#im just a slave to capitalism and the education system so what can i do 🤩

[baeshijima]

faints

[girlwithapeach]

I needed a breather… using social apps and wasting time just scrolling endlessly without doing something productive it’s eating at me.

This is also a social app but I don’t follow many people and I just come here to write and share my thoughts, I’m not scrolling like a zombie because it’s just not the same tumblr as before. I don’t even enjoy coming here and scrolling, I literally just come here to type some words and I log out.

There’s just so much suffering I’m witnessing through my phone with the genocide of all those countries and it’s getting to me, I’m feeling numb watching it all go down. I’m proud of people protesting and boycotting and speaking up and I’ve been doing my small part in all of this but there’s just so much I can do… I even talk to my friends and family about it, I don’t educate them but I let them know what’s going on and who’s doing the atrocities in all of this…

I feel like I’m not the same person before acknowledging these problems, I was ignorant just living blindly in this world and I’m not anymore, there’s still so much I have to learn and I want to learn but at least I finally know what’s wrong with this world and its people and how we are managed with this fucking system called capitalism.

I want to focus on myself and my health and even though I won’t be sharing the posts and information about the genocide I will be reading books about it, I even want to read books about the history of my own country. This is what has lead that war into my life, I want to have the knowledge of this problems and histories. I won’t ever be ignorant again, people think politics and war doesn’t affect us but it DOES. Every single thing done in politics affects EVERYONE. That’s why it’s importan to know about what is going on and who’s making all of these decisions.

I’m just so sick and tired of living in a world where there’s no EMPATHY and COMPASSION for our fellow human beings and animals… I wish for it to be easier to do the right thing everyday but we’re slaves in this system, maybe I won’t see the destruction and end to capitalism but I truly hope the best for our future generations. And I know millions of people share the same sentiment like me.

Im so grateful for everything that I have and the people around me but we can’t be blind to what’s going on in the world…we have to keep fighting these ideals and politics against us because they just exist to benefit a group of people and not ALL people. I believe we’re in a time of change but it’s going to take a lot of time before we see changes for the better. It’s just so hard to fight something that’s been alive for almost 100 years and even more…

[cosmik-homo]

I just realized how limited my knowledge of america is so i’m compiling a list of thoughts and things i know about the American states and waiting to be educated by shocked American followers. basically im bored af ok

this is in the order i thought about them, and i do not know all 52 states (54? 51? 50?) so like. some will not be here.

California- big happy beach state with a lot of the entertainment stuff I was on vacation there once- they have big water parks and I think Disney and stuff. apart from that, like, a lot of trees.

Florida- ah no never mind this is the happy beach place with the Disney whoops. thinking of Florida just makes me think of flip flops and i dont know why.

New York- its also a state isn't it. thats why all the songs go “new york, new york”- first city name then state its in. Contains New York. liberal.

Texas- deep south, giant, tex-max food. batshit crazy and very republican, they have gns and “Don’t Mess With Texas” signs.

Georgia- also southern, i think thats where McCoy from star trek was born. they have accent and drink sweet tea and are kinda old fashioned.

Carolina- also southern, there are two of those but i dont rember their names. that’s where the civil war happend, so they used to have slaves here. i mean all of america used to have slaves but these guys really wanted to have slaves.

Nevada- a big red desert! that is where Les Vegas is.

Hawaii- islands that are a lot farther fro us mainland then i expected. aloha! unique culture, interesting eco system with coral reefs and volcanoes, and also importantly where lilo and stitch took place. Another thing that took place there is pearl harbor.

West virginia- MOUNTAIN MOMMA... The McElroy homeland, it has a lot of forests and mountains.

Virginia- I was sure up until a few weeks ago the other virgina was south virgina but apperantly its just regular virginia, idk.

Oregon- i lived here for a bit! a lot of forests and wildlife, its rains there all the time so you get used to walking in the rain. The state capital is portland and it was a nice place. aso gravity falls takes place in oregon.

New Jeresy- people seem to hate that place, but idont know why. funny accent and a lot of beachs.

Kansas- the wizard of oz! a lot of farms and corn. just a yellowy place.

Washington- Baffaling, but the city of Wshington DC is NOT RELATED to the STATE OF WASHINGTON. THEYRE NOT EVEN CLOSE. WHY.

