The Value of Joy

Joy Reid is responsible for my signature afro. It was late 2018; I was in the makeup chair at MSNBC, and the makeup artists said, “You have such nice hair.” My hair was getting pretty long, and I thought she was nicely telling me it was time to get it cut, as older Black women in my life were always telling me whenever I’d let my hair get too long. I assured her that I was going to the barber shop right after my Saturday spot on AM Joy.

Joy was in the chair next to me. She slowly turned to me and said, “Do you like being on television?” I said, “Yes,” and she said, “Then I would keep your beautiful Black hair.” My hair had long gone gray by that point, but she wasn’t talking about its color. She broke it down for me, explained how television was a visual medium, and told me that my afro was a “signal” to viewers that I was bold and unafraid. I countered with how I had been told to keep my hair “high and tight” (around white folks) for fear of their dismissing what I had to say because they were unused to seeing natural Black hair. She told me to pay those types of people no nevermind, and added: “Not everybody could pull it off, but you can. Your hair matches what you say.”

I never did go to the barber after the show. My mother is still pissed about it.

I’ve told that story to a lot of people and, for many white people, it’s just a cool “behind the scenes” story about how television gets made. Black folks, for the most part, understand that our little conversation was much deeper. I was essentially making “respectability Black” arguments: accepting the premise that to succeed in a white world, I had to look like they wanted me to look. Joy was telling me to not play their game, to be my full authentic self on television, and trust that viewers, especially Black viewers, would have my back. They did.

Over the weekend, MSNBC canceled Joy’s primetime show, The ReidOut. The network followed up by canceling Ayman Mohyeldin’s show, Jonathan Capehart’s show, Katie Phang’s show, and announced that Alex Wagner will not be returning to the 9 pm weeknight slot when Rachel Maddow leaves it again in April. The white hosts at the network remain, as of now, unaffected. What’s happening over there is not subtle.

Cable news has never been truly comfortable with authentic Black voices. That’s true of every type of media, and every medium, owned and operated by white folks, but cable is particularly difficult for Black people to break into because you need practice at it before you get any good. It’s not easy or natural to answer complicated questions in 35-second sound bites while somebody is screaming “WRAP IT UP!” in your ear. It’s harder still when you’re trying to figure out if you’re allowed to give the truthful answer to the question, or only the white answer to the question. God forbid you’re trying to parse all that while making a joke or adding some flair to your answer, or while saying something different, something more unconventional than what was just said by the guest before you or will be said by the guest coming up after. And it’s intimidating when you’re doing it all live and know that anything you say can and will be used against you by Tucker Carlson.

You need practice to get it right, but there just aren’t a lot of cable hours to go around. I’m a writer and I was able to spend 10,000 hours just practicing writing before anybody really started paying attention to what I wrote. If you do radio, there is always some random W-LOL station in Podunk that will have you on and let you practice that format. If you do comedy, there is always a club that will let you grab an open mic at 2 am. If you do YouTube, you can put up videos every day until you figure it out. But when it comes to TV, not so much: You’ll get four and a half minutes here, nine minutes as part of a five-person panel there, and very few opportunities to hone the craft of it all before everybody decides a white guy with better “rapport” with the host should get the seat at the table.

Joy was a singular presence in cable news because she gave young Black people practice. She let us put in our reps. Joy would go out of her way to find young Black talent and put them on her show; then, she put them in situations where they were treated like white talent. What that means is that she wouldn’t just find Black people to talk about “Black” issues; she’d find Black people and let them talk about any issue for which they had expertise. For me, that meant allowing me to talk about the law—and not just “Black” law. I had been on TV quite a bit before I met Joy, pretty much anytime a young Black person was murdered by the cops. That was my television “beat.” Joy was the first person to have me on to just talk about the Department of Justice or the Supreme Court. She let me practice doing on television what I had already been doing on the page for years.

In the process, Joy essentially turned her show into a PhD program for Black journalists, scholars, and experts looking to make the jump to TV. Her show was a showroom for any other television program willing to have interesting Black people on. Former Nation writer Chris Hayes is the first person who put me on primetime television, but his people knew I was ready for it because they’d seen me on Joy’s weekend show. When Joy finally got a primetime gig, she continued her tradition of giving Black folks reps under the bright lights.

It’s a tradition she didn’t start. Joy took the baton handed down by Melissa Harris-Perry after MSNBC refused to let her stay on the air. When Joy left the weekends, she tried to pass that baton to Tiffany Cross, who did everything she could to elevate Black and brown voices and perspectives—before MSNBC fired her too.