The Undercover Introvert

Miss Me with Your MLK Quotes if You Don’t Support Voting Rights

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Another Martin Luther King Jr. Day is upon us and, once again, I’m bracing myself for the dizzying, day long onslaught of self-serving hypocrisy. Ah, yes, the annual online showmanship of Republicans posting key quotes from MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech (because they’ve never read or heard anything else by the man) while they actively work to strip voting rights away from people who look like Dr. King. If the times in which we’re currently living weren’t so terrifying, this would almost be hilarious. Almost.

I’m just here to say: miss me with your fake fuzzy feelings for Dr. King if you spend the other 364.9 days of the year suppressing voting rights, undermining our democracy, or promoting the Big Lie.

It feels good to get that off my chest. Not that I expect anyone to dial down their hypocrisy on my account. But it just seems especially bad this year, doesn’t it, considering these “leaders” could vote on bills at the federal level to secure the voting rights of every eligible American and instead are choosing to do nothing while a slew of states pass legislation making it even harder to vote.

That’s exactly the world Dr. King was talking about in his famous speech, though, right? The one in which he mentions doing whatever’s necessary to concentrate power in the hands of the wealthy few while the lowly masses go unheard and uncounted.

I don’t find it hyperbolic to say that I fear for our democracy. I worry about how weak it has been revealed to be in the stark light of day, how easily it could crumble beneath the jackboots of those who are willing to resort to shocking violence in order to subvert an election and get what they want. These people, and the politicians who purposely whip them into a nationalist frenzy, are the ones who wouldn’t have stood with Dr. King when he was alive and advocating for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They are no great supporters of equality, or voting rights, or racial justice. Are we supposed to believe that they care about the words of Dr. King or what he stood for, even for a single convenient day out of the year?

We’ve run a terrifying, demoralizing gauntlet of death and disease over the last 2 years. In that time, these so-called “leaders” have more clearly revealed and defined themselves, their motives and beliefs on display in a way we’ve not seen before. Some of these “leaders” have stopped even giving lip service to the sacred ideal of one person, one vote. They no longer bother with pretense. I have to admit, I appreciate their candor, though I find it chilling, because if these people had their way, I would lose the ability to cast a ballot, as would millions who look like me. But, despite their cheerful chipping away at the foundation of our democracy, these people (or their staff) will still find a few seconds to indulge in performative reverence for one of the greatest Civil Rights leaders this country has ever known.

To them, I ask: why bother, after everything you’ve done and said? After everything you are doing and saying right now, in this moment? Leave the duty of remembering the brave Americans who fought for freedom and equality under the law to those of us still fighting to bring these ideals even closer to fruition. If you don’t love what Dr. King stood for, then stop pretending to love the man himself, even if it is the carefully whitewashed version. You would have been repulsed by who he was in life, and he would have been repulsed by what you are: people who would oppress anyone, tell any lie, tear down any cherished institution in order to cleave to power.

So instead of playacting respect for Martin Luther King, Jr., just keep his name out of your mouth. Leave the celebration of his legacy to those of us who actually celebrate it with our whole hearts and weary bones besides. Those of us who are the beneficiaries of the work he did in his lifetime. Those of us who cherish his legacy and strive to honor it in all we do. Those of us who are in this struggle and won’t stop until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Until one person really does mean one vote.

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A Journey Through Time and Space

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History is a funny thing. It’s behind us by definition, but it also never leaves us, even when we willfully shy away from it. And there are times you can feel the weight of centuries taking up space, intruding on the present, a physical force that quickens your heartbeat and cools the blood rushing beneath your skin.

A few years ago, I found myself in Washington DC for several months for work. I’d never spent much time in our nation’s capital, and I decided to make the most of it. That meant an aggressive schedule of museum visits and as many trips to historical monuments as I could muster in 90 days. My second weekend there, I booked a boat ride to Mount Vernon, the famous home of George Washington. I’m a history nerd going way back, so I was truly excited to finally visit the sprawling estate of a central founding father. I also possess the ability, fostered by 12 years of public K — 12 whitewashed education, to fawn over our country’s rich history with one breath and then criticize it with the next. You can’t grow up in this country without developing this ability, a kind of compartmentalizing that allows me to bask in the carefully crafted glory of our collective past while also acknowledging that I, as a Black woman, wouldn’t have lived very well outside of the last 50ish years. Even within those 50 years, it can be a crapshoot.

