There Are So Many Ways To Die

Beyond the Book: Fuck a Desk Job

I struggled in majority white office spaces for a few decades before starting to write professionally and eventually leaving corporate America to write full-time. In So You Want To Talk About Race, I discuss some of my experiences as a Black woman in majority-white work environments. I talk about what it was like to begin speaking openly about race and racism, and how it made it impossible to continue to work in a space that was so hostile to my Blackness.

No matter how traumatizing cubicle life can be as a Black woman, my leap from the world of regular paychecks and a 401k to one of scrambling to amass enough low-paying writing gigs and side-work to pay the bills was a scary and stressful one. I’m so lucky that it worked out for me in the end - my car was repossessed and I almost lost my house - but now, years after that rocky transition, I can support my family better than I had ever hoped to in my tech years. For the vast majority of Black creatives, it doesn’t work out this way.

Within a few years of leaving the corporate world, the traumas of everyday microaggressions (and fairly regular “macro” aggressions) targeting my race and/or gender were replaced with the weird, white fuckery of the publishing world, and the fairly predictable and occasionally horrifying presence of harassment and threats from angry white people pretending to have read my work and then pretending to be gravely insulted by what they imagined my work said. People regularly ask me how I have dealt with the pretty continuous presence of racial slurs, insults, and threats that my chosen career has brought to my life. People can praise your strength and courage. It can get to your head if you aren’t careful. If you forget what it was like before.

A few years ago I was asked to be a part of a leadership program at an ivy league university. The program brought together “young leaders” from various fields in communities across the country that the university had determined were “important” to the overall wellbeing of the United States. The vast majority of the hundred or so participants came from medium-to-large nonprofits, from equity or community outreach positions in major companies, and rising and influential positions in government and public policy. To my knowledge I was the only person attending who didn’t represent an organization or entity other than myself. We spent a week on campus discussing case studies for social and economic improvement in cities across the country. Talking about different types of issues that cities and towns faced and how we could address them.

Y’all. When I tell you that it was the shitshow of epic white liberal elite proportions - I am not exaggerating. Case studies looking at crime were steeped in white liberal bias, racist assumptions, and a dangerous level of love for mass incarceration. Discussions on housing treated gentrification like it was a good thing. I distinctly remember a dinner lecture where we were supposed to talk about race and how race impacts the way we do work in community, when the white professor tasked with leading this discussion stated (to as close to exact wording as my recollection will allow): “We are supposed to talk about race this evening. As you can see, I’m white. But I’m also a woman. That’s called Intersectionality.” She then proceeded to talk about being a white woman for the next twenty minutes while I stared, wide eyed at my dinner companions mouthing, “what the fuck??” over and over.

Every time something hella racist would happen that week I’d look around the room at the rest of the participants of color and see them shaking their head and wincing in pain. They would make eye contact with each other, with me. We would share a silent moment of pain and outrage. I would pause for a second to see if anybody was going to say something, and when nobody did, I would raise my hand to pause the rapidly moving discussion to go back to address the harmful assumption or statement. At first I thought that maybe I was the only person who was offended. Perhaps I had imagined the looks of pain and discomfort from my colleagues of color. But they would catch me after the session to debrief. To voice agreement with what I had said. To thank me for saying something. It didn’t take more than a day or so for others to start joining me, raising their hands to also slow the racist train down so we could look out the window and describe the absolute fuckery around us.

It was in the side conversations in between sessions that I realized the reason why I felt so free to speak out while my colleagues had not, and I was embarrassed that in a few short years I had become so far removed from my old work life that I had forgotten. No matter what honor the BIPOC participants in the program had received, no matter the prestige of their positions, no matter the mission statements or political contributions of the organizations they worked for - they still worked in hostile, racist spaces. They knew that even though they had been proudly sent to this ivy hosted program to represent their organization in an inclusive and progressive light, they could not afford for one minute to forget who they really worked for. These were smart, talented, compassionate and driven individuals who were committed to doing good work for their community. And they were not naive enough to think that they could get in a room with a hundred other influential leaders who also represented important organizations and speak openly and honestly about the racism that was happening in that space without jeopardizing their work.

Yes, these individuals worked hard to serve their communities, but that work was tied to and limited by white supremacist power structures in the same way that just about every other single job in this country is. I saw Black and brown people wincing and swallowing down racism, not because they didn’t care, but because they were constantly weighing the cost and benefits of speaking up vs. staying quiet. Was the offense enough to be worth risking relationships or embarrassing your employer? Was this the offense that you were going to speak up about and piss everyone off, only to encounter even greater racism later that nobody wants to hear from you about because you’d already been labeled as “difficult?”

Even as people began to speak up more, it was almost always done with careful deliberation. There was always a look around the room to make sure others were hearing what you were also hearing, and that others may have your back should you say something. These were calculated risks that participants of color took every time; risks they took out of love for their communities and fear for what influence this unchallenged racism, codified by the legitimizing powers of an ivy league institution, might have on other community leaders in attendance and the communities that their work impacts. We would get together after sessions to have a drink and try to decompress. We would try to create an hour or two of space and time free from the violence of racism - a space to openly run thoughts by each other and counteract the constant gaslighting of the day.

I was reminded of how I used to cling to my few Black coworkers for survival in my office days. I wasn’t trying to save the world or my community back then. I was trying to feed my family. I, like many Seattleites, worked in tech. I worked for companies that showcased their liberal credentials by ordering catering from a local Indian restaurant for Diwali and sending out a “Happy Kwanzaa” email every December. I worked for companies that proudly stated they were “anti-racist” and still maintained an almost exclusively white board of directors and executive suite. I remembered being asked to pose for employee pictures for the company website and showing up to a conference room to find that I was sitting next to more coworkers of color than I ever expected to encounter in any real work meeting.