Utah- mormons. the capital of this one is salt lake city whcich is a pretty nice sounding name, even i not a very creative one.

Iowa- sparely polpulated land where corn and satan rein supreme.

thats all the states i know stuff about, i can name like ~10 more but sue me if i know where they are or what they do.

[expfcultragreen]

Its about enclosure.

We, as collectivized animals, dont need any of societys systems (eg grid power, the medical industrial complex, cops, mass scale agriculture) to stay alive, in the bodily parameter sense--humans evolved as small-group egalitarian pastoralists, not metal alloy/plastic-organic symbiote megahive swarms--but we increasingly are trained to fear imagining alternatives (eg1 educational focus on intangibles like words and numbers, in tandem with no material survival skill instruction at all; we are not expected to learn to survive outside in the world because we are not expected to want to go outside into the world, because we havent been taught how to survive it, because we need to be inside to generate profit, so we need to be held captive and the most efficient way to do that is to deputize each of us to hold ourselves captive, and to be held captive by ourselves we must be kept infantile, uninformed, untested, inexperienced and feeling incapable; we have been taught how to survive within capitalism ({which means we know how to keep our heads down and create profit so we might later be returned a tiny portion of it as wages to pay off the state at regular intervals so it doesnt send cops to kill us for our 'negligence', our 'dereliction of duty' as taxable automata supporting whatever military expenses they refuse to itemize "for security purposes"}), which is barely surviving at all. eg2 apocalypse/collapse media as inertia-inducing capitalist pacification propaganda which, i hope im coining "paciprop" but probably not) let alone taking on the perceived risk of doing more than imagining.

We are set up to fail because if we were set up to succeed, we would leave and theyd be short slaves. Its like a bad relationship with someone who hates you but likes to use you because you let them, theyre never going to help you help yourself to move on, they need you, youre their host and theyre your parasite. Of course theyll try to lasso you with a dependency on compulsorily wifi-integrated technology, think of the 80 other lassos of similar sorts already binding you to the will of those who enjoy ownership of you. They've already got you paying to be in your home (rent or taxes), paying to heat water electrically off the grid instead of boiling it over a fire, and paying for the water--which falls out of the sky for free & slightly less full of chemicals; imagine if you had to pay for internet too before the kettle would work. Wow. Think of the auto-and-oil-and-insurance tagteam trio; most people ive known are stranded in life without (the expensive albatross of) their car because they become totally reliant on driving, to the exclusion of cheaper or faster or greener or less stressful alternatives...but almost everyone shames you for 'irresponsibly' avoiding the whole car thing as if its a valid, immortal rite of passage to get a car and youre not a full adult unless you can-and-do spend all kinds of money just to, lbr, get yourself to work on time with greater certainty, by piloting a climatecontrolled metal womb for yourself so your legs dont have to do anything like what theyre evolved to do. So even though you NEED to move your legs a lot (and everyone is getting weird sedentary lifestyle-related ailments even if they spend money to go to a gym when theyre not at work because we're even extorted for keeping ourselves in working shape as expected), we're all supposed to get a car and drive instead of getting places under our own power or via mass transit. And there are consequences lurking to suckerpunch you if you don't at least have a drivers license, even if you dont use it for driving.

Because of, its about enclosure.

Welcome to the future, where you don’t own anything and the stuff you rent stops working once your phone has no signal.

[sparrow-in-boots]

youre proud the portuguese used to be major colonizers?? what do the british have to do with south america??? im. a little lost

Okay so, I’m going to assume you’re a gringo to be asking that question, and I’m also going to take this in good faith for yours and other people’s benefit because South American history is not really a subject in other countries’ educational system to put it very charitably.

First of all, I’m absolutely not proud of the Portuguese empire’s colonial legacy. On the contrary, I’m highly critical of it and its lasting consequences in all of its past colonies, and the atrocities that they perpetuated. What I meant was that to erase the Portuguese empire’s part in the colonization of South America, the differences between the past Portuguese and Spanish colonies in Central and South America, and how those differences shaped our current geopolitical situation is to erase half of the history of the continent. When I brought them up, it was to remind that they were in fact a major power in the world before the British Empire took that role, something that is quite often overlooked or downplayed like it was in that post I reblogged. I don’t say it as a point of pride, I say it as a reminder of a historical fact, awful as it is.