The morning was brisk, but the boat ride on the Potomac was lovely as experienced from my warm seat nestled safely below deck. Upon our arrival, I stepped out into the chill air and took stock of my surroundings. Besides the boat, everything was much the way it might have looked back in the 1700s when Washington was still alive and kicking. I felt transported hundreds of years into the past, which was thrilling, and then I felt something else as we disembarked. It was visceral, and it stayed with me for the rest of the trip, niggling at my insides, casting shadows in the far corners of my eyes, as though the very space I inhabited was crackling with all that had come before this moment.

I had to walk up a path through the trees to get to the mansion at the top of the hill. I went quickly, stepping around groups of people as I tried to identify that nagging feeling. It twisted in my gut and settled on my shoulders, a heavy sensation that followed me as I climbed higher. By the time I reached Washington’s tomb, I knew where the feeling was coming from, though I couldn’t name it. The heaviness trembled in the air around me. It was everywhere.

I wasn’t welcome here.

No one was yelling at me or telling me to leave. No one was even looking in my direction. And why would they, when the grand, brick-enclosed tomb of our nation’s first president was right in front of us? But the unsettling un-at-homeness of the place was filling my lungs as I inhaled, and it didn’t leave me when I exhaled. I wandered away from the tomb, craving a bit of separation from the cluster of tourists excitedly snapping pictures of Washington’s final resting place. In a shadier, much quieter spot, I found a more modest marker, dedicated in 1929, which read:

In memory of the many faithful colored servants of the Washington family buried at Mount Vernon from 1760 to 1860. Their unidentified graves surround this spot.

I glanced around where I stood, alone, my eyes tearing. In that space was no trace of the generations of men, women, and children that had toiled on this land. No marker naming them. No place for flowers or remembrance.

Faithful colored servants.

It struck me that the biggest difference between these Black folks and myself was the passage of time. There was another difference that weighed on me: I had come here willingly and would leave without obstacle as soon as my tour of the main house was completed.

I went on to the house at the top of the hill and my tour, that sense of being unwelcome, of sharing space with the nameless, faceless people that had come before me never lifting. It had been these people, bound in slavery, that made Washington’s life possible. Beneath his every success, the ones we read so much about in school, there were these folks, tending the land, cleaning the house, cooking the food, caring for the animals, making the place hospitable for a never ending stream of guests. Yet, the history I learned in the first 12 years of my education never made a single mention of these so-called faithful colored servants. They stayed in the background of history, and, upon their deaths, were buried in unmarked graves, taking their names and stories with them. But I could feel them in that space, on that land, where I wandered, a little stunned to be in a place where they had walked, and lived, and wept, and dreamed. A place that had not been their home, not really. A place that was never meant for me to visit, free as any white person.

On my way back to the boat, I stopped again by the hallowed ground where so many people had found their harsh freedom from a life of forced servitude. I stood near the marker, sharing space with them one final time, letting the air vibrate with that feeling of unwelcomeness. These men and women had built this place, had turned it into a thriving estate, a destination for millions to come and stand in reverence of the great George Washington. But I would never know their names. History would never tell their stories. Still, I could feel them as that heaviness pressed into my shoulders, a sense of the past bleeding into the present, of hands reaching across the void of time.

I went back to the boat, and my life, that otherworldly feeling staying with me long after I returned to DC. In many ways, that visit mirrors the experience of being a Black American. People that looked like us toiled for centuries, building a country that was never meant to belong to us. And, yet, here we Black folks are today, left to reconcile the brute expanse of history with the realities of our daily lives. It catches us off guard, rising up and settling heavily onto our shoulders: millions of stories, of lives, of experiences and shared spaces that bind us together, but are unknowable. What else can we do, besides carry the weight of that shadowy past along with us into the future?

Open Letter to Those Ruining it for the Rest of Us

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When I was in school, there was little I looked forward to less than the dreaded group project. Teenaged me operated beneath a relatively simple directive: get all schoolwork done and behind you so you can move on to the things you actually enjoy doing, like hanging out with friends or reading for pleasure. That’s not to say I wasn’t also a habitual procrastinator, but it helped that neglecting schoolwork wasn’t an option. The crackdown from my folks would have been swift and all encompassing if I brought home poor grades, so I chose to simply handle my business, even if I was handling it at 2 AM the night before an assignment was due. But group projects added a layer of complication to this straightforward formula of powering through until I reached the lightweight feeling of momentary freedom at the end of a pile of homework. I (mostly) had control over myself. But I had zero control over the actions of others. When they decided not to shoulder their share of the work, there was very little I could do about it besides just pick up the slack if I wanted a good grade.

