue has been tough to pin down both because of problems with documentation and the need to track medical complications at different stages of pregnancy. If a fatality occurs earlier in a pregnancy or postpartum, for example, it might not be accurately counted or attributed to pregnancy.
Having reliable data about maternal mortality is crucial for better understanding causes, treatments, and early interventions, experts say. And while this study offers evidence that the scope of the problem may not be as large, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s still an urgent issue. “Any maternal death is one too many. And we know that these deaths are preventable,” says Gemmill.
What’s in the study
The findings of the Joseph-led study diverged so greatly because of a difference in how these researchers calculated maternal deaths compared to how the CDC did. Per the CDC, a maternal death is defined as “‘the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy,’ but excludes those from accidental or incidental causes.”
Both the CDC study and the Joseph study got their data from death certificates that are filled out for fatalities in the US. On that certificate, there’s a checkbox to indicate whether the person was pregnant at the time of death or 42 days prior. This checkbox was added in 2003 with the goal of better tracking which deaths were related to pregnancy in some way. Since then, the US has seen a sharp increase in the number of fatalities classified as maternal deaths.
For its data, the CDC utilized that “pregnancy checkbox” to identify who was pregnant and to count those who had it checked as maternal deaths if they were of childbearing age. The problem with using this information, however, is that this checkbox can sometimes be checked off in error, Texas researchers found in 2018. In that study, multiple people who were not pregnant had this checkbox marked, for example.
Additionally, there are cases when a pregnant person dies from another condition, like cancer. Under the CDC’s approach, those deaths are also considered maternal deaths, even if pregnancy did not directly cause or exacerbate these fatalities. Joseph believes these cases inflate the number of deaths categorized as maternal deaths.
In order to make a calculation that tried to account for both issues, Joseph and his team only counted deaths in which pregnancy was listed as an explicit cause of death on the death certificate. Using that information, they arrived at their much lower figure, though they make clear that this data could suffer from the flaw of being an underestimate.
“Weaknesses of the study included a reliance on cause-of-death data from death certificates, which can lead to an underestimation of maternal mortality,” they note in the paper. “It reflects a very limited and restrictive way of calculating these numbers whereas the CDC method is most comprehensive,” Louise King, a professor at Harvard Medical School and physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, also cautioned.
Joseph’s study, and its weaknesses, underscore the difficulty and importance of gathering trustworthy data on this topic. Maternal mortality data collection has been less reliable in the US because death certificates include errors and don’t fully capture conditions a person may have experienced — including mental health conditions, like postpartum depression.
There is also debate regarding which deaths should be considered maternal deaths. For example, there are deaths caused by other factors or conditions that could still be tied to pregnancy.
“An opioid overdose may be related to the fact that the pregnant person was forced to quit cold turkey during pregnancy and relapsed after; a suicide could be attributed to postpartum depression; a homicide may be the result of a fight with a domestic partner about the pregnancy,” Annalisa Merelli writes for Stat News.
The UK is seen as a gold standard on how it approaches this issue, says Gemmill, because it uses multiple sources to examine maternal deaths, not just death certificates. In addition to the information provided by death certificates, UK authorities also utilize birth certificates to confirm that a person was pregnant and conduct investigations known as “confidential enquiries” regarding an individual’s specific medical record.
In the US, some state-level boards do deeper dives into each maternal death as well, though the practice is inconsistent and has been politicized, Merelli writes.
How to think about maternal mortality in the US now
Even if the rates are lower than the previously reported exorbitant ones, it’s still troubling that women are dying as a result of pregnancy and associated complications.
“Mothers are getting older, they have more hypertension and diabetes, they have more chronic diseases than they have had 20 years ago, and that puts them at high risk,” Joseph told Vox. “So, if we do not continue to focus on addressing maternal mortality, it will get worse. And we need to bring it down from where it is.”
Based on data from a 2022 analysis by the Commonwealth Fund, the US still has a higher maternal mortality rate than many other industrialized countries even with the more conservative estimate. One caveat Joseph notes is that it’s tough to compare across countries because they each have unique measuring systems.
If the US’s rate is closer to Joseph’s results, that puts the country more in line with — but still slightly above — a number of other developed nations. Per that Commonwealth Fund analysis, 10 countries have rates under 10 deaths per 100,000 births, with the Netherlands, Australia, and Japan all leading the way with rates under three per 100,000.
Concerns about racial disparities, and how Black women are disproportionately dying during or after pregnancy, persist. Systemic racism, including discriminatory treatment in hospitals, where doctors have ignored and downplayed symptoms women have raised, has been found to be a central factor. Unequal access to health care and treatment for chronic conditions prior to pregnancy also plays a role. Researchers identified higher rates of death from ectopic pregnancy, hypertension, and cardiovascular illnesses among Black women, Joseph’s study notes.
The goal of having better data on this problem, and the conditions that cause it, is so physicians can better identify treatments and preventative steps that could help patients, says Joseph. This study, ultimately, is one part of that conversation.
AD’s journey underscores the Netflix hit’s misogynoir problem.
Netflix’s Love Is Blind is reigniting conversations about whether the show’s unique dating experiment — courting sight unseen — benefits Black women.