And, you ask what do the British have to do with South America, and I tell you, more than you might think. 

The British had been trading with Portugal in their colonies since the 16th century when they first started to dip their toes in the transatlantic trade. They first started sailing from West Africa and then started to make stops in the northeast of Brazil, before returning to England. At first, they came for pau-brazil, a type of wood native of South America that gives a very deep and rich red dye and it was all the rage before sugar came along and became the Portuguese colony’s main export as well as other raw materials like cotton and tobacco. Of course the Portuguese cracked down on those trades eventually, and also Britain had the Sieges of Boulougne going on, so they had to give it a break for a bit. 

So guess what? Around the late 16th century, the British empire sent down fucking pirates to press on the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. Privateers but, you get the picture. You’ve heard of Francis Drake, right? 

Yeah, that guy. He and some other notable names like Edward Fenton and Thomas Cavendish were sent to explore the waters between the Atlantic and the Pacific and find ways to circumvent the fleets to make the way around the globe, going through the Strait of Magellan. You know, the southern tip of South America. Also, to steal stuff from the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Just to prove that they can and to clap back at the Spanish. And the ports of São Vicente and Santos in the southeast of current Brazil became an almost obligatory stop for English ships sailing in the south Atlantic to restock their ships for the rest of the journey. 

So the Portuguese started to get fed up with the English stopping by their colony and started to fend off the ships and arrest the sailors if they made port. So because they were pirates, they attacked the Portuguese colony. They assailed the Bay-of-All-Saints (current Bahia, Brazil) for two months, they raided and pillaged engenhos and towns on the southeast coast, and when they attacked Recife, they got so much loot from the city that they needed the help of Dutch and French ships to take it all with them. (an interesting source to dig through)

Also, where do you think our sugar went to? The engenhos (our version of plantations) sent the raw sugar to the Dutch who refined it and sold it across Europe, especially the British. Until the Dutch and the Spanish started to plant sugar cane in the Caribbean, Portugal had the sugar market pretty much cornered. That’s why the Guyanas exist and one of them have English as their main language, it was a Dutch colony and the British took control of parts of it from them, so they could trade with the native communities for prime resources, like wood, pau-brasil, native animals, cotton, tobacco, urucum (it’s another source fo red dye, google it), and so on. Guyana’s capital is called Georgetown??

Oh, shall I get to the fact that the majority of the gold you see in the interior of Buckingham Palace is from Brazil? I think I shall because, during the gold rush in Minas Gerais, Portugal was severely in debt from their wars with the Spanish and the Dutch. So much debt that what they got from exploiting their colonies, they spent it right away with industrialized goods. Goods from England. We in Brazil have an expression, “quinto dos infernos”. Literally “the Devil’s fifth”. It comes from the taxation of gold from the mines, one-fifth of what the miners extracted went to the Portuguese. To send someone to the Devil’s fifth is to tell them very emphatically to go fuck themselves. I think that explains how the people in the colonies felt about the taxes. It also caused revolts like Levante da Vila Rica and the Inconfidência Mineira, the last one being a major historical event in Brazil. So much so Minas Gerais’ state flag’s design is the same as was suggested by the rebels.

Libertas quae sera tamem is latin for “freedom albeit late”.

Oh, and you think pirates and privateers got involved just those first times? Think again! The tensions between the Spanish and British fleets in the Caribbean caused some major upheaval and even a war between the two of them, one battle affecting current Colombia, with the British attempting to siege several major ports from the Spanish. The war started cus the Spanish cracked down on illegal commerce in their colony by the British.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the British invaded the Vicoroyalty of Río de la Plata, (currently Argentina and Uruguay). The war was a good cover to attack one of France’s allies, but it wasn’t the first time the British had their eyes on the region, they’ve had previous attempts at trying to take control previously. The defeat of the British by the local populace with little to no help from the Spanish colonizers was also the last straw they needed to push for their independence.

