The Undercover Introvert

American Math: Black + Female = Unqualified

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After Justice Breyer announced his resignation last week and President Biden confirmed he planned to keep his campaign promise of nominating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, I knew I’d need to brace myself for the next couple of weeks. Call it stacking up ample frustration in advance of what is going to be an emotionally trying process. Battening down my mental, physical, and emotional hatches. Slamming, then locking the steel door to my internal storm shelter. I could definitely go on but am choosing to spare y’all any additional rhetorical flourish….

One helluva storm’s brewing, and we’re about to experience intense thundershowers of racism and sexism for a solid couple of months. Get ready for power outages. Flash floods. Devastating wind. Y’all might recall a similar storm that raged for weeks on end during the 2020 election after President Biden announced his pick for Vice President: a category five hurricane of racist, sexist bullshit that spread from sea to shining sea, leaving no community untouched.

It’s a tale as old as time in this country. When white and male are the default (yet invisible) standards, no one deviating from those unspoken criteria can ever hope to measure up, no matter how objectively qualified. And if someone different does manage to get into a position of power, the collective snap judgment is that it had to be because of a quota that needed filling, Affirmative Action, charity, or outright dishonesty. In other words, long suffering white people getting the shaft in favor of goldbricking Black folks, all in the name of diversity, or whatever we’re calling it now.

Before we go any further, let’s arm ourselves with a few facts. In the Supreme Court’s 232 year history, there has never been a Black female justice. In that 232 years, the court has had 115 justices total. 108 of them have been white men. There have only been 3 justices of color in our nation’s history, and two of them are serving right now. The other is Thurgood Marshall.

Now, some might argue that we didn’t get the first Black Supreme Court justice until 1967 because there just weren’t any smart and capable Black folks in existence before that time. It just so happened that only white men were intelligent and accomplished enough to be part of an institution created by other intelligent, accomplished white men. It couldn’t have had anything to do with 400 years of categorizing Black people as literal property followed by a system of laws implemented after Reconstruction that purposely excluded Black folks from most civic, educational, and professional life, could it? That’s crazy talk, right? Clearly, Black people just weren’t good enough to sit on the bench…or be doctors…or hold elected office…or teach white children…

Nothing invites intense public scrutiny quite like a Black person breaking down a barrier that has kept folks that looked like her/him from doing exactly what she/he is now doing. Questions abound about qualifications, preferential treatment (this is laughable, given our country’s history, but here we are), and — GASP — reverse racism. This latter charge comes with a quickness as soon as it’s made clear that the position will intentionally be filled by a person of color.

WHY ARE WE SO FOCUSED ON RACE? (mostly unqualified) white folks wail. Shouldn’t the most qualified candidate be chosen, regardless of race???

Well, yeah, in a perfect world, that would be great. In said perfect world, everyone has an equal shot, no bigotry of any kind exists, and one race of people never held another race of people in bondage and then abracadabra-ed racial terror into a system of laws that kept that formerly enslaved group of people from rising too far above what was deemed to be their station. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t be looking at a statistic like this: 93% of Supreme Court justices have been white men while only 2% have been people of color. And, just to reiterate, 0% have been Black women.

So, we don’t quite live in that perfect world of lollipops, rainbows, and equality, now do we?

Also, here’s another fun fact for your reading pleasure: Republican’s political superhero Ronald Reagan made a point of announcing that he planned to nominate the first woman to the bench before naming Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981. Reverse sexism, amirite? Where’s the public outcry at this obvious injustice?

Here’s a radical idea: how about we have a high court that reflects what our country actually looks like? And ICYMI, that’s not 93% white and male.

Let’s bring in a few more numbers to break this down, shall we? According to data from the 2020 Census, the racial makeup of the United States is only 76.3% white. But a whooping 93% of SCOTUS justices have been white men. And while the racial makeup of the U.S. is 13.4% Black, there have only been 2 Black justices in the history of the court, a mere 1.7%. I’m the polar opposite of a numbers person, yet even I can see this doesn’t add up.

Some might argue that when entire groups of people have been systematically excluded from positions of power for centuries, making space for more of those excluded groups of individuals — Black people, women, Hispanic people, members of the LGBTQ community, etc. — is imperative. It isn’t like President Biden is going to pluck the names of random Black women out of a hat and appoint one of them, regardless of their qualifications. In fact, you can bet that whoever is nominated, she will be one of the most, if not the most, qualified individual to ever sit on the bench, man or woman. Because that’s how it works in this country. If you aren’t white and male, you’d better be twice as good if you even hope to be considered for a job that has never been done by someone that looks like you. Actually, make that three times as good, just to give yourself some wiggle room.