Think of American society as the ultimate group project. First, no one has a choice but to be part of the group. Second, no matter how much you keep your head down and focus on simply handling your business, someone else can come along and fuck the whole thing up. Then we all get a failing grade. Now we’re all grounded! Or, worse, we get stricken with a deadly virus…

So, yeah, this is for those of you who are actively fucking things up for the rest of us.

Just a point of clarification before I lean all the way into my tirade: this is directed squarely at those who have adopted a loud and proud me first and fuck everyone else mentality, not those immuno-compromised folks that can’t actually get vaccinated. Herd immunity is what’s supposed to protect these folks, so it’s even more infuriating that perfectly (and momentarily, TBH) healthy people are selfishly refusing to protect them and all kids under 12 years old that can’t yet get the shot.

Okay, back to the rant.

We were forced to start a new and rather challenging group project in the beginning of 2020. No one was given a choice, but we were all fully in control of how we responded to the unique parameters of the project. I responded by going into self-imposed quarantine and wearing a mask for my biweekly trip to the grocery store. For months, I did very little outside of the house besides shop for food at 7 AM when the store opened and was not busy. I didn’t travel. I didn’t see friends outside of Zoom happy hours. I worked from home and waited for it to be over. It wasn’t fun, but it was necessary. Yes, I was protecting myself and those I lived with, but I was also making sure I didn’t get sick and spread the virus to others in my community.

As soon as the vaccine was made available to my age group, I got it. Two weeks after my second shot, I reentered the world as though exploring an exotic locale. I went to in-person meet ups with friends. I ate at a restaurant for the first time in over a year. Cases were going down and things were opening up again. It felt like we’d lived through the worst of the pandemic and were finally coming out on the other side. It felt really good, like all my (admittedly minimal, in the grand scheme of things; no one was asking me to parachute into a warzone or anything) sacrifices had been worth it. This was a once in a century pandemic, and we made it through. We had our lives back. Praise science!

Sure, it wasn’t great to see folks refusing to get vaccinated or continuing to turn this into an unnecessary political debate, but I felt hopeful we could still get to herd immunity without them. But then the Delta variant rolled onto the scene and it seemed like we were right back where we started, even despite the vaccines.

And you know why?

Because some of y’all didn’t do your part of the project. And your selfish bullshit is now taking down the rest of us.

And don’t come at me with that freedom nonsense.

I value my freedom as much as the next person, but we live in a society. My freedom extends only insofar as it doesn’t infringe upon yours. And, last I checked, giving you a deadly virus that might land you in the hospital counts as infringement. Your ‘freedom’ to be a dumbass might result in a variant that my two shots of the vaccine can’t protect me from. You aren’t free to drive drunk, because you could hurt or kill someone. How is this any different?

Living in a society means we sometimes have to do things we don’t want to do. That’s just how it goes. The world does not revolve around you, me, or any other single individual. When you do or don’t do things, it affects others. If those effects are negative, you need to stop, and this has nothing to do with freedom. And, anyway, freedom has never been absolute, even in this so-called Land of the Free. There are laws, social norms, expectations, guidelines, and common courtesy.

We’re stuck doing this group project. There’s no getting out of it. We can succeed together or we can fail, dragging your dead (perhaps literally, because this is a deadly virus!!!) weight behind us. Unlike the group projects I quickly learned to despise in high school, this is a matter of life and death. My 2 shots of the vaccine protect me, you, and those that can’t get the shot, either because of health reasons or because they’re too young to receive it right now. Can we set aside the B.S. and just get this done? There are millions of people in other countries who would kill to have the easy access to vaccines that we’re actively taking for granted as a society.

Vaccines are safe and they work. There’s no disputing that. We just need everyone who can to get one. Let’s get an A on this project, y’all, so we can move on to the things we’d rather be doing.

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A Year of Living at Work

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The beauty part about working from home is that you never have to stop working!

Seriously. It. Never. Has. To. End.

Before we dig in, let’s set the table: I’m extremely privileged to have a job that allowed me to work from home, burrow into a cocoon of safety with the folks I love most, continue to pay my bills, and generally keep my head down while a pandemic raged outside my door. Believe me, I don’t take this for granted.

Now that I’ve put that out there, I can start on the rest.

I worked from home long before the pandemic and loved it: the freedom and flexibility, the nonexistent commute, the sound of my dog snoring lightly in the little bed I set up next to my desk for her. I traveled quite a bit throughout the week for meetings and work related events, so it was rare for me to spend two full days in a row in my home office. So, I carved out Sundays as my day to catch up on emails, research, and other writing intensive tasks, setting up at my desk around 8 AM and working peacefully until about noon, no other people in sight. An introvert’s dream.

