Falling in love with Peter Kavinsky—right along with Lara Jean—shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. And not just because of his swoon-inducing smile, his ability to make a back-pocket spin in the middle of a cafeteria look downright sinful, or even his impressive emotional depth, either. Rather, I love him—as so many other grown-ass women now do—because I have spent my life falling in and out of love with Peter Kavinskys, just as I was trained to.

I should begin by saying that my now, maybe not-so-former infatuation with a seemingly never-ending list of white boys is my hidden shame. As a young black woman who came of age at a flashpoint in our nation’s relationship to and dialogue about race, it’s the dirty little secret I aimed to bury once I reached adulthood. I’d promised myself it would go the way of my heinous Aeropostale tee collection and my hot pink Samsung SEEK: matured past, grown out of.

My maybe not-so-former infatuation with a seemingly never-ending list of white boys is my hidden shame.
Click To Tweet

While I was never the type of girl to pour her feelings out onto the page like Lara Jean—for fear of making them tangible would make them too real, perhaps—I was the type of girl who daydreamed. Who imagined herself tangled in all sorts of intricate, decidedly un-Indiana romances with the kinds of boys that populated all of my favorite stories: the sensitive nerdy musician type a la Nick O’Leary (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), the bad boy with a troubled past in John Bender (The Breakfast Club) and especially the, “It’s your dream dad, not mine!” star jock and secret poet of Austin Ames (A Cinderella Story). These characters, or what I thought these characters embodied, helped me formulate what would become The Perfect Boy.

The “White” following “Perfect” kind of just went without saying. (The “Boy” and not “Girl” or “Nonbinary Person,” on the other hand, was reiterated strongly and often.)

You should know that I’ve only ever dated people of color. Even in high school, my not-so-spectacular track record with almost-boyfriends is exclusively black. Somewhere deep, somewhere beyond the formula of book-and-movie boyfriends I’d concocted, I was still much more interested in finding kinship and solace and—I can’t believe I’m gonna say this about my high school “ex”, but here we go—passion with other people who looked like me than I was with finding my Kavinsky.

But the white boy thing was more than an embarrassing blip on the radar of my adolescence—my longing for these boys was the product of a sound indoctrination from years of white media consumption.

To All the Boys I Loved Before (both the book and the movie) subverted narratives in which the quirky white girl is the one deemed worthy enough to get the get The Perfect Boy—girls like the one I was relegated to background roles and left romance-less by the end of the story—in so many of the right ways. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before created, for me, a rich world of beautiful, smart young women that neither relied on men to uplift them not validate them. But, you know, it was sort of a perfect bonus when that happened too.

Even now, weeks after its release, my inbox still occasionally pings with messages from friends watching it for the first time. Today, for instance, one of my closest friends couldn’t even wait for the credits to roll before she texted me. She said she’d tried to get away from her love of romances, but this managed to draw her right back in. There were moments throughout where she worried she’d have to turn it off, abandon it once it followed the same trajectory of so many of its predecessors.

“I just knew [Peter Kavinsky] had to do something to ruin things. I just knew there was no way they could end up together,” she said. “The happy ending just felt impossible.”

So many of us were waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the catch. The first time I watched it, I just knew that the inevitable breakdown seen was right around the corner. The part of the story where the young bookish girl, or so often the woman of color, has what seems like a light at the end of the tunnel, extinguished. Where she encounters some sort of embarrassment, some unearthed trauma that precludes her from a happy ending without also enduring great suffering.

The perceived impossibility of To All the Boys, I realize, is at the heart of why I loved it—why I found myself clicking replay before we’d even reached the brief mid-credits scene. The image of a young, smart, bookish woman of color falling in love without grief (related to the relationship) or shame on screen felt too big to assign a name. Felt too close to a dream not to hold tight to it, to close my eyes and will myself back to a world in which those things still seemed attainable.

Half of the story is the fact I didn’t grow up with images of young girls of color falling in love on screen at all, let alone with a heartthrob like Kavinsky. But the other half—perhaps the half that’s even more harrowing—is that I certainly didn’t see us falling in love separate from trauma, or rarer still, with another person of color.

