[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. When Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Darrin Bell was a young kid growing up in California, he didn't quite understand why his mom wouldn't let him have a water gun like some of the other kids in the neighborhood. His was bright green, and Darrin's mother explained to her son that it had to be fake-looking because he was a young Black child, and too many people in the world still view young Black boys as dangerous. That's one facet of what is known as The Talk.

Young Darrin decides not to listen to his mom and takes his water gun out around the neighborhood, leading to a terrifying encounter with a police officer. A variation on the theme plays over and over again in his life. People seeing a skin color first and making the worst assumptions that he's plagiarized a paper or that he stole something. Darrin chronicles his journey as a high-achieving and sensitive person trying to make a name for himself as an artist in the new graphic memoir, The Talk.

In a starred review of the book, Kirkus writes, "Bell's memoir is a triumph. A beautifully drawn book, rich with insight, humor, and hard-won knowledge." Darrin Bell won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, the first Black artist to do so. He's the cartoonist behind two syndicated comic strips: Rudy Park and Candorville. He's also a contributing cartoonist for the New Yorker. His graphic memoir of The Talk is out now. Darrin, nice to meet you.

Darrin Bell: It's great to be here. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned at one point in the book that it was your mom who taught you how to draw, and she obviously features really prominently in this book and in your life. What memories do you have of art and your mom?

Darrin Bell: My mom, she was a natural-born artist but she also took art classes. She wanted to be a professional but she wasn't able to. She had to stay home and take care of us. She taught me every technique she knew. When I was three, she taught me how to use perspectives. She taught me how to draw while looking at a figure without looking at the paper. She taught me how to draw entire scenes and pictures without lifting the pencil once from the paper. There were all sorts of techniques that she taught me that I didn't understand why she was teaching me, but I found myself coming back and using them so often during my career.

Alison Stewart: Why didn't you listen to your mom, the smart lady, [laughter] when she told you don't play with your water gun out in public?

Darrin Bell: Well, because I was six years old and I knew everything, and she was old and out of touch. She was born in the '40s when TV was in black and white. I didn't think she had any wisdom to share with me in 1981.

Alison Stewart: When she sat down and really tried to explain to you about this water gun and perception, do you remember what you were initially thinking?

Darrin Bell: Yes. I was just watching her mouth move and waiting for it to stop basically, [laughter] so I could go play with my gun. I remember what she was telling me, but it made absolutely no sense to me. It just sounded like a bunch of paranoia, and I didn't want to hear it. I just wanted to have fun.

Alison Stewart: When did it make sense to you what your mother was trying to tell you?

Darrin Bell: It made sense to me about an hour or two later when I snuck out of the house. I was going through the neighborhood shooting everything in sight. Benches, stop signs, pretending that they were stormtroopers, and I was Luke Skywalker escaping from the Death Star. Then I knelt down to refill my water gun in a puddle, and I heard somebody say, "Drop the weapon." I looked up and it was a police officer.

At first, I thought he was just playing with me, but the look on his face told me it was deadly serious, and I was just terrified and I froze. Everything my mom had told me just a couple of hours earlier came rushing back to me, and I felt like my life was at risk. I just knelt down and closed my eyes and wished he would go away, and eventually he did.

Alison Stewart: The way that you present this in the book, it's interesting throughout the book where you choose to use color and where you choose to use black and white. The gun is very green, the police lights are red. I noticed a lot of the toys are in color, and then the things that are dangerous and frightening are also in color. Tell us a little bit about your color choice and what you hope the viewer takes away from your color choice.

Darrin Bell: The color represents what stood out to me the most when I was a kid; what was the most real to me. Escapism and escaping into fantasy. When you're a kid, your imagination is more real than the actual real world around you, but so are dangers. So are dogs that might rip your face off or police officers' sirens when they're directed at you. These are things that are seared into your memory in vivid color, and that's what I was trying to do with the book.

Alison Stewart: I should point out that the gun incident is actually not the first story in the book. The first thing you introduce us to is a neighbor's dog that is really scaring you as a kid. Why did you want to introduce the book that way?

