In “This Time It’s Personal,” an essay from Tajja Isen’s debut collection, Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service, the author describes a certain reaction she got when discussing the project of her book. Her aim is to call out the disconnect between the fair, racially just society we claim to want and the society our actions actually cultivate, and it was this premise, she writes, that left some people “nervously joking about the cameos they’d make in [the] book.”

Lest it’s not apparent from the quote’s content, the nervous jokers Isen, a Black writer, is referring to are white people. And as a white person myself, I’m going to go out on a pretty sturdy limb and assume it was usually well-meaning white people, ones who’d feel genuine shame about appearing in what I guess they thought was Isen’s Simon and Schuster–approved burn book. 

I don’t know if those people understood their joking response is itself a form of lip service. I’m sure Isen knows it, since it closely mirrors the ubiquitous privilege disclaimers her book’s title essay critiques: “Privilege disclaimers are like magic tricks. … You can’t criticize me for my power”—or make me look bad by writing about the racist stuff I did—“the logic goes, because I admitted to it already.”

Either way, those people can get over themselves because this book isn’t about them.

Throughout nine essays, Isen blends personal narrative with research, cultural criticism, and wit to tackle topics including the legal system, the publishing industry, America’s evolving definition of diversity, and the myth of Canadian equity and greatness. She examines how societal and systematic failures prevent us from solving the injustice that surrounds us, and how in our efforts to look like we’re fixing things, we often overestimate our ability—or desire—to do so.

The book’s first essay, “Hearing Voices,” takes on race and character authenticity in cartoons. Isen worked as a voice actress for two decades, giving her a front-row seat to the industry’s problems. Of her childhood audition experiences she writes, 

I’d stand on the little taped X, emote like I was gunning for the Emmy, and hear as if on cue, “Could you do that a little more street?” Casting directors tossed off the phrase as casually as asking me to play it more natural or desperate or sexy. They never modeled or explained what they meant by it because, while that would have been helpful, it also would have been a human rights violation. But this feedback—if you can call it that—was a beat-cop sentiment buried in a polite liberal ask. It assumed I was fluent in white fantasies of how Black people really are.

The essay also confronts the moment of reckoning in 2020 when white people voicing non-white cartoon characters decided that wasn’t such a good look. They stepped down from their roles, proclaiming characters of color should be voiced by actors of color. And I remember at the time, I thought this mantra was good. Isen, however, has a different take. Because if actors could only voice cartoons that match their race, she writes, then “the whole wide, rippling pool of Black talent [was left] competing for all two of the roles the creative team happened to design and script accordingly.” And who was writing those two roles for Black voice actors? The same people who told a younger Isen to be “a little more street,” because of course the reckoning didn’t go any further up the industry food chain than its actors.

Isen summarizes the cartoon world’s botched attempt at problem solving with a perfect thesis for the whole book: “This is what you wanted, right? No. That is not what I meant at all.”

In “What Do We Want and When Do We Want It?” Isen discusses the genre of the demand as a vehicle for change. The essay tackles everything from civil rights leader James Forman’s “Black Manifesto”—which in 1969 demanded $500 million in reparations from white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues to address their role in racial injustice—to Frances McDormand’s 2018 Oscars acceptance speech where she demanded actors utilize inclusion riders to make film sets more diverse.

The nuanced, far-reaching essay is far from a rejection of the demand’s usefulness, a point I want to make clear. But it does frequently return to the genre’s limitations. Because, if you can believe it, white churches and synagogues in 1969 did not cough up $500 million, a sum that worked out to just $15 for every Black American. Instead, a response from the Executive Council for the Episcopal Church promised to support civil rights “in word and action, as well as with money”—emphasis Isen’s. (“[L]ove thy neighbor, but make it budget,” Isen quips.) And despite the applause McDormand’s speech inspired, afterward, Isen says, “the uptake of inclusion riders was predictably spotty.”

The reason this failure is predictable is because a demand almost always asks those comfortable with the status quo to change it, “[putting] the onus for transforming the system in the hands of a few well-meaning white people, and then only if they happen to feel like it,” Isen explains.

And besides, it’s just too easy for society to meet a demand’s barest minimums—We cheered when McDormand mentioned inclusion riders! Yay us!—reflexively claiming the moral high ground of, This is what you wanted, right? When, of course, the answer is no. Not at all.     

Throughout the book, Isen finds naïve blind spots and outright bad-faith behavior in so many of our attempts to be good. She critiques a world that doesn’t celebrate Black writers’ creativity or craft but instead “barely [talks] about the books beyond how important it was for us to talk about them and how good we were for doing it”; a legal system that prioritizes racial neutrality, a mindset that resulted in law students at the University of Texas being asked in 2018 to argue the pro-segregation side of Brown v. Board of Education; and corporations, like Starbucks, which donated $1 million to fight bias and racism in 2020 while simultaneously telling employees they couldn’t wear anything that mentioned Black Lives Matter.

In short, Isen makes plain how we’re relentlessly committed to eradicating injustice—so long as it doesn’t hurt someone’s bottom line. So long as it doesn’t make anyone feel too bad. So long as we don’t have to change things too much. So long as we don’t have to do very much at all. But progress, equality, equity, change: all of it requires work. All of it is going to cost somebody something. And until we accept this, our “[fluency] in the language of social justice,” as Isen terms it, will only ever be lip service. 

“This Time It’s Personal,” the essay I mentioned at the start, is broadly focused on the personal essay in the internet era. Isen explains how this female-dominated form previously consisted of clickbait like xoJane’s “It Happened to Me: My Gynecologist Found a Ball of Cat Hair in My Vagina,” whereas now it serves clickbait with a side of social justice—see, Cosmo’s “What It’s like to Be Biracial in the Age of Black Lives Matter.” (“[L]ater retitled but the cache remembers,” Isen writes.)

Isen dissects the layers of the personal essay, discussing how it can successfully make the personal political, how it provides space for women of color and Black women specifically to share their stories, but also how it can pigeonhole the stories of non-white women, creating a market where white people only become interested when people of color expose their trauma.

Compounding this problem is how white audiences often respond to these stories: we don’t take action; we take to social media. “Expressing an opinion on Twitter, or retweeting an essay on the struggle of being a Black woman, becomes a stand-in for actually doing anything to change the systems that give rise to it,” Isen writes. “You don’t have to worry about transforming social conditions for Black women if you can just pick one voice and amplify it ad infinitum.”

Speaking of actionless amplification, Juneteenth. 

Juneteenth, as most Black people in my life have known forever and as a whole lot of white people learned last year, commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. In 2021, it became a federal holiday, so this past June, while I was reading Isen’s book, many Americans observed it for the first time. On that day, Steven Pargett tweeted, “The white folks that work at the front desk at WeWork are off today to observe the holiday. The Black people that do all the custodial and cleaning services in here working. Happy Juneteenth!” 

The tweet was all over my timeline. And every time I saw it, I thought about Isen’s book. About meaningless gestures. About how instead of making Juneteenth a federal holiday, we could try to do something about Black individuals being killed by police, about white families having a net worth ten times that of Black families, about schools disproportionately disciplining Black students. Maybe addressing any of that would be more useful than making Juneteenth a federal holiday. Maybe deciding Juneteenth should be everyone’s thing was never a very useful idea to begin with, always only lip service.

As of this writing, that tweet has been retweeted nearly eighteen thousand times. I’m one of those retweets. But if you’ve been reading closely, you probably already figured that out.

…That was what you wanted, right? 

(No. That wasn’t it at all.)