The Black Cat: The Metaphor Club engenders a safe communal space
Last Saturday, I found myself back in Leimert Park, this time attending an event at The Metaphor Club.
The club was packed with black people from all different professions mingling, drinking coffee and chatting as they waited for the main event to begin. Attorneys were speaking with film producers, and bankers were hanging out with journalists. I noticed there was a lack of tension in the room, resulting in an ease that I do not often see among black people. There were no eyes glaring when someone reached into their pockets, no verbal code-switching needed for communication and no focus on whether one was being too black or not black enough in the public space. In other words, we felt safe.
“It was obvious from almost day one when we opened up that there was a desperate need … for a space like this,” said Lawrence Ross, co-owner of The Metaphor Club. “When you get here, you understand the possibilities and what happens when you have an unapologetically black space, what happens when everyone is really encouraging.”
The Metaphor Club opened last August on Crenshaw Boulevard. It is owned by four men who were members of the same national fraternity in college: Lawrence Ross, Lawrence Gilliam, Jimar Wilson and Gerald Rawles. Most of them grew up in South L.A. and wanted to create a gathering space for people in their community.
“With the change in our neighborhood that we’re witnessing, we wanted to make sure that we could always have a stake in the ground for our culture on Crenshaw,” Gilliam said. “The way we wanted to manifest that was in a creative space — a place where people could … come in and be creative and work and be productive and not be afraid to say what they need to say.”
Now, six months later, the club’s membership has skyrocketed and it is already the largest black-owned coworking space in Los Angeles. There is a monthly fee of $79.99, with a discounted rate for students and teachers. The price is relatively inexpensive compared to other coworking spaces in L.A., where the monthly fee can be anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars. However, at The Metaphor Club, a membership is not even required to attend some events. Several of the events are free, like the one I attended; some have visitors pay at the door and, if someone wishes to spend the day there, they offer day passes. Their quest for inclusivity outweighs their exclusivity in order to create a thriving creative community.
“A quarter percent of our membership is just independent business professionals,” Rawles said. “People who don’t want to work from home but find themselves not needing a full-blown office.”
The Metaphor Club hosts many events throughout the month. Every second and fourth Friday, it hosts “Blacademics,” a networking opportunity for college students and faculty. The club also rents out its space next door for art shows and other events and even hosts panel discussions with working professionals from Hollywood.
“[It’s] the energy [and] being around people who look like you,” said Monique Judge, who moderated the event I attended. “When you come here, you are working with other black writers, and we just vibe. The energy helps gets your creativity flowing … [This] is a good place to get work done, and feel like you are a part of a community.”
Saturday’s event was a panel discussion with a few staff writers and editors from Netflix’s new comedy “Family Reunion,” which is about an African American family attending their family reunion. The show is unique in that all the writers for the show are black, a rare find in Hollywood. The writers said Netflix asked them to create a black-centric family comedy and to not shy away from expressing themselves.
“Although it’s an all-black show with black writers and black people, it’s still a family [show], and everyone can relate to it,” said Howard Jordan, one of the story editors for the show.
Jordan also noted that many television shows create black characters for the sole intention of educating non-black audiences and a lot of the black characters today are not even written by black people, giving a lack of authenticity to many of the situations those characters find themselves in.
“[For us,] it’s organic,” he said. “[They] argue in the writer’s room on what it means to be black but also … have days where they don’t mention blackness. It naturally comes out … [the writers aren’t] forcing it.”
After the panel, people resumed mingling, this time over chocolate cake. Names and numbers were exchanged as people began to connect and share ideas. The artists spoke with the entrepreneurs and, it turns out, the attorney wanted to become a screenwriter. It felt like the the walls we had spent years building to protect ourselves from society had temporarily come down to let fresh air into our worlds.
“We are highly encouraging of making you be the best person you can actually [be] while being in this space,” Ross said. “This is a space that is a nurturing space … this is a place where you can learn from other people.”
The result is a modern-day, black Café Society, where no black person has to adjust their mannerisms to be presentable for white people. Immediately, I understood the importance of The Metaphor Club. In a world where black people are arrested for simply sitting down in a Starbucks, finally, there is a public space made just for us where, for a moment, we can simply exist.
But then, as quickly as it all began, it ended. And we all had to leave. So, we walked back out onto a quiet Crenshaw Boulevard and put up our walls, at least until the next club encounter.
Dominic-Madori Davis is a senior writing about black-owned businesses in Los Angeles. She is also the chief copy editor of the Daily Trojan. Her column, “The Black Cat,” runs every other Thursday.