I remembered how I not only had to work twice as hard, I also had to make my voice twice as soft. I remembered how often I’d have to try do decide if my dignity - my very humanity - was worth possibly not being able to pay rent or feed my kids, every single time something racist happened to me. I remembered trying to build work alliances that I needed for promotion opportunities, knowing that those connections were always going to only be as strong as how much they benefitted my white colleagues and how little they inconvenienced them. I remembered trying to strike a balance between pushing the racial awareness and equity that was necessary for a company to see me as an employee of value so that perhaps some of the more blatant racist obstacles standing in my way could be addressed, while not pushing over the edge to becoming a liability. I remembered the heartbreak and embarrassment of being reminded that my white coworkers were not my friends whenever I was foolish enough to forget and trust a sense of camaraderie. I remembered the day that I realized that there was no promotion or accolade that was going to allow me to walk into any meeting as a whole Black woman.

Much of what people of color - especially Black people - endure in work spaces is downplayed or ignored. If nobody is calling you the “N” word to your face, it’s not a real problem worth whining about. Everybody hates work. Join the club. Yes, it’s racism, but it’s racism that you’re being paid to put up with. The truth is, there are many ways to kill someone. You can put a gun to their head and pull the trigger. People can see the immediate violence of it and easily quantify the loss. You can also kill someone by robbing them of their life one small piece at a time. You can kill someone by hollowing them out from the inside, by making them invisible, by depriving them of the recognition of their humanity, by taking away all of the time and energy they would use for living by forcing them to constantly fight to avoid dying. If you are forced to swim in rough waters every day to keep from drowning there comes a time where you can no longer call that living, even as your head stays above water.

I can say this with complete honesty: there are no amount of threats I can receive today - and I’ve received threats that have forced me from my home - that can match the harm of the spirit-breaking years I spent working in racist office spaces. My job requires that I spend the majority of my work life documenting the horrors of violent racism in this country - and the strain of that will never compare to decades of having to decide once again how I’m going to respond to a racist joke that my boss just told me and what that joke means for my career prospects. Nothing I do today compares to spending 9 hours a day in a space that is openly hostile to me because of the color of my skin and knowing that if I were to leave for another place, it would likely be just as hostile and I’d likely have to take a pay cut in order to do so. Nothing I do today compares to how it used to feel to know that in order to provide for my family I had to spend more time with racists who would find a new way every day to cause me harm, than I got to spend with my own children.

I can speak up now. Yes, I will receive hate and I’ll receive threats. But I won’t get fired - and the lack of food or housing for my family is still a bigger threat to me than the rambling rage of an ignorant racist will ever be. If I lose a writing gig I can find another. Yes, I do not receive the same opportunities as white writers and still am regularly offered less compensation than white writers with equivalent credentials. Yes I have to navigate white publishers, editors and readers who regular seek to exploit or disempower me - and I do still at times make the hard and familiar choice to not push back on racism that I encounter in writing and publishing because to call out every instance would absolutely have a debilitating impact on my career, but I don’t have make those decisions each and every day anymore. I can write this essay right now and know that I won’t have to show up tomorrow to an office full of people who despise me for daring to call racism…racism. I know that right now there is no longer an active HR file with my name on it that questions whether or not I’m a good “social fit” or a “team player” that someone is using to try to determine whether or not I’m going to get a raise that I have been working my ass off for.

At the leadership program in this ivy league institution, I was surrounded by people of color who still faced that reality every single day and were still working to create meaningful positive change in that reality. And we were surrounded at the same time by young white people also identified as “leaders” who would never have to calculate the risks of speaking up when something racist occurred that would hinder their work. It wouldn’t hinder their work, and if it did, it wouldn’t in a way that mattered to them.

My ability to be able to openly call out racism without risking my livelihood shouldn’t be a privilege. But privilege is relative, and so in this space - and in so many spaces where the majority of Black people work in this country - it is a great privilege that I shouldn’t have to have and one that I desperately hope to help create for others who need it even more than I do.

By the end of the week it had all become a deeply traumatizing experience. The last day of the program, after a closing session on how we can mimic the speech style of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to get others to support our work in our organizations (and watching white participants, who mostly worked in positions that served no racial equity function whatsoever, nod and agree that Dr. King was a great teacher because he was passionate while still being “nonthreatening” enough to not scare away possible supporters), I broke down in tears.

I left that space behind and returned home to my writing work. But every time I’m speaking at a university, a corporation, a government department, or a large nonprofit - I’m aware that I’m back in that space again. And I get to leave while the few Black and brown faces in the audience cannot. I’m aware that even when I’m in that space talking as openly and honestly about what racism looks like in that space, it will never be enough. The white people who make up the majority in that space will still never have any idea of how much toxicity that their coworkers of color are trying to live with while also balancing their workload while knowing that neither of those efforts will ever be fully appreciated or rewarded. The white people in the audience still will have no idea of how much they participate in that harm and how much that harm benefits their careers even as it steals from their coworkers of color.

This, that I’m writing here, isn’t the work. Even the honest and often confrontational talks I give in these work spaces isn’t the work. The work is being done each and every day by workers of color who never asked for this extra job on top of the one that pays their bills. This here is just an acknowledgment. It’s another piece of evidence to read and say: This is real. This is really happening. It’s really fucked up. You aren’t too angry, and you aren’t crazy.