I watched and read hundreds of stories in which the luckiest girls fell in love and rode off into the sunset—often in a cool Jeep!—with their Prince Charming. And that Prince Charming always looked like Peter Kavinsky. Peter Kavinsky—and by extension, Peter and Lara Jean’s fauxlationship—was everything, but it was also precisely what I’ve been implicitly taught to desire. In this way, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before did what so many of its genre forebears had done before it.

And the thing is, I’m not asking this movie to be some wild break from the genre. I don’t even really want that of this particular film. What I do want, though, is thousands of different narratives about what it looks like for girls from all backgrounds to fall in love. We deserve every iteration of story in which young women of color get to fall in love with a sweet, emotionally-adept, whatever-trope-suits-your-fancy partner.

So much of what makes To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before an unbelievably awe-inspiring, tweet-worthy movie, particularly for adults like me, is the element of unconscious wish fulfillment. Like, of course I’m not a teenage girl in a hyper white space, yearning for a story about a bookworm woman of color who falls in love—period, let alone with the “it” guy—anymore. And of course I’m no longer relying on these images to help me feel worthy of love and affection in the way I once was. But I’ve been sitting with that same yearning since then. That girl, the me who needed those things so desperately when she was a kid, never went away, she just evolved.

But even in that evolution, there are moments of deeply troubling considerations about what my love of Peter Kavinsky and this story might mean. Is it him, this particular character and this particular actor, or does my desire speak to something greater?

I’m 24 years old and settled into a community of black folks—friends and found family alike—that not only affirm, but uplift me. Everyday I am reminded of the beauty and brilliance of our people. And I am reminded of my own beauty and brilliance, by extension. This is a far cry from my hometown in suburban Indiana, from an upbringing that was largely populated by people and spaces that could do neither of those things. But that juxtaposition only serves to ground me more firmly in what I know to be true: one of my greatest gifts is that I was born to this black body, and can love other people who share it.

Yet, knowing those things doesn’t automatically undo the years of isolation and forced assimilation I endured to get here. Knowing those things doesn’t automatically help me unlearn the lies I internalized about myself and any potential partners who looked like me.

One of my greatest gifts is that I was born to this black body, and can love other people who share it.
Click To Tweet

What I’m saying is shaking this doesn’t happen for all of us overnight. I’m saying that the mechanisms of white supremacy are complex and, oftentimes, hidden in plain sight. If I spent a lifetime both abhorring and simultaneously craving the white male gaze, then it’s going to take some time—ruminating on my understandings of desire and shame and identity—to walk back the decades of deeply entrenched ideologies which taught me to aspire to finding my happy ever after in the arms of a white man.

I spent the second half of 2016 talking to you, white people, telling you how you were fucking up. I wrote about how you consume Black creations and identities for your own gain; how you lie too fucking much, how you manipulate and silence Black people even when we’re living in constant trauma. I wrote about how you protect your nasty, entitled little monsters to the detriment of literally EVERYONE else. Your years of fucking up has led us to right now…and the hard lesson I had to learn was just how many of you want the fuckshit that’s happening or don’t care enough to even speak out against it, much less try to stop it.

I was naïve. I thought there was a majority of white people who tried to make things equitable, who wanted a better world. But these past two years have taught me that what you really wanted was a world where you could be as monstrous as you desired without consequences. That you were wholly invested in the perception of civility and humanity without actually doing the work. I learned that your version of winning was continued exploitation of others under the punishment of death and that as long as you were the one physically holding the gun, you were okay with it.

I tried to understand. In the beginning, I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I told myself that if I was patient and helped them understand what they were co-signing on, that you would change your ways. I foolishly thought that my humanity was understood and accepted, not a bargaining chip on the table that you were intent upon winning, even if you had to cheat.

When Protecting Yourself From Racism Is The Selfish Choice
theestablishment.co

Well, congratulations, white people. You won. You now have the country your ancestors fought for — your dream is now realized. Black people continue to be exploited and murdered by both cops and white civilians at will, with virtually no consequences. In fact, some of y’all even make money when you face any consequences for your racism.

Your sons, spouses, and friends continue to rape women and children with impunity. Black and brown people continue to be snatched off the street, from their homes, jobs, and their children’s schools.

We are forced to show identification, or detained by ICE whenever a random white person feels empowered to fuck up someone’s day, and white people continue to call the police on Black people just for being near them.