Since season six of the hit show began airing on Valentine’s Day this year, all eyes have been on Amber Desiree (AD) Smith and her bumbling journey through the pods. AD quickly became a fan favorite because she was candid about her destructive choices when it comes to love. “If I see a red flag, I’m like, ‘Oh, well, I’ll just paint my nails red to match,’” AD confessed to the camera early in the season. This tragic admission informed her decision to pair up with Clay, a man who reminded her of her exes and revealed that he selected women solely based on physical appearance. The internet placed Clay in the show’s villain category once he probed AD about her looks, a major faux pas for a show titled “Love Is Blind.”
Throughout the course of their engagement, Clay earned that villain title. Commentators noted how he treated AD like a receptacle for his trauma, even going as far as laying his head on AD’s chest to be coddled like a newborn minutes into their reveal. “I’m a baby,” he told AD, as they took stock of their physical characteristics, noting that both of them were dark-skinned. Clay talked about his father’s infidelity like it was the third partner in their relationship and focused on how AD could build him up. He repeatedly expressed fear about commitment, but AD held his hand through the process. He ultimately managed to shock AD, in front of their parents and other family members and friends, when he said no to marrying her at the altar.
Outside of her relationship with Clay, AD faced additional hurdles during filming. Her castmates drew attention to her body, pointing out how “stacked” she is, and made an inside joke (“bean dip”) about non-consensually smacking her breasts, which, no need to look it up, is in fact sexual assault. Now, a year after filming, AD says that she “had such an amazing experience” on Love Is Blind. But her storyline highlights some of the sinister aspects of dating as a Black woman, and because it’s airing on Netflix, the reality is being splashed across one of the world’s biggest platforms. AD’s experience is connected to that of Lauren, Diamond, Iyanna, Raven, Tiffany, and Aaliyah — Black women whose stories came before hers on Love Is Blind — as well as to the Black women whose journeys were never shown, and even those well beyond the show’s pods.
To talk about how this show positions Black women, I reached out to “meeting and mating” sociologist Sarah Adeyinka-Skold, an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University. Adeyinka-Skold studies how “inequalities are produced and reproduced” in romantic relationships, and says that Love Is Blind viewers are naive to have ever thought that this experiment, sometimes billed as an equalizer, would help Black women have an easier time finding love. We talk about the unique challenges Black women face, their limited portrayals on the show, the issues with casting, and why Black women’s pain seems to be profitable for both Netflix and the show’s producers.
We are now six seasons in on Love Is Blind and I find myself questioning whether Black women should continue to go on this show. Have you been wondering the same thing?
I can honestly see an argument for Black women to not go on the show. What we’re seeing is that external constraints like racism and sexism are always in the pods even though the show has tried to create this other reality.
What kinds of portrayals of Black women are allowed on Love Is Blind?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the reality they choose to show and how they choose to edit. They’re choosing to give us some things and not give us others. They’re creating a reality that reinforces these gendered racial stereotypes of Black women as these Jezebels — hypersexual and promiscuous. And as these mammies who are caring.
In season four, they had these two white nasty women [Irina and Micah] on the show. That’s not behavior we could ever see from Black women on that show! The kind of backlash they would get. And I wouldn’t want them to depict Black women that way. But again, there’s this humanity and fullness of person, or a spectrum of white womanhood that we get to see, that we don’t get to see with Black women.
All of the Black women on the show are professionals. They’re extremely kind. They’re extremely smart. But we don’t get to see that. We see the producers and editors focus on the problems these women have. Why are we treating the representation of Black women so basic?
Black women being ignored, disrespected, or rejected on dating shows isn’t new. We have so many examples from the Bachelor and Perfect Match to Married at First Sight and Love Island. Black women are either treated as side characters or just not given a chance to shine at all. But it felt like Love Is Blind could somehow equalize dating and create a space for Black women to be seen and celebrated. Do you think this has happened?
I think when people say that, they’re being naive about how our social structure is shaped and formed. Anytime anyone says that something is supposed to be the great equalizer, we should side-eye them and ask, “What does that actually mean?”
In this context, that idea shows a lack of understanding of how our society is set up on purpose to put Black women at the bottom of the gender and racial hierarchy. To think that any dating show could be an equalizer for Black women is pretending that that hierarchy doesn’t matter.
Let’s talk about casting. People have criticized the show for not casting men who are interested in dating Black women.
We think about romance and love as these agentic, individual things that we do in silos. We’re constantly acting as though we are choosing or making decisions outside of our social structure. But the fact of the matter is, this country was built on the rape, pillaging, and conquest of Black women’s bodies. It’s also built on explicit laws that said you should not be marrying Black people, laws that were on the books until 1967 with the Loving v. Virginia case. So how do we think that that’s all just going to disappear? My question is, what do people mean when they say we need to get men that are interested in Black women, and dark-skinned Black women, in particular? Isn’t that the antithesis of the show?
If the whole premise of the show is emotional connection, maybe what they’re trying to say is you need to bring people on the show that are really tuned into and attracted to the experiences that Black women have, [who] know for themselves that Black women’s stories and the experiences make them great partners. So maybe what we mean is we need to cast men who are intimately familiar with the Black woman experience, and it’s part of their attraction to these women.
