What if Cargo Shorts Were ‘Gang Attire’?
Clare Brown flips the script in her new audiobook, ‘New Nigeria County.’
One perk of spending too much time online is getting to know some wildly talented creators and watching them do the coolest things. Today is pub day for Clare Brown — a.k.a. the incomparable @clarabelletoks — and her audiobook, New Nigeria County. It’s a feature-length version of her viral videos on TikTok and Instagram, in which she uses humor to cleverly flip the script on racism, misogyny, and much more.
Clare and I chatted about her approach to social media back in 2021 (which you can read here). Today, I wanted to dive into New Nigeria County, which I was lucky enough to listen to early and highly recommend. It is both extremely entertaining and deeply needed.
The audiobook features a full cast of characters, with Clare in the staring role of Carèn, an affluent, high-powered, well-connected businesswoman. New Nigeria County opens with Carèn calling the police after spotting a teenage boy with “yellow hair” wearing “gang attire.” (Spoiler alert: He’s in cargo shorts.) The situation quickly escalates at home, at work, and at the local high school. Lessons aren’t exactly learned, which is precisely the point.
Below, Clare explains the difference between writing for social media and tackling a longer-form project, why she wanted Carèn’s narrative to be less of an arc and more of a circle, why the visuals were especially important in this audiobook.
New Nigeria County is available now on Audible, Spotify, Apple Books, Google Books or wherever you get your audiobooks.
Clare Brown Flips the Script in ‘New Nigeria County’
Please note: This conversation has been edited and condensed.
So excited to chat! Before we dive into your audiobook, could you explain your approach to your viral videos?
Clare Brown: My videos are very niche, set in a flipped universe. I flip racial micro-aggressions, misogyny, gender roles, family roles. I also flip a lot of how we speak. I say “European American” — nobody says European American. It’s taking these common things that we’re used to saying and flipping them around. With New Nigeria County, even the title is a flip. We take calling “New England” totally for granted, these places we just accept are named after these colonizing countries.
How did New Nigeria County become an audiobook?
A rep from Simon Audio reached out to say she was a fan of my videos and asked, “Would you ever consider turning them into an audio show?” She explained what a Simon & Schuster Audio Original is and I said, “Of course, yes, that sounds amazing!” I loved the idea of a full cast. To this point, this work has just been me playing all the characters in front of a green screen.
From there, I had to write it — and that’s when things got interesting! I remember writing the first episode, submitting it, and being like: This is amazing. Oh my gosh, I am a natural. And then I got the edits back and it was a bloodbath. [Laughs] I learned that this is not TikTok. You don’t need to joke every 30 seconds. You need to write full dialogue, flesh out characters.
While listening, I recognized so many things from your social media videos. How did you take what you have done there and turn it into a fuller story?
On social, I’m allowed to be a little bit more chaotic in terms of what I talk about. This project, despite it being longer, it needed to be tighter.
There are familiar elements from a lot of my videos: Nat Turner High School is the high school everybody goes to and Black Diamond Enterprises is the company all the women work at. Margin [a key character in Brown’s online videos and a riff on the name Meghan] plays a big part in this story. It’s her son who starts the central conflict.
The show opens with an inciting incident: A white family moves into this very affluent, homogenous, Black neighborhood. My character, Carèn, sees Margin’s son, Jake, outside. He’s wearing gang attire, in her opinion, so she calls the cops on him. Then it begins to snowball.
New Nigeria County has a full cast of characters, but I want to focus on yours. Tell us about Carèn.
Carèn is akin to a mediocre white man, someone with a lot of power and a lot of influence — but in New Nigeria County, that’s a Black woman. She is going through life doing what she thinks is best, usually to the detriment of the people around her. But she neither cares nor is held accountable for that.
Carèn has a doting husband who manages all of the emotional and mental labor of the home. And she is surrounded by similarly powerful, wealthy women who protect her. In real life, these rich white men are usually connected to people who have a lot of influence in the community. Carèn is really close to the mayor of her town, who swoops in and helps her out, as in: “I can get you out of any sort of discomfort that you might be feeling.”
Very early on, Carèn gets put on a leave of absence. And you think there’s going to be a reckoning, similar to how you think there is going to be a reckoning with these white men.
Ultimately things start and end pretty much in the exact same place. Carèn’s story is not really an arc; it is a big circle. That was important to me because a lot of stories about race are designed to make people feel like racism is behind us and everything is fine. But it’s not. We see so many powerful white men do these terrible things — and then they’re our president, right?
I wanted to tell that story in a much lighter, more humorous way.
You use very universal settings to tell this story, examining the dynamic in school, at home, or the office.
I really wanted people to be able to place themselves in any of these positions — and the feeling of being other-ized — to then unpack the dynamic.
At home, you have Carèn and her husband and their daughter. Carèn is very clueless as to what’s going on. Her husband is managing everything and you see a man take on the emotional labor, both of managing his partner through uncomfortable time while also completely managing everything that’s happening on the home front.
At school, that’s when many children of color really start feeling the other-ization. Meghan’s son, Jake, goes to Nat Turner High School. He’s new in junior year and is immediately tokenized and otherized. You have people kind of standing up for him, but it doesn’t quite work because they’re still tokenizing him.