When COVID-19 closed down the country in March of 2020, working remotely was nothing new to me. It was odd not to travel to meetings, conferences, and other professional get-togethers, but I didn’t miss them that much at first. What did change was that everyone else with whom I interacted throughout my workday was now working from home too. Suddenly, as though by some dark sorcery that managed to enchant us all simultaneously, what could have been a 10 minute phone call was now an hour long Zoom meeting complete with slide deck, round robin intros, breakout rooms, and icebreakers about what was getting us through the lockdown. And, unlike in person meetings, there was no longer any time built into our shared schedules that allowed for eating, bathroom breaks, or, you know, time to do our actual jobs. It was common practice to have meetings begin at 9 AM and go until 4 or 5, each one an hour, each one starting immediately after the one before it. The Zoom Industrial Complex rose quickly at the beginning of our self-imposed lockdown and loomed large over just about every single professional interaction I’ve had over the last 15ish months.

I get it. We were all missing in person meetups. But did that mean things that definitely could have been handled via email now needed to be a 45 minute long on camera meeting?

The answer is no. And yet…

Just an FYI: if you’ve been on a Zoom with me where my camera is off — despite the constant peer pressure to be visible, always — then you have most definitely accompanied me to the bathroom, to the kitchen to refill my water bottle or fix a snack, around my house as I sweep/dust/scrub (when the hell else am I supposed to get cleaning done?), on the elliptical (only for Zooms after 5 PM), or to the floor to stretch out a body that aches from crouching over a computer all day.

Just to reiterate, I fully understand how fortunate I am to have been able to continue working from the safety of my home during a global pandemic, but, goddamn, it quickly felt less like working from home and more like I was living at work.

The line between working and not working is always a little blurry when you work from home. But, last year, that fuzzy line completely disappeared. Calls happened at night and over the weekend. I worked every day, all day, because it’s not like I could safely do anything outside my house, right? Plus it was an election year, and those are always crazy af in my line of work. It seemed like my mind never clicked from work to home. It was exhausting, but also guilt inducing, because it wasn’t like I was risking my life by working a 16 hour shift in an emergency room. I didn’t have to worry about getting infected with a deadly disease as I rang up groceries for unmasked customers that couldn’t care less about my health and safety. I was sitting at home, safe, in front of my computer. Besides, I wasn’t going anywhere anyway, so I might as well answer those emails, do that research, jump on that weekend Zoom meeting, put together that memo.

I’ve been fully vaccinated for a few weeks. By and large, I’m still working from home, but I had my first in person meeting in well over a year earlier this month. While it was great to see other vaccinated people in person, albeit a little freaky, we’re all still inhabiting an in-between space where we’re expected to live at the office and also leave the house to get work done. Granted, it’s the home office, but, still, we’re living at work. It took several days of plugging away at home to catch up after a day of meetings spent untethered from my computer. You can’t travel for meetings and still manage to get 9 solid hours of screen time, which is the minimum amount you need to get enough work done to justify stopping for the night.

As we collectively emerge from this year like no other in our lifetimes, I’ve begun to set boundaries, even if they are uncomfortable at first. During the weekend, I make a point to do things with family or friends that don’t involve work. Some of y’all might be thinking: how is that a boundary? Isn’t that just normal life?! Well, when you’ve worked 7 days a week for so long, only coming up for air when you’re climbing into bed at night, this is huge. During the week, unless I have to finish a task that can’t wait until morning, I’m done at 5 PM, no exceptions (well, some exceptions, but this is a work in progress). I don’t take work calls in the evening and I don’t set up meetings over the weekend. I do take a few hours on Sundays to catch up on emails and research, like old times, but I’m not on a goddamned Zoom meeting, so it feels a little like the sleepy hours just after dawn when you’re on vacation and no one else is awake yet. Just you, a mug of coffee, the promise of the rest of the day, and a little bit of time to do whatever the hell you want to do in that moment.

I’m taking it step by step and giving myself grace. It’s hard to break bad habits, and working 7 days a week, taking phone calls whenever, and waking in the middle of the night sure you’ve dropped a ball somehow, somewhere are all bad habits. I’ve planned 2 vacations for later in the year. I see friends and family often. I regularly disconnect from my computer for hours at a time.

Most importantly, I refuse to continue living at work.