Speaking of dwindling colonial powers, when Spanish and Portuguese ships kept failing to supply ships to meet the colony demands, it was the British who stepped in and filled the gap. After the Napoleonic Wars, the transatlantic trade basically belonged to the British, and if you’re paying attention, that greatly affected colonial and independence era South America. After Brazil’s independence from Portugal, the British were one of the new country’s main economic partner, mostly because it was their support when the royal family came to Brazil that pushed for independence. They even opened a mining company in Minas Gerais that ran for 125 years.

And these are just the things off the top of my head. The British Empire, like all the other European empires, had their fingers on many major events in Latin America as a whole as well as all over the world, but I tried to stay focused on South America. 

Colonizing powers in Europe of past and present have always had their fingers here because that’s what having colonies is. It’s exploitation and intimidation and always trying to get more and more, no matter who gets hurt or killed in the process. The plantations and engenhos were brutal, the mines were brutal, the entire system of colonization is brutal and revolting. Countless enslaved people, mostly black people, died in those places, so many even the slave trade couldn’t keep up with the demand for slave labor. It’s absolutely horrifying. And our countries have suffered and still suffer from external influences in our politics, especially by the US in more recent history, even if we keep fighting against thinly-veiled military intervention constantly. It really fucking sucks.

And you could have learned all this - and more! - if you just bothered to open a single Wikipedia article. Like, literally google “history of South America” or “Latin America-United Kingdom relations” and read. Bonus credits if you dig into the article sources and read them if available to you in English. But if reading is not your thing, there are several youtube channels out there who want to teach you stuff you don’t know and are a decent enough jumping point. Literally all I can say after all this is, educate yourself.

(I’ve leaned more on Brazillian history which is what I’m more familiar with, but if there are any fellow latines who want to correct me on something or add on to this, pls do so!)

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Issa Rae: ‘So much of the media presents blackness as fierce and flawless. Im not’

The creator of Insecure talks the dating totem pole, films obsession with slavery and the gender-race pay gap as season two begins

I dont want the stench of the current administration on this show, says Issa Rae. I dont want people to look back and be like: Oh, this was a Trump show. I want them to look back and say Insecure was an Obama show. Because it is: Obama enabled this show. The sharp, pithy, Los Angeles-set comedy, dubbed by US fashion and beauty site the Cut as the black, millennial Sex and The City, which Rae co-created, writes and stars in, first aired on HBO last autumn, exactly a month before the US election. Culturally, Obama made blackness so present, and so appreciated; people felt seen and heard; it influenced the arts, and it absolutely influenced how I see blackness, how I appreciate it, says the 32-year-old Rae. When a black president is a norm, it enables us to be, too.

Being a norm is a matter of some import to the actor and writer, who in spite of her personal allegiances had no desire to make an overtly political show. She never wanted Insecure to be, as she says with a generous eye-roll, a story about the struggle or the dramatic burdens of being black. At the heart of the series is the relationship between her on-screen iteration also named Issa, who works for an educational nonprofit called We Got Yall and raps soliloquies to herself in the mirror and her best friend Molly (Yvonne Orji), a high-flying corporate lawyer. Together, they navigate the professional and personal challenges of late-20s urban life.

I just wanted to see my friends and I reflected on television, in the same way that white people are allowed, and which nobody questions, continues Rae. Nobody watches Divorce [a HBO stablemate, starring Sarah Jessica Parker] and asks: What is the political element, what is the racial element driving this?

Watch the trailer for season two of Insecure.

But so rare is it to see what its creator describes as a show about regular black people being basic in contemporary entertainment Insecure has nonetheless been hailed as revolutionary. It wasnt always so. Growing up, Rae was an avid fan of the predominantly black US sitcoms Moesha, Girlfriends and A Different World. Then they disappeared, she says of the film and television landscape. Somewhere along the way, being white became seen as relatable, and you started to see people of colour only reflected as stereotypes or specific archetypes. So much of the media now presents blackness as being cool, or able to dance, or fierce and flawless, or just out of control; Im not any of those things.

It is a hot and swampy summer afternoon in Manhattan, and Rae is in town doing the requisite rounds of late-night talkshow appearances ahead of Insecures season two premiere. On arrival, she seems a little lethargic entirely understandable, given her promotional schedule. But once seated in a buzzy restaurant, specifically chosen because its the sort of spot that the on-screen Issa and her girlfriends would patronise, Rae immediately perks up, emanating charismatic good humour.

