Issa Rae Discusses Her Controversial Joke About Asian Men and Black Women

The highly anticipated third season of Insecure premieres this Sunday, August 12, and I don’t know about you, but Issa Rae is ready. She went on The Breakfast Club on Friday morning to talk Season 3, which she says will focus on “adulting” as it relates to her characters owning up and taking responsibility for their mistakes, something Natalie Rothwell, who plays Kelli and writes for the show, echoed in her recent Complex interview.  

“One of the key things about adulting is nobody is gonna forgive you, nobody is going to make excuses for you,” Issa told the Breakfast Club crew. “After you pass your 20s, people are like, ‘she should know better and she needs to do better.’”  

It’s worth remembering that Issa as a person, beyond her eponymous HBO character, is also going through the “adulting” process. She even offered an example of her own growth: in her mid-twenties, she would take to social media to complain publicly about her job, something she can’t even fathom doing now.  Still, though, she says it can be “unfair” to hold someone to what they write on the social media bubble. 

Charlamagne himself then brought up a prime example: a passage from Issa Rae’s 2015 memoir, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, in which she “proposed” that educated black women and Asian men “join forces in love, marriage, and procreation,” except for Filipinos, who are “the blacks of Asians.” The passage drew heavy controversy earlier this year, but Issa hadn’t commented on it until now.

“I wrote that in 2010, and that was the context of… all these news things like, ‘black women have no hope,’ ‘educated black woman, there’s no chance for you,’ ‘black men [don’t want you],” she explained. “So, sarcastically, I noticed that there was an abundance [of Asian men]. So there’s your solution black women!” Issa also noted the problem has been felt in the dating app sphere, in which black women and Asian men have the “worst chances of matching with other people.” 

“Of course it was a joke, but I was like, ‘this is what I’m getting dragged for?’” she remembers. “And I’ve never even dated outside my race, I was like, ‘I stayed loyal to these ashy n*****s all my life!’” 

“People read headlines, captions, and pictures all day,” she added. “If you read the chapter before, you’d see where that came from. I can’t explain things to people.” She added that the whole thing “felt beyond her” at the time and chalked it up to people projecting their own expectations onto her and waiting for her to mess up. 

The Insecure creator and star has been doing lots of interviews in the past couple of weeks in the lead up to the Season 3 premiere. Besides her gorgeous Essence cover, she spoke to Hot 97 on Thursday about why fans shouldn’t worry about Lawrence’s absence from the upcoming season and, during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she shared a truly delightful story about why she totally blew her chance to become Rihanna’s friend (same.)