I love my job, but not enough to do it 15 hours a day, 7 days a week. Not enough to keep sacrificing time with family and friends. I still have to beat back guilty feelings when I reach for a book instead of a work related task, when I schedule lunch with friends on a Saturday instead of doing that extra research, when I keep watching Netflix instead of taking that 7 PM phone call. I remind myself that, when I worked in an office, stepping out into the parking lot meant I was finished working, that the rest of the day was mine to do whatever I wanted. I felt no guilt then. I shouldn’t feel guilt now, just because my office is nestled inside the rest of my house. All the lines are still there. I just have to enforce them. So, that’s what I’m doing: tracing over the blurry, indistinct lines between work and my personal life until they become bold again.

America, This is Exactly Who We Are

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Last week, I watched an angry white mob storm the heart of our nation’s capital in an attempt to subvert the will of millions of voters. These people came armed, not just with weapons, but with an innate sense of entitlement endowed by their skin color, a certainty swimming in their blood that they could livestream what they were doing with no fear of repercussion. I watched in horror and fury as the foundation of our fragile democracy trembled beneath thousands of angry footfalls, unsure if it would hold after the last four tumultuous years.

In the wake of this failed insurrection, I watched dozens of public figures proclaim that we are better than this as a country, that this is not who we are. There were social media posts aplenty making similar pronouncements, such that they became a persistent drumbeat that was impossible to ignore. Unfortunately, these hearty arguments and entreaties were little more than feel good bullshit.

America, this is exactly who we are.

I’m not sure what part of our history these folks are referring to when they make sweeping judgments that we, collectively, are better than whatever terrible event just occurred. The hundreds of years of chattel slavery? The horrors inflicted upon indigenous people, including genocide, land theft, and broken treaties? Jim Crow? Redlining? The War on Drugs? Internment camps during WWII? Women treated as second class citizens? The exclusion of the LGBTQ community? Lynchings?

Stop me when I get to the parts that prove what we’ve always been wasn’t on full display when hundreds of terrorists invaded the Capitol Building the other day.

Listen, I think America is the land of endless promise. It’s something on which the Founding Fathers and I are in complete agreement. The country is at its greatest during the times when we inch closer to its founding promise, the one that says everyone is entitled to a life lived freely and with dignity. But we are not that country all the time. We need to accept that, because lasting change doesn’t occur unless we do. Pretending that we are better than we’ve proven ourselves to be throughout our history is disingenuous and self-defeating. The idea of America is a shining beacon of freedom and equality recognized across the globe. The reality of America is much less hopeful, though not completely hopeless. Therein lives the motivation so many of us feel to make the reality of this country finally live up to its promise.

This country is comprised of millions of people living their lives within its borders. Many of these people are good. But there are also many that aren’t. Thousands of the latter kind were in the nation’s capital the other day, attempting to disenfranchise about 81 million of their countrymen and women. I could go on for a few hundred paragraphs about the kind of deep seated entitlement one must feel — that this country is yours and always has been — in order to do that kind of thing, but that’s not the point of this. The point is to pull us around to a collective mirror and invite us to really look at what we see there: good, bad, hate, love, forgiveness, stubbornness, hope, fear, entitlement, and pain.

This country isn’t just one thing, good or bad. It’s many things. We are the people that stormed the Capitol Building, armed and determined to keep a failed president in office by any means necessary. We are also the people that peacefully protested for Black lives after the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We can be both, and a million other things, at the same time. What we can’t do is pick and choose the parts that we use to define ourselves. We’ve done that for far too long, and it’s gotten us into the mess we’re experiencing now.

Refusing to reckon with our complicated past is as American as apple pie. We cleave to the good things, holding them up like gleaming, hard won trophies, and forget the rest. But history repeats itself when we refuse to learn from it the first time, or when we refuse to even acknowledge it. That’s where we are right now: relearning lessons we resisted initially. Pretending the actions of these fellow Americans don’t reflect the country that birthed, coddled, and empowered them just continues this unfortunate cycle. We can be better — I truly believe that — but only if we embrace our collective faults and commit to changing them.

Our democracy suffered a real hit this week after years of repeated blows, and it troubles me to know how delicate it is, how unstably it sits atop layers of air and convention, how much of what we understood to be foundational to the health of our way of governing is more akin to a gentlemen’s agreement. I can honestly say the events of last week shook me to my core, but they also infuriated me. This is my country too. I see it clearly, and still love it, for all it could be if only we keep pushing. But I refuse to suffer those that indulge in revisionist history in order to view this country through the rosiest of rose colored glasses.

We are not better than what happens within our borders or on our watch. We are not better than the things we do. But we can be better. That’s what keeps me going.

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