Darrin Bell: Well, that was the first moment that was seared into my mind when I was confronted by the two Dobermans that used to roam through our neighborhood. I felt like it was an appropriate analogy because everybody else seemed to not mind these Dobermans. They thought, "Well, if you just don't bother them, or if you submit and reach out your hand and let them sniff it, they won't kill you," but I knew better. I knew that these are animals, and there's a possibility that they will. 99% of the time you run into stray mean-looking dogs, they're not going to do anything to you, but there's that 1% of the time where they might, and it might be the last time. I felt--

Alison Stewart: My guest is Darrin-- Oh, please go ahead.

Darrin Bell: I felt like that was that was an appropriate metaphor for the entire experience of growing up Black in America. Most of the people you encounter don't mean you harm. Most people want to see you succeed. Most people are good. But there's this percentage that will find themselves in a position of power over you, and they're going to want to abuse it. You have to be aware that that's going to happen and you have to be prepared for it.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Darrin Bell. The name of the memoir is The Talk. In the memoir, there are various scenarios where there is a person who is in a position of power, and several of them, especially teachers, which is the one that gets at my heart. That the educators are coming at you regularly with backhanded compliments like, "You're one of the good ones." There's a teacher who suggests you plagiarized a paper. There's one scene that is like a drug-- It's like one of those "Don't let this happen to you, kids," drug moments. They're like, "Who will play the drug dealer?" and you just know they're going to ask you. [laughter] Did this really happen? That your classmate was Mayim Bialik?

Darrin Bell: Yes, she was my classmate. She sat across from me for a few years.

Alison Stewart: She stood up. She did it.

Darrin Bell: Yes. It was after another incident where a security guard had profiled me for something that another kid had done. A few days later we were in class and the D.A.R.E. program was going on. I told my friend when they get to the dope dealer they were going to ask me to stand up and play him, and sure enough the cop did. I think Mayim might have overheard the conversation I'd been having, or maybe she just saw the look on my face, and she came to my rescue and she stood up and volunteered to play the dope dealer. She got me off the hook.

Alison Stewart: It seems like your mom - which is interesting; your mom's white - talked to you a lot more about race than your father did. Do you have an understanding of why that was?

Darrin Bell: I think it was much harder for my father to do it. For my mom, she had witnessed it. She had gone through the civil rights era. She had witnessed discrimination against my father. She had gone through discrimination as part of an interracial couple, but she was not a Black man, and she didn't grow up Black. I don't think she had internalized any of the trauma involved with this scenario. To her, it was a little bit more academic, and she was able to just impart it as if she was imparting knowledge. Like teaching me to tie my shoes.

My father, I think he felt it so deeply that he just didn't want to talk about it. He wanted to just pretend that it didn't exist. That if you just didn't think about it, then it couldn't hurt you. He never spoke about racism at all until pretty late in life.

Alison Stewart: Something that's interesting in the book is we're going with you as you live your life. You're a Gen Xer, so there are certain things that have happened. There's the Challenger explosion. There's the depiction of the police beating of Rodney King. When you are depicting and drawing and creating these events that actually happened, how do you think about accuracy? How do you think about your creative practice?

Darrin Bell: The only not-to-accuracy that I had to do was I had to double-check dates to make sure that things actually happened when I remembered them happening. The way I deal with it in the book is I deal mostly with my response with how I felt and with how people around me felt and reacted to it. All I had to basically do was close my eyes and think back and try to relive it and try to experience it and employ that lesson that my mom taught me how to draw without looking at the paper. Sometimes I drew with my eyes closed. Then I opened it and I saw that I had captured what I was trying to capture.

Alison Stewart: You can draw with your eyes closed?

Darrin Bell: I can. [chuckles]. Thank you, Mom.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: That's amazing. That's so interesting. Do you see it when your eyes are closed? Do you see it in your mind's eye? Or is it just that it's your hand knows where to go? I'm fascinated by this idea that you draw with your eyes closed.

Darrin Bell: I sort of feel like my hand is doing the thinking. I just let my hand move, and I open my eyes and there's the picture.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Darrin Bell. The name of the memoir is The Talk. You write about your biracial identity and how it affected you growing up. This is a passage from your time in high school. "I don't want darker-skinned kids calling me a poser. Same reason I don't wear A Tribe Called Quest and everyone else is wearing. Overnight flashy gold chains all across America vanish, replaced by the medallions. It feels like a movement, like pride. I want to be a part of that, but am I? Am I even Black?" When was the first time that you felt comfortable saying, "Yes, I'm a Black man in America"?

