now why did you name your company ‘trblmkng’?
this is issa rae’s fault. sorta.
for years i’d called my business ‘hilltop’ loving the double entendre. it gave me a play on my last name and was also a callback to one of the neighborhoods that was a part of my growing up. my entire life my grandparents lived in hilltop, a neighborhood of richmond, ca. (yay areeeeea!) so, i’d informally used ‘hilltop,’ but never had a paperwork conversation with the state of california about that.
when i’d finally gone to file it in 2020, as i’d suspected when filing it as a media company, someone else already had it. i don’t know it for sure, but i’ve always assumed it was the coffee shop issa’s a partner in, hilltop coffee + kitchen, which… oddly enough is only blocks from where i live, in inglewood. plus, having a fake beef with someone can be fun. in reality, i love issa and hilltop coffee + kitchen is one of my favorite coffee shops. but i had a dilemma: i had to rethink my name.
and it was a huge blessing. (a blessing “in a damn good disguise,” as my grandfather would put it.)
having to (re?)name my company and my work made me have to rethink what i really wanted to put out into the world. as a creator, i have a respect for the fact that my work helps shape narratives, ask questions and use information to (hopefully, if we’re doing it right,) speak to some hearts and change a few others.
anyone who’s been on a team with me knows when it comes to creative, i’m always a believer that the inspiration will come, even if not in the time we want it. it’s become a thing, especially with names, for me to not rush them, to just them come.
well, the state of California didn’t think that was cute. she wanted an answer today and didn’t care about my hippy dippy ‘waiting for the name to manifest’ shit.
so i threw my own name on it, knowing that it would come, and i’d pay some more money to have it changed ‘when the name came.’ about half a year later, it came.
i kept a running list of the things that i might call the company, words that stuck with me for potential inclusion, themes that i wanted to consider. but the more i thought about the work that i want to offer the world, i continued to think about wanting to move the needle for black, brown, lgbtqia+ and otherwise marginalized people. and in some cases that means asking some uncomfortable questions of people, raising a voice amidst silence, or even making some ‘trouble.’
special thanks: will smith & trevor noah
i recently got the opportunity to work with will & trevor on a project, so of course i was super excited that the universe had finally conspired and we were all about to become best friends. now will never calls and trevor’s always ‘busy.’
anyway, we were working on a streaming event related to the launch of will’s new incredible docu-series, amend: the fight for america. it focuses on the fourteenth amendment and the ways in which it’s been used to create citizenship, and later to both oppress and liberate different demographics of people throughout the united states’ history. it’s a super innovative series, full of every star imaginable (including samuel jackson as martin luther king, jr.), you should probably be watching it. i had to binge the whole series to do some writing for an event that would be hosted by trevor and will.
in one of the episodes, they discuss bayard rustin’s belief that “we need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.” rustin is an under-appreciated queer black man from the civil rights movement. (if you don’t know, read about his improbable life here.)
i’d known of rustin since college, and i may have even heard this specific line before, but hearing this one line in the documentary was probably worth more than the money they paid me to write. for whatever reason, hearing it connected a dot. the lightbulb went on.
we’d only recently lost john lewis, legendary congressman from georgia and a fellow civil right’s activist of rustin’s. (now if you don’t know who john lewis is, you got work to do.) at the end of his life, john’s catchphrase of ‘good trouble’ had been revived with a new documentary 'john lewis: good trouble.’ i’d liked the phrase, thought it was cute or whateva. but hearing the rustin quote and the lewis catchphrase made something start to ring.
i always knew that i eventually wanted to call my company something that said something from the beginning. if we make a film, the opening cards will say something about what kind of filmmaking we’ve intended. if it’s tv, or a book, a radio show, whatever, i wanted the name to be something that would make for a semi-sentence statement.
‘this is a troublemaking production.’ ‘this is a troublemaking podcast.’ ‘this is troublemaking.’
it spoke to my desire to move the needle. it spoke to my prayer that we can make progress, with respect for where we’ve come from. and it’s a tribute to two black men, one queer, that lived lives that were worthy of honor and tribute.
after using the name ‘troublemaking’ for a few months, it seemed to me that there was something else to include in the way i wanted to brand this work. i started playing around with the letters, moving them backward, then forward, etc. then i deleted the vowels. and it still spoke, even if the letters thought to be vital to making words work in the first place were removed.
it was distinct. and disruptive. and effective.
it made me think about the ways that we center the same few things over and over again, as if that’s the only way to tell stories, or have impact, or be effective and successful. but every word doesn’t require vowels to speak clearly. our brains, oftentimes, can read the context to figure out something just as quickly, but sometimes taking an extra second or two of thinking, paying attention, giving it a hair of effort and then getting it. progress.
(i don’t have to be more explicit there do i?)
here’s to issa, will, and trevor. and lowercase.
nd t th ppl wh mk gd trbl, fr th sk f nglc prgrss.
this is trblmkng.