Born in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, Rae real name Jo-Issa Rae Diop is the third of five children, her father a Senegalese doctor, her mother a teacher from Louisiana. The rapid rise in gang violence in the city prompted Raes parents to move the family to Senegals capital, Dakar, when Rae was five years old. Her father tried to open a hospital there but things didnt work out and, three years later, they came back to the US, but to Potomac, Maryland, on the east coast, where Rae attended a predominantly white private school. When the family moved once again, this time back to LA, Rae entered a largely black and Latino school. Everybody thought I was lame and hated me, she says, matter-of-factly. It was a huge culture shock.

Part of the on-screen Issas insecurity of feeling not black enough for black people and not white enough for white people is, Rae says, something that I have been called out for by kids in my life. Ive experienced a real sense of feeling out of place. But with admirable chutzpah, she found a creative solution: I wrote a play and cast all of my bullies, and they loved it. They thought I was cool after that. She pauses, and gives a wry smile. Well, cool is a strong word. But I wasnt on their shit-list any more.

Big society … Raes character with co-worker Frieda (Lisa Joyce). Photograph: Justina Mintz/HBO

While studying at Stanford University, Rae began to notice that many of the television shows she loved, including Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld, were all-white comedies. Of course, sense of humour is relative, is subjective, but there is an assumption that black people wont find certain things about white comedies funny, she says. I got really frustrated and just wanted to start making my own stories. She conceived and directed Dorm Diaries, a mock reality show with an all-black cast, in the style of MTVs The Real World. When she posted it to Facebook, it quickly circulated, and Rae realised that she had a talent for portraying everyday black life; she has called it my epiphany moment. A few years later, she created what would be her breakthrough web series and the forerunner to Insecure, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.

A web show is one thing, of course, a mainstream television show on a high-profile cable network quite another. I ask her about the sociologist and civil rights activist WEB Duboiss concept of double consciousness, which she has referenced in the past, defined as the psychological challenge of always looking at ones self through the eyes of a white society. Does she feel that even more sharply now than before?

Absolutely. I didnt create this show for white people, I didnt create it for men; I created it, really, for my friends and family, and for their specific sense of humour, she nods. But now that we know we have an audience including HBO executives the double consciousness comes into play, because youre always wondering: How do they see what I am writing? Are they laughing at this specific joke for this particular reason? When season one aired, I had Asian women coming up to me on the street, saying: Oh my gosh, this reminds me of me and my best friend, she recalls. And thats wonderful thats what you want for a show but you are always wondering: What elements do they relate to the most?

I suggest that in future she stops fans and asks for further, more detailed feedback. She throws her head back and laughs. Yes. Excuse me, but why do you like the show? Tell me right now, please.

Boyfriend material … Jay Ellis as Lawrence in Insecure. Photograph: Justina Mintz/HBO

While Insecure may be only inadvertently political, this second season is noticeably more charged with social commentary, and examples of everyday discrimination. Through Molly, the show explores the gender pay gap, with an added issue to unpick: is she being paid less because of her gender, or her ethnicity, or both? These are questions that we constantly have to ask ourselves, as minorities, or double minorities, or triple minorities, nods Rae. In terms of the intersectionality of it all, you are constantly asking yourself: Which part of me is being discriminated against? Which part of me is being targeted? If not all parts of me.

The often-dispiriting experience of modern dating features prominently, too. At the start of this series, Issa has recently broken up from her long-term boyfriend, Lawrence (Jay Ellis), and thrown herself into the choppy waters of Tinder, Bumble and Hinge. Dating in todays digitally enabled world is rough enough but there is, Rae believes, an added dimension for her characters. Black women are at the bottom of the desire chain, of the dating totem pole; were not the trophies, she says.

In rap culture, especially, theres always an idea that once you achieve an amount of success, your trophy is the white girl on your arm. However, she asserts, thats not limited to hip-hop. Its not scientifically proven, but theres evidence, in dating apps for example, that were the last to be chosen, the least desirable. The theory is also explored in Aziz Ansaris Netflix show Master of None, which includes a scene in which one of his dates, a black woman, tells him: Compared to my white friends, I get way less activity [on app dating sites]. I also find that I rarely match with guys outside of my race.