Yes, that is the subtext. Most of the people I’ve seen making this suggestion are Black women. AD herself is advocating for a better vetting process, and a few seasons ago, former contestant Raven Ross said men in the pods “weren’t looking” for Black women. So it seems like Black women in the pods have had to do this kind of initial vetting themselves.
That’s why AD asked Matt, “Do race and ethnicity matter to you?” She was correctly attuned to the fact that he is white. And when she asked, she was talking about skin color, but the subtext was also, “I’m coming in with a particular kind of experience that you’re not going to get with any other woman precisely because of the way our social structure is set up.”
Let’s break down some of the issues in AD’s relationship with Clay and try to make sense of what it all means for Black women who go on this show and for Black women who date on any reality TV show, online, or in real life.
Let me first say that any man of any race can say all of the things that Clay said. But when we think about the cultural imagination about Black men, unfortunately, Clay checks off all of the boxes of what we think about Black men who are good-looking and as egotistical as Clay.
We can think of it like a Venn diagram. There’s the circle of shitty men characteristics, and then another circle for Black men characteristics, and then in the middle you have Clay. So together, Clay is a shitty man who also happens to be Black.
And when we think about what a shitty Black man is, he’s a guy who cheats. He’s a guy who’s not ready for commitment. He’s a guy who is stuck on the physical. He’s a guy who’s maybe fine dating non-Black women but doesn’t think that Black women should be interested in non-Black men. Like, he’s so much cooler. He’s a cool Black guy, so how could AD possibly be interested in a guy like Matt?
In the United States, there are these characteristics that we associate with shitty men, but when you’re a shitty man in Black skin, society looks at it differently. Society says, oh my goodness, they are going to ruin your family. They are going to be violent. They are going to be cheaters. It doesn’t carry the same type of weight as a shitty man in a different skin tone.
So unfortunately for Clay because he happens to be a shitty man who’s also Black, he’s just playing into that cultural imagination, those stereotypes, that we already have of Black men and which we think is the source of Black women and Black families’ problems. When you have a society where Black people are at the bottom of the racial hierarchy and Black men are demonized, Clay is seen as particularly bad. Again, I don’t think that Clay is doing anything original.
It feels like Black women are having this conversation among themselves. I don’t know that I’ve seen many men outraged, apart from Wale who’s been keeping his foot on Clay’s neck on X all season.
That points back to our racialized and gendered society. Black women are often the ones that have to bear the burden of choosing Black men, of being committed to the racial uplift of Black people, of choosing Black community over themselves.
People are always holding Black women to the highest standard. Black women understand that it’s on them to keep Blackness afloat. It’s on them to breathe the respectability of Blackness. It’s on them to show other people we can have Black love and Black families. Black men don’t care about this because first of all, they’re men. They are rewarded regardless. They don’t have to care because the pressure is not on them to keep the race going. The pressure is not on them to choose the community every time. And if they do that, people are like, “Oh, that’s fantastic.” You get extra points for choosing the community and choosing Black women.
But Black women don’t get extra points. And in fact, they get deducted points, if they do something like date a white guy, which goes outside of the norms. And I think that AD probably didn’t even understand how much the experience within a culture that says, “This is what good Black women do” also impacts the decisions that she’s making. That’s why Black women are having this conversation. They recognize that these two things constrain the ways in which they’re allowed to be fully human.
Some would argue that Black women have had some successful relationships on LIB. For example, fans view season one’s Lauren and Cameron as the show’s golden couple. And then we have Tiffany and Brett, who are celebrated for being the show’s first Black couple that has remained together.
I like the contrast with Tiffany and Brett. They did a good job in season four of giving us a successful story. It was just really beautiful and I’m glad that they did that. But I also think it shouldn’t be an anomaly. It shouldn’t be that in these other seasons we’re kind of treating Black women like trash. We need to see the full experience of Black women just like we see the full experience of white women on the show.
I’ve seen white commentators call Tiffany and Brett boring, while others have complained that they don’t get enough attention from the franchise.
When you say it’s boring, what are you looking for? Are you looking for that drama that you guys focused on in season five? Is that the only thing we’re capable of watching? These are the same groups of people who will tell us that the Black family is in shambles because all the men are like Clay. But y’all want to watch that shit on television. You guys will tell us Black families are poor because the women are too much in charge. But y’all want to watch that shit on television. So when there are Black healthy relationships, they’re calling it boring. That should make you question what it is you want to watch and why. Why do you want to see Black people as stereotypically dysfunctional? So Black people can’t win.
Though AD and Clay say they’re not dating, viewers are speculating that they are still together based on their body language during certain moments of the reunion. But if some months from now they do announce that they are giving it another go, how should we interpret their decision?
I think we need to understand that AD and Clay are navigating some pretty complicated structural and agentic constraints as they are trying to find love. As we have discussed, no white woman on the show was like, “What do you think about race?” They have never asked that question. I will die on that hill.
AD and Clay are still navigating gender and race in a way that white people simply will never have to. And so we need to extend to them the full grace that we give to humans because they are humans.