Jake befriends Carèn’s daughter and you see the flipping of a white savior. She really wants to make Jake feel welcome, but she doesn’t quite know how to because she won’t see past the fact that he is white. I wanted to showcase that, with things like: [EH note: Clare slips into her Carèn voice here] Oh, we really should try hard to pronounce his name. It is, like, a really hard name. All of these moments where it’s just very cringe.
I loved how Carèn calls Jake “Snake” — and her daughter gasps.
Yes! You do see that tension, right? She knows her mom is kind of the worst but she doesn’t know how to navigate that, which I think is a common dynamic — especially with an older parent and a younger child. They have different worldviews. That tension happens throughout the book, it’s a familiar tension we all experience.
I loved how visual your storytelling is. Tell me about why that was so important.
I wanted you to be able to hear the way that people are weaponizing clothing and hair. One of the first things that listeners are introduced to is the idea of “gang attire.” This is something that we’ve all heard, especially millennials in school. We had dress codes where certain clothing was labeled “gang attire” — and it was a hoodie.
In New Nigeria County, gang attire is cargo shorts. Jake is wearing khaki cargo shorts and that is a huge red flag for Carèn. She panics immediately and calls the police.
Why did you choose cargo shorts?
I wanted to pick things that are so innocuous to us right now. I recently moved into a new neighborhood and a neighbor was talking about another family. She said, “Oh yeah, he’s just like a typical dad — he was wearing cargo shorts. He’s harmless.” She said it unprompted! [Laughs] And then my husband said, “Oh, he’s in a gang.”
Jake’s hair is a huge issue as well. He is blonde; they call his hair “yellow.” You hear even the principal of Nat Turner High School talk about it: “We don’t have unnatural or exploratory colors” and “You have to have a ‘normal’ hair color.” Jake is forced to dye his hair and that doesn’t quite work out, so then he has to cover it with a scarf.
You see Jake doing all of these gymnastics to fit in, just how Black children do now, like “fixing” their hair so that it’s more presentable for school. You see Jake have the burden of appearance, which is something that a blonde white boy never has to encounter. Throughout the whole audiobook, he is constantly managing his appearance so that he can feel safe in this community.
What other visual aspects were important in this audio project?
There were definitely moments where I wanted people to have those visual elements of imagining a world that’s more built for Black women. Haircare and skincare is such a big part of our day-to-day, it was important to me to bake that into each of these characters.
The flip side of the yellow hair and the cargo shorts is the VP of HR leaving work to go get micro braids. In New Nigeria County, this is very normalized behavior — no one is calling her out because she has to go sit in a chair for 11 hours to get micro braids.
So on one side, you have a literal child who has to go to the salon and dye his hair brown to be accepted in school. And then you have an executive who is like, “I need to cut this meeting short because I need to go get my hair done.” That is a huge no — but in New Nigeria County, it’s like, “Oh yeah, girl, go!”
The cast is so good — do you have a favorite character?
I love the HR lady, she’s just so funny. Ayanna Dookie, who voiced her, captured her so perfectly. She is supposed to be Toby from The Office.
Throughout the audiobook, it was important to me to have Black women behaving badly and not suffering any sort of consequences. The Black anti-hero — especially the female comedic anti-hero — doesn’t really exist. In New Nigeria County, you listen to Black women live their lives on their terms. They’re not a best friend, they’re not a moral compass for the white protagonist. They’re just chilling throughout.
You dive into some really complicated topics in this audiobook with a lot of humor. What made you want to use comedy in this way?
On a personal level, I don’t like when people give me a lecture.I didn’t want to sit down and say, “This is a micro-aggression and this is how you should avoid it.”
I also feel like a lot of racial discussions re-traumatize Black people. They’re forced to reenact a traumatic moment. I was trying to find a way where it felt as fun as these topics can be, but that it was also empowering for Black women in particular to listen to this and be like: “This is what we have always been talking about — but we are not being re-victimized by hearing it.” That’s where the flipping comes into play.
In any comedy, you have to tow a line and you have to stay in your lane. I can draw from my own experiences to make it work. This is me comedically acting out my own traumatic experiences that I can now look back on, and with clarity, and make funny. But I wouldn't want to do that with anybody else’s trauma.
What do you hope people take away from New Nigeria County?
This project is not necessarily a solve. I don’t have a solve for fixing racism in America — regrettably! I wish I did.
It’s about raising awareness in a way that doesn’t feel combative and drawing attention to progress that still needs to be made from all of us. I hope people listen to it with an open mind and see areas where they might need to improve. And also I hope everyone will maybe have some empathy when they hear people, especially people of color and women of color, talk about their negative experiences in the workplace or at home or at school. Instead of being like, “No, you’re over-reacting, that didn’t happen” maybe pause and be like, “It probably did.” Building collective empathy, I think, is really important.
My thanks to Clare! You can find her on Instagram at @clarabelletoks and listen to New Nigeria County wherever you get your audiobooks — click here for all the links. 10/10, highly recommend.
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What a fascinating read! I learned a lot about the background of Clare! Plus, the idea of pure audiobook/ narration is new to me. Thank you for always bringing in new people and topics to your substack!
Thanks for this conversation, Elizabeth. Clare is one of my favorites! I’m always thrilled when she’s made a new video. Her flipping the script is so clever and interesting and hilarious. And of course, thought provoking. I’ve been looking forward to this audiobook since she first talked about it.