Gold Digging When The Game Is Rigged

Does the tragic mulatto get to dig for old white guys' money? Comments on a theme, Episode 2, CLIPPED

When select members of the British upper class crowned Meghan Markle as a certified gold digger, I laughed. They had done the same to the lovely Princess Catherine, sticking their noses up in box stands at the horse races, leaving the untitled Kate and her sister to whisper amongst themselves. No matter that the girls had parents who were by all accounts, honest millionaires and not recipients of wealth primarily stolen from enslaved colonies. They were climbers, which to those British people meant recent climbers, not past climbers such as themselves.

But it was when a contingency of Americans, no stranger to the democratic royalty of fame and fame chasing, declared her a gold digger too I was disappointed. What a waste of chastisement! Critique the former Duchess for her interview inconsistencies, the complete fabrication of not knowing who the prince was, and for misleading the American people on the title drama. Criticize the absolute disaster of a career in The Firm those two became.

But what made Meghan Markle a wretch for fixing her cap (as they used to say) on a man of means and privilege? Is that NOT what mothers and daughters have wanted for their own since the beginning of time?

When my mother and aunt were in our local grocery store, they saw a nice sale on eggs. As they started gathering some eggs, the manager came up waving his arms to tell them that this sale and these eggs were for “The Community”. We have laughed about The Community ever since. For one, I don’t know when Walgreens became the kind of posh members-only store for egg purchases, but I do know that this man presiding over a Walgreens in a wealthy small town positioned next to a neighborhood of immigrants thought the eggs were too good for supposed riff-raff. Never mind that those immigrants were the ones who kept the town stores and centers staffed, cleaned and ready to go. Or who owned the businesses that kept the lawns green and watered? The point was the eggs were too good for anyone else and he was going to scare off the undeserving to protect The Community.

When episode 2 of CLIPPED opens on the butt of V Stiviano’s cherry red Ferrari, we are reminded of how in the game of trying to get Rich White People Money, the players have changed but the game has not.

V is no longer helping herself to a private buffet for her boss billionaire Don Sterling. She is screeching her order into a greasy fast food audio box and dealing with the normal people honking at her and the normal rats scurrying beneath her car.

V is here because, at this point in our story, Don’s wife who built this empire with him is suing her for the gifts Don gave her. After all, lo- the money spent on them is community property.

One of the inconsistencies of women like Shelly, Don’s wife, is made very bare in this episode. Shelly is right to not want some young woman to sniff around her husband and take money off his hands. Shelly ( and her racist friends) however are not simply disgusted by Don’s continual use of paying for female attention. They are irritated by the kind of female attention that plots and plans like them. “That mixed race girl” and “That thing” are not supposed to jostle or compete with them for the bill of Wife or Primary Spender. Those “kinds” are supposed to want less and be impressed with less.

In the past, entry to the game to financially position yourself as a wife of a wealthy man had entry rules. Your religion, your current class, your pedigree, your nationality, your family history, and your race could knock you out of the running from the get. Or, it could make you the topic of derision and the target of whispers that would trail you till you spent your new fortune to the last cent.

But the players have changed. Social media and the Internet of Business and things have somewhat dented the gates and accelerated the speed at which new money can act or pass like old money. It has made new money care less about old money, to a certain degree, and created a rising class that flouts the care pretense of the past and cuts straight to the chase. The person with the most attention is valued or seen as influential, as opposed to the quiet anonymity of generations who circle one old pot of gold.

V’s mistake was thinking that because entry into a cutthroat world was easy for her, living in it would be too. As if her ambition and dreams would be as valued by these people as their own. What V forgot is she was always a product to Don. And while Don and Shelly were dead wrong about V, the culture they operated within was always going to back them. A straight-up surprise to V in her Ferrari reading her newly served lawsuit. No one was going to look at her the way she saw herself, the future Mrs. Sterling who was a delicate tan girl or a Latina woman. They saw her as a just passable Black, a tragic Mulatto who would fret across the stage and then exit when the real story was ready to begin again. Old Rich White Men, like eggs, are for The Community, not commonors.

V, who insists in this episode she is not Black, who had decided like Meghan Markle, to divorce her experience from the context that created it until it was too painful to deny otherwise, is firmly put in her place in this episode. A place she didn’t see coming and she didn’t think she fit in because she assumed herself in the caste system to be above the others. This is the danger of going color blind in an economy that grew out of a racial and class caste system. Class still matters. The story of who you are and where you came from carries with it a social currency that either clears the bank or doesn’t. And the answer isn’t to play the game and cry foul when it ultimately does exactly what it was designed to do.

The idea that we can make it to the top and then the weights of the context in which we live will magically not apply to us is in some ways the definition of magical thinking. It is not, as some try to say, the cynical play of squirrels trying to get a nut. It is ultimately a fantasy as strong as the fairy tale Meghan tried to act her way into. The fairy tale that was never going to make her a full princess, but a cloying, American show monkey in a dress at tea. That kind of power does not bend so easily, not even to the most beautiful or the young or the clever. To bargain with it as if it will welcome you, to trust in it to be the answer to overcome the injustices and inequities that befall us, is to bargain with one of the oldest of devils.