Lawrence, meanwhile, is also experiencing discrimination, albeit in a different form. In one scene spoiler alert! he is picked up by two non-black girls at a grocery store, who lure him to their apartment, where they proceed to seduce him. Their fetishisation of his blackness has echoes of Get Out, Jordan Peeles racism-thriller which triumphed at the box office earlier this year.

That was based on a real-life situation that one of our writers shared, says Rae of the uncomfortable tryst. It didnt end well, which had nothing to do with his blackness, but we thought: How can we make this story apply to fit our show? Every show can have a threesome story gone awry, but how can we make it unique for Insecure?

Off the clock … Rae in New York last month. Photograph: Amy Sussman/Invision/AP

There is a show-within-the-show too, an antebellum-era television drama that several of Insecures characters are glued to. Last year, our show-within-a-show was Conjugal Visits, which was a comment on the trash TV that consumes us all. Setting it in a prison a system which, in this country, incarcerates mainly black and Latino people and making that entertainment, was definitely meta-commentary, nods Rae.

This seasons skewering of popular culture is no less pointed. Theres [been] such an obsession with depicting slavery that the last few years, I have been kind of slaved-out, she sighs. So we thought it would be funny to have the characters obsessed with this new slave interracial drama. A guest-starring role for Sterling K Brown, who won an Emmy for his portrayal of prosecutor Christopher Darden in The People Vs OJ Simpson, ups that meta ante even further, but Rae is quick to assure me that this wasnt a casting that she chased down. No! We actually have an anti-celebrity policy on the show, she insists. We were doing something together for the Independent Spirit awards, and he was, like: I love your show, if you ever want to cast me The musician Syd, another self-proclaimed fan of the show, also makes a brief cameo.

Although Rae resists comparisons between Insecure and Girls and of herself to its creator Lena Dunham: I get the inclination to compare us because were both young women, but the stories were telling couldnt be more different, she says the two share a deliciously frank depiction of female sexuality. Broken Pussy, one of Issas raps, became something of a refrain in season one, after she speculates that Mollys run of bad luck with men might be the result of a defective filtering system.

My friend and I have a thing where we talk in, um, pussy sounds, Rae laughs. I think that most women know whether they want to sleep with a guy or not within the first five minutes of meeting him, and so we speak in Marge Simpson voices about whether or not a guy could get it. She demonstrates. If its a yes, well say: My pussy was like: [Perky, eager voice] Mm-hm, girl. Or, My pussy was like, [Low, negative tones]: Mm-mm. So, the conversation about Molly feeling like she wasnt attracting the right type of guys was me suggesting her pussy might actually be broken.

What did her mother make of this particular piece of dialogue? She only saw it at the screening! Rae laughs. She pulled me aside afterwards and was, like: That mouth, were going to wash it out but, good job.

Insecure continues on Thursday 10 August, 10.35pm, Sky Atlantic

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Issa Rae: ‘So much of the media presents blackness as fierce and flawless. Im not’

The creator of Insecure talks the dating totem pole, films obsession with slavery and the gender-race pay gap as season two begins

I dont want the stench of the current administration on this show, says Issa Rae. I dont want people to look back and be like: Oh, this was a Trump show. I want them to look back and say Insecure was an Obama show. Because it is: Obama enabled this show. The sharp, pithy, Los Angeles-set comedy, dubbed by US fashion and beauty site the Cut as the black, millennial Sex and The City, which Rae co-created, writes and stars in, first aired on HBO last autumn, exactly a month before the US election. Culturally, Obama made blackness so present, and so appreciated; people felt seen and heard; it influenced the arts, and it absolutely influenced how I see blackness, how I appreciate it, says the 32-year-old Rae. When a black president is a norm, it enables us to be, too.

Being a norm is a matter of some import to the actor and writer, who in spite of her personal allegiances had no desire to make an overtly political show. She never wanted Insecure to be, as she says with a generous eye-roll, a story about the struggle or the dramatic burdens of being black. At the heart of the series is the relationship between her on-screen iteration also named Issa, who works for an educational nonprofit called We Got Yall and raps soliloquies to herself in the mirror and her best friend Molly (Yvonne Orji), a high-flying corporate lawyer. Together, they navigate the professional and personal challenges of late-20s urban life.