Darrin Bell: I think it was when the teacher accused me of plagiarism. I realized at that moment that the reason I didn't feel comfortable saying it all these years was because I knew what would come with it. I had internalized some of my father's avoidance of the issue. I thought that there's nothing I could do about racism, but maybe if I just believe that race is just a social construct, that it's not real, and you're not white, I'm not Black, they're not anything, we're just Americans basically, then I could avoid what was coming. Then I found out in college I can't avoid it, and I felt ashamed for even trying.

Alison Stewart: It seems like it was offering you a false sense of security perhaps, for a time.

Darrin Bell: It was. That false sense of security can last mere days or it could last decades, but sooner or later someone's going to slap you in the face with reality and tell you that you can't really escape what comes with who you are.

Alison Stewart: You've made certain cartoons about the end of affirmative action. You tell a story in the book and you draw about a police officer questioning your identity as a Berkeley student, going as far as to say, "You were lucky you got into school before Prop 209," which ended affirmative action in California. What would you want to add to the conversation and the discourse around affirmative action? Something that you haven't heard discussed around it.

Darrin Bell: I've heard white people complain my whole life about Black people not working hard enough, not trying hard enough, and not aspiring to be highly educated, not valuing education. I haven't heard them acknowledged that one of the main reasons people choose to be educated is because their parents went to college. I think the problem is people love to complain, but they don't want to do anything to fix the situation. One of the benefits of affirmative action was it created a whole generation of Black people who made it into higher education. Not just college, but to elite colleges where they could get world-class educations. Where they could make connections.

Where their kids can grow up knowing "My dad went to Harvard. My dad went to Berkeley. I'm going to do the same thing." It's the inspiration it provides to the younger generations of knowing that their parents did this and that their parents earned it. Because affirmative action, contrary to what a lot of people think, is not letting in unqualified people. You have to be qualified. They choose from qualified people and it's built upon that.

I think what people really need to ask themselves is do they just want to keep complaining or do they want to fix the problem? The Supreme Court just decided that they just want to keep complaining, but we can't just let that be the last word.

Alison Stewart: I was curious about, is there something particular to the kind of racism you experienced in Northern California? Because you think of Berkeley, the jokingly called Berserkeley, [chuckles] you think of it as being a place where people are open-minded and anything goes, but it sounds like that might be sometimes.

Darrin Bell: Yes. Berkeley, it's one of those places where there's just as much discrimination as there is elsewhere, but people don't believe that they're doing it and they won't admit it. They'll gaslight you day in and day out, and tell you how they're actually such good allies and you're just imagining it. It's a little bit more insidious in a place like this.

Alison Stewart: Were there any parts of the personal things that happened to you? Some of these are really about big-picture issues, and then some of the things you write about are falling in love and dating someone else's girl, which you didn't know about. [laughs] Then having that real sense of love and lust when those intertwined for the first time. How did you decide how personal to get?

Darrin Bell: I just wanted to tell a story and not worry whether I was divulging too much information. I just wanted the story to be raw and honest. As I was writing the book I wrote about whatever came to mind about those periods in my life. I figured in the process of editing it we would cut out whatever was not necessary. There was plenty of personal stuff that we cut out. Not because it was too personal, just because it wasn't necessary to tell the story. Everything that's left, I felt added something. Even if I couldn't put my finger on why we kept it - I'll leave that for the reader to the side - it just felt right to keep those stories in.

Alison Stewart: How and when did you decide was the right time to have the talk with your own kids?

Darrin Bell: My wife and I, Makeda, we had gone to the opening of the African American History Museum in DC. Our son at the time was, I think, three or four years old, and we talked about it as we were walking through the museum. When are we going to tell him about it? When are we going to bring him here? We came up with an arbitrary age which sounded good to us. We thought maybe 10 or 11, but real life intervened. We went home, a few years later the pandemic happened, and then George Floyd was murdered and the summer protests began.

Our son, who was six years old at the time, we were having dinner, and one day he just looked up at us and said, "Who's George Floyd?" We both looked at each other and realized we did not want to wallpaper over this or tell him, "We'll tell you when you're older." I think we both realized at that moment that the proper age to tell your child is when they ask about it.

Alison Stewart: We just got a tweet from somebody who said, "Loving this interview with Darrin Bell Art. Can you post a link to the book?" We sure will. We'll also do it on our Instagram as well. The name of the book is The Talk. My guest has been Darrin Bell. Darrin, thank you so much for being with us.

Darrin Bell: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.