Liz Charles

As a woman of color in media and entertainment in the United States, I often find myself in spaces where I am the only – only woman, only person of color (only black person). The responsibility as an “only” is not just to my personal humanity but to the racial and gender groups I belong. It’s taxing, exhausting, but despite my need for respite, this experience caused sleep to become difficult for me. I was missing healthy stimuli to turn off the anxiety and weight of each day’s interactions. I needed to feel safe, I needed to feel like I am not the “other”, but rather, that I belonged. This is the way it was, before I became an “only”.

I’m a Jamaican born, Guyana and Cayman raised, child to a Jamaican mother and Guyanese father. Like many Caribbean families, a reunion at our house looks like a UN convention, so varied are we in hue. This is a beautiful part of blackness. The sound of urban radio was the soundtrack to my childhood. I listened to the voices of people who looked and sounded like my family and me, passionately debating current events, or crooning over RnB tracks till late in the night. Everything that I saw, heard and felt, spoke value to me. When I eventually secured a place in these spaces where I would become an “only”, I realized how lonely it was. Access to spaces where I was an “only” came through the acquisition of jobs that were the makeup of immigrant dreams; but they came at a cost. These experiences caused me to thirst more than ever for spaces like the ones I’d had growing up, that is, spaces where voices of people who looked like me were elevated.

Before We Wrap fosters that sense of familiarity in the home of each viewer and listener, to empower women and people of color by creating a space that raises their voices and in doing so creates a sense of safety. In the U.S., in 2019, safety for women and POC has shown itself to be equally rare as it is vital. I want to be a part of changing that. Late at night, instead of experiencing more of those “only” spaces by watching one of the Jimmys, a Stephen or Seth, women and POC can join a conversation where voices like their own are lifted up. Hopefully together, we’ll feel a little safer, a little stronger, and we can all sleep a little easier.