I just wanted to see my friends and I reflected on television, in the same way that white people are allowed, and which nobody questions, continues Rae. Nobody watches Divorce [a HBO stablemate, starring Sarah Jessica Parker] and asks: What is the political element, what is the racial element driving this?

Watch the trailer for season two of Insecure.

But so rare is it to see what its creator describes as a show about regular black people being basic in contemporary entertainment Insecure has nonetheless been hailed as revolutionary. It wasnt always so. Growing up, Rae was an avid fan of the predominantly black US sitcoms Moesha, Girlfriends and A Different World. Then they disappeared, she says of the film and television landscape. Somewhere along the way, being white became seen as relatable, and you started to see people of colour only reflected as stereotypes or specific archetypes. So much of the media now presents blackness as being cool, or able to dance, or fierce and flawless, or just out of control; Im not any of those things.

It is a hot and swampy summer afternoon in Manhattan, and Rae is in town doing the requisite rounds of late-night talkshow appearances ahead of Insecures season two premiere. On arrival, she seems a little lethargic entirely understandable, given her promotional schedule. But once seated in a buzzy restaurant, specifically chosen because its the sort of spot that the on-screen Issa and her girlfriends would patronise, Rae immediately perks up, emanating charismatic good humour.

Born in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, Rae real name Jo-Issa Rae Diop is the third of five children, her father a Senegalese doctor, her mother a teacher from Louisiana. The rapid rise in gang violence in the city prompted Raes parents to move the family to Senegals capital, Dakar, when Rae was five years old. Her father tried to open a hospital there but things didnt work out and, three years later, they came back to the US, but to Potomac, Maryland, on the east coast, where Rae attended a predominantly white private school. When the family moved once again, this time back to LA, Rae entered a largely black and Latino school. Everybody thought I was lame and hated me, she says, matter-of-factly. It was a huge culture shock.

Part of the on-screen Issas insecurity of feeling not black enough for black people and not white enough for white people is, Rae says, something that I have been called out for by kids in my life. Ive experienced a real sense of feeling out of place. But with admirable chutzpah, she found a creative solution: I wrote a play and cast all of my bullies, and they loved it. They thought I was cool after that. She pauses, and gives a wry smile. Well, cool is a strong word. But I wasnt on their shit-list any more.

Big society … Raes character with co-worker Frieda (Lisa Joyce). Photograph: Justina Mintz/HBO

While studying at Stanford University, Rae began to notice that many of the television shows she loved, including Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld, were all-white comedies. Of course, sense of humour is relative, is subjective, but there is an assumption that black people wont find certain things about white comedies funny, she says. I got really frustrated and just wanted to start making my own stories. She conceived and directed Dorm Diaries, a mock reality show with an all-black cast, in the style of MTVs The Real World. When she posted it to Facebook, it quickly circulated, and Rae realised that she had a talent for portraying everyday black life; she has called it my epiphany moment. A few years later, she created what would be her breakthrough web series and the forerunner to Insecure, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.

A web show is one thing, of course, a mainstream television show on a high-profile cable network quite another. I ask her about the sociologist and civil rights activist WEB Duboiss concept of double consciousness, which she has referenced in the past, defined as the psychological challenge of always looking at ones self through the eyes of a white society. Does she feel that even more sharply now than before?

Absolutely. I didnt create this show for white people, I didnt create it for men; I created it, really, for my friends and family, and for their specific sense of humour, she nods. But now that we know we have an audience including HBO executives the double consciousness comes into play, because youre always wondering: How do they see what I am writing? Are they laughing at this specific joke for this particular reason? When season one aired, I had Asian women coming up to me on the street, saying: Oh my gosh, this reminds me of me and my best friend, she recalls. And thats wonderful thats what you want for a show but you are always wondering: What elements do they relate to the most?

I suggest that in future she stops fans and asks for further, more detailed feedback. She throws her head back and laughs. Yes. Excuse me, but why do you like the show? Tell me right now, please.