Brown veterans and non-violent brown people are forcefully deported regardless of their military service or immigration application status. The pool of youths available for sex trafficking has increased exponentially with the latest, sanctioned kidnapping of immigrant children at the border while others attempting to cross continue to be detained indefinitely or murdered at will.

Not to mention the sex workers who are being murdered thanks to shitty legislation that protects no one. Those living with disabilities are left to fend for themselves or die, as are the elderly. And the LGBTQIA community has had their rights whittled away one by one and women’s reproductive rights continue to be a target.

Black and brown people are fucking terrorized and worried about leaving their homes but we’re great because the military is working on the Space Force but with less science.

The United States voluntarily left the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, thereby cementing the plan to ensure that human rights are only intended for white people, mainly white men, and the administration has just rescinded protections for Haitian immigrants. So, all in all, white people are winning.

That last sentence is sarcasm, by the way. This is the kind of winning Charlie Sheen was talking about, where you make a series of fucked-up decisions and convince yourself it’s a good thing.

Yeah…That’s where we are, stewing in this “good” fucking thing.

The shit going on is intentional. Egregiously so. I’m constantly having to guard myself from the apathy and glee expressed by white people. It’s like you are finally realizing the dream of your ancestors, to continue being the worst fucking examples of humanity and wearing that shit like a crown. And you fucking KNOW what you’re doing. You KNOW and you do it or let it happen anyway.

No bullshit, I didn’t understand that prison was slavery until a few years back. I knew it was a place to avoid as best I could, but I didn’t understand the scope, destructiveness, and exploitative aspects of the institution until the past decade. I didn’t understand how people lived with slavery until I understood that I was one of those people. I let slavery happen around me and never did anything about it. I’ve lived alongside genocide my entire life and never bothered to understand it until recently. I am a bystander in the dehumanization and destruction of human beings, and the best I can do is be angry and send money because doing more is hard.

But you know. You know people with power. You know people in office. You know some police. You know some of them ICE terrorists. And no, “not all” of you know someone, but you know people who do and I expect you to do something with that knowledge.

When White People Need Us To Save Them From Themselves
theestablishment.co

I’m not even expecting much…just fucking stop lying about giving a fuck or actually give a fuck and do something. I want you either to wear your Melania “I don’t care” jacket with pride so I can know who the monsters really are, or to fucking exercise some of your goddamn privilege and DO SOMETHING.

The wonderful thing about these shitty times is that more white people are living their racist fantasies, so I don’t have to guess which ones are rooting for my demise anymore. All y’all ain’t shit till you own your place in this and do better. If you aren’t calling out this inhumane shit…if you aren’t fucking disowning your white supremacist relatives, if you aren’t exacting social, economic, and sometimes physical punishment on the people in your life cheering for or indifferent to this shit, then you are just like them. You are aiding and abetting this bullshit and you need to stop fucking lying to yourself about it.

Since I’ve started talking about oppression in many of its forms, I’ve had that shit weaponized against me, repeatedly. People I thought were my friends told me to shut up about it. White people I went to school with would speak up to tell me to shut up. I have watched my circle of acquaintances disintegrate and blow away as though Thanos had snapped his fingers and it’s all because I stopped letting people feel safe and comfortable in their bullshit lies about their privilege and the ways they enable white supremacy. I’ve cut off family and friends and myself been cut off by both because shit ain’t gonna change if we keep pretending it’s fucking fine.

You’re not good people. You are enabling global fucking harm and pretending that it’s fine.

White people created, protect, and enable a culture rife with self-delusion, so intent on amassing and maintaining a malevolently violent definition of power that they are gutting this planet and its people.

As a people, as a culture, you are willing to destroy anything that challenges your idea of power, often at your own expense. Your limited, short-sighted, wildly hedonistic, and venomous actions are astounding in their inhumanity. You have literally redefined “human” to only include those with a fucking skin mutation that literally makes the sun poisonous for you.

But you’re fucking winning. So, congratulations on openly promoting and encouraging others to engage in all the racist violence to their heart’s content. Should we survive your bullshit, I hope history remembers you accurately as the monsters who sought to rule the earth by destroying everything and everyone else on it.

Originally published at talynnkel.com.

If you like my writing, you can support me on Patreon. Right now, there are $1, $3, and $10 tiers but you can give whatever amount you want. Every tier gives you some behind the scenes content and the $10 tier lets you see work that will probably never be publicly released.