The Talk was on several best-book lists of 2023, and near the top of the best-graphic-novel lists. Its author, Darrin Bell, in 2019, had become the first Black editorial cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize. I didn’t know what the book was about, but I was intrigued.
Turns, out, The Talk, refers to the conversation Black American parents have with their kids to prepare them for a world that will be unkind to them because of the colour of their skin. Discussions range from microagressions to how to survive police encounters. Not every parent does it, but it’s a strange milestone – a marker of innocence lost early to brace for the racism to come.
Bell’s story starts when he was six, when he asked his mother for a water gun like the other kids in the neighbourhood, and she got him a conspicuously neon green one, so it wouldn’t be confused for a real weapon. It didn’t help. Young Bell, refilling his toy in a puddle a few days later, still got threatened by a police officer. There’s confusion and shame for him. For us, it’s the start of slow-burning rage that intensifies as the pages turn.
The chapters cover his coming of age in Los Angeles and Berkley. Bell is followed around in stores, on the assumption that he might shoplift. He’s a good student; teachers call him “one of the good ones.” (“I bet White people never have to worry about that,” he thinks.) At college, one professor accuses him of plagiarising an essay because he uses terms like ‘the aether’ and has well-thought-out ideas. She threatens him with expulsion. He asks her to prove it’s copied, and offers to illustrate their exchange in the campus magazine. She backs down, but not before accusing him of playing the race card.
{{/usCountry}}The chapters cover his coming of age in Los Angeles and Berkley. Bell is followed around in stores, on the assumption that he might shoplift. He’s a good student; teachers call him “one of the good ones.” (“I bet White people never have to worry about that,” he thinks.) At college, one professor accuses him of plagiarising an essay because he uses terms like ‘the aether’ and has well-thought-out ideas. She threatens him with expulsion. He asks her to prove it’s copied, and offers to illustrate their exchange in the campus magazine. She backs down, but not before accusing him of playing the race card.
{{/usCountry}}Bell’s book turns the aether on its head, using it to describe White Americans’ fog of wilful ignorance of the Black experience. The fog isn’t lifting, so Bell must now prepare for The Talk with his own young children.
The illustrations are beautiful. Bell’s fear-filled eyes jump off the page. The flashbacks have a translucent feel. So much of Bell’s stories echo how India’s own marginalised must feel about caste, class and other privileges. If you weren’t given The Talk as a child, consider it another lucky side effect of the accident of your birth.