Boyfriend material … Jay Ellis as Lawrence in Insecure. Photograph: Justina Mintz/HBO

While Insecure may be only inadvertently political, this second season is noticeably more charged with social commentary, and examples of everyday discrimination. Through Molly, the show explores the gender pay gap, with an added issue to unpick: is she being paid less because of her gender, or her ethnicity, or both? These are questions that we constantly have to ask ourselves, as minorities, or double minorities, or triple minorities, nods Rae. In terms of the intersectionality of it all, you are constantly asking yourself: Which part of me is being discriminated against? Which part of me is being targeted? If not all parts of me.

The often-dispiriting experience of modern dating features prominently, too. At the start of this series, Issa has recently broken up from her long-term boyfriend, Lawrence (Jay Ellis), and thrown herself into the choppy waters of Tinder, Bumble and Hinge. Dating in todays digitally enabled world is rough enough but there is, Rae believes, an added dimension for her characters. Black women are at the bottom of the desire chain, of the dating totem pole; were not the trophies, she says.

In rap culture, especially, theres always an idea that once you achieve an amount of success, your trophy is the white girl on your arm. However, she asserts, thats not limited to hip-hop. Its not scientifically proven, but theres evidence, in dating apps for example, that were the last to be chosen, the least desirable. The theory is also explored in Aziz Ansaris Netflix show Master of None, which includes a scene in which one of his dates, a black woman, tells him: Compared to my white friends, I get way less activity [on app dating sites]. I also find that I rarely match with guys outside of my race.

Lawrence, meanwhile, is also experiencing discrimination, albeit in a different form. In one scene spoiler alert! he is picked up by two non-black girls at a grocery store, who lure him to their apartment, where they proceed to seduce him. Their fetishisation of his blackness has echoes of Get Out, Jordan Peeles racism-thriller which triumphed at the box office earlier this year.

That was based on a real-life situation that one of our writers shared, says Rae of the uncomfortable tryst. It didnt end well, which had nothing to do with his blackness, but we thought: How can we make this story apply to fit our show? Every show can have a threesome story gone awry, but how can we make it unique for Insecure?

Off the clock … Rae in New York last month. Photograph: Amy Sussman/Invision/AP

There is a show-within-the-show too, an antebellum-era television drama that several of Insecures characters are glued to. Last year, our show-within-a-show was Conjugal Visits, which was a comment on the trash TV that consumes us all. Setting it in a prison a system which, in this country, incarcerates mainly black and Latino people and making that entertainment, was definitely meta-commentary, nods Rae.

This seasons skewering of popular culture is no less pointed. Theres [been] such an obsession with depicting slavery that the last few years, I have been kind of slaved-out, she sighs. So we thought it would be funny to have the characters obsessed with this new slave interracial drama. A guest-starring role for Sterling K Brown, who won an Emmy for his portrayal of prosecutor Christopher Darden in The People Vs OJ Simpson, ups that meta ante even further, but Rae is quick to assure me that this wasnt a casting that she chased down. No! We actually have an anti-celebrity policy on the show, she insists. We were doing something together for the Independent Spirit awards, and he was, like: I love your show, if you ever want to cast me The musician Syd, another self-proclaimed fan of the show, also makes a brief cameo.

Although Rae resists comparisons between Insecure and Girls and of herself to its creator Lena Dunham: I get the inclination to compare us because were both young women, but the stories were telling couldnt be more different, she says the two share a deliciously frank depiction of female sexuality. Broken Pussy, one of Issas raps, became something of a refrain in season one, after she speculates that Mollys run of bad luck with men might be the result of a defective filtering system.

My friend and I have a thing where we talk in, um, pussy sounds, Rae laughs. I think that most women know whether they want to sleep with a guy or not within the first five minutes of meeting him, and so we speak in Marge Simpson voices about whether or not a guy could get it. She demonstrates. If its a yes, well say: My pussy was like: [Perky, eager voice] Mm-hm, girl. Or, My pussy was like, [Low, negative tones]: Mm-mm. So, the conversation about Molly feeling like she wasnt attracting the right type of guys was me suggesting her pussy might actually be broken.

What did her mother make of this particular piece of dialogue? She only saw it at the screening! Rae laughs. She pulled me aside afterwards and was, like: That mouth, were going to wash it out but, good job.

Insecure continues on Thursday 10 August, 10.35pm, Sky Atlantic

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