After spending a week focusing on talking to black activists and public figures amid the ongoing nationwide protests against police brutality, a still-subdued Jimmy Fallon has returned slightly to the usual Tonight Show programming of people with something to plug. On Tuesday night this included the Queer Eye cast, whose new season just happened to drop on Netflix last week. But the show has form on this specific issue, thanks to an early episode that dealt directly with police brutality and racism in frank conversations between culture expert Karamo Brown and one of the show's made-over "heroes", a Georgia cop. So there was no way the Fab Five — including Tan France, a British-born Pakistani man who'd just received his American citizenship earlier that day — weren't going to address the current conversation in their own way.
"A lot of people have been like, how are you gonna promote a show during this time, where like, you know, everyone is worried about a pandemic and also is supporting the Black Lives Matter movement," said Brown, the only black member of the cast. "I think what is beautiful is that people get to take a break, a mental and emotional break, which is necessary so that you can recharge and come back stronger to help other people.
"It's nice because you get to see these people that we're helping [on the show], our heroes, turn into these full, whole and beautiful, vulnerable people," he continued. "And it kind of just recharges you and says, 'You know what? I want to go out there and protest. I want to do better for tomorrow. Let me recharge, break down and come back.'"
Brown has a job to do, a show to promote, and an authentically sincere persona to leverage in service of that. But he's right — the version of self-care that's generally understood these days draws liberally on Audre Lorde's definition of it as self-preservation, as an inherently political act that sustains your strength so you're not drained and brought down by your fight before it's won. Whether you rebuild that strength while crying over makeover shows or in other ways, whatever allows you to get back out there and keep fighting is not time or effort wasted, as long as you come back stronger.
And if you've needed a Karamo pep talk in the last few months, Brown's got you.
"Most people don't even realize that they're grieving right now," he told Fallon. "They're experiencing severe loss. Like what people don't realize, even when the pandemic was happening, you are grieving the loss of financial stability, of our regular schedules. And you have to go through a process of acknowledging it and starting to feel from it. And that's happening again, it's now compounded also with the fact that Black Lives Matter movement is happening — people are waking up and they're going through so much loss and everyone is screaming out for, 'I need change. I need, you know, things to be different.' And it's a very beautiful moment that we're living in."