Here’s my ultimate question: what’s so wrong with a Supreme Court that looks more like America? It has taken over two centuries to get to this place. To me, that’s way too long. For others, it’s just not long enough, and there’s really nothing a Black woman could do to show she’s sufficiently qualified. Because it’s not about her qualifications, is it? It’s about her race and her gender. It always comes down to that in America. If you aren’t white, every single one of your achievements can be written off as a consequence of Affirmative Action. And there’s no way to prove otherwise.

Suffice to say, I’m buckling in for some rough weather over the next few months. Whoever the eventual nominee is, I’m sending her nothing but good vibes and strength. But I’m sending that to future me too, because this is going to be a frustrating ride, full of microaggressions, impassioned soliloquies on the scourge of reverse racism, and a boatload of misogynoir.

But when those high winds stop howling, the drenching rain subsides, and the sun shines again in a clear blue sky, we’re going to have a Black woman on the Supreme Court. And I’m going to raise a glass to her. But I’m also going to raise a glass to getting one step closer to what this country should be: a place that truly represents us all.

On Being Black, Female, Terrified, & Hopeful in 2020

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I’m pretty anxious about the upcoming election. That’s both the understatement of the century and an accurate description of my current state of being. I spend my day ping ponging between nausea-laced despair and regular despair — despair zero: all of the flavor without any of the pesky calories. If I’m awake, I’m worrying about a few hundred things at once, each one enormous, the cacophony beating along the inside of my skull.

And, yet, I still feel hopeful for some reason.

This is despite being a Black woman at this moment in America.

This is despite all evidence to the contrary.

In fact, let’s take a handful of seconds to go through some of that evidence, and then I’ll make my case for why we should keep on trucking in the direction of the light I’m looking forward to finding one day at the end of this long, strange, narrow tunnel.

After limping through the last four years of an incompetent megalomaniac occupying the White House (when he’s not occupying various golf courses, that is), there appears to be nothing to look forward to, no reprieve, no magic bullet, no hope of any kind. We’re living through a global pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 people in this country and sickened many more, kept us away from family and friends, turned our economy upside down, and financially destroyed millions of American families. Even before the pandemic bulldozed its way across the country, we lived in a state of perpetual dread at what irresponsible, bigoted, and/or outrageous thing the so-called leader of the free world would do next. Racism isn’t new, but Trump sure has managed to make it great again, hasn’t he? Ditto for sexism. And homophobia. And transphobia. And Islamophobia. And xenophobia. You get the point, right? It’s a truckload of isms and phobias. Not to mention the courts are packed to the rafters with conservative judges, we’re not doing one goddamned thing about climate change, and we’re the butt of every joke on the international stage.

But, here I am, hopeful. Nauseous as I maniacally check every election related metric imaginable, but still hopeful.

Part of this hope is directly related to what I do for a living. Back in 2016, as I watched the political train careen off the track and into the canyon below, I had absolutely no way to influence the process past my vote. Don’t get me wrong. One person’s vote is important. But back then I believed voting was all an American needed to do in order to claim engagement in the process.

I learned how wrong I was the hard way.

I felt hopeless and scared the morning after Election Day, and when that despair turned to anger, I didn’t really know what to do about it. By the middle of November, I’d found my people — other pissed off folks (mostly women) that hadn’t been involved before but wanted to fix that lack of engagement in a hurry — and that started me on a path I’m still traveling to this day.

Another reason I’m hopeful is that I finally understand the full extent of my power now, how it’s amplified when I stand shoulder to shoulder with other people like me who want things to be different, fairer, better. Not just a return to the pre-Trump era, but a reimagining of what we could be as a country if only we eradicated racist and sexist systems that have been in place since the nation’s founding.

Every time we lose a fight or take a hit that should leave us down for the count, I feel that abiding, stubborn flicker of hope intensify, and we get back up again. If you’d told me 4 years ago about this persistent little flame, I’d have waved you off, disbelieving. How could such a thing exist, I’d ask, given everything that’s wrong? But now I think it only exists because of what’s wrong. The fixing is fuel, and there’s so much that’s broken.

So, what about this election?

I voted weeks ago, and we’re shortly running out of work that can be done that might influence the direction of this election. But I’m going to keep pushing. I plan to leave it all on the field this year.

Before getting sucked into the world of politics, I’d never experienced the feeling of helping to shape history. Of being part of a movement that could bend the arc of the moral universe a little further towards justice. I feel that now. We’re making history, all of us, together. And we’re a few short days away from the fruits of our labor. I really believe that. I have to. That little flame demands it.

And after Election Day?

We keep going, fighting, pushing to create the country as it should be. There’s so much damned work to do, but I’m grateful to be able to do a small part of it, and I’m even more grateful for the people that are doing the work right along with me.

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Sexism 101: Internalized Misogyny

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In case y’all haven’t noticed, we live in a deeply sexist country. I don’t think I really understood the true depths of that sexism until 2016. I knew the country’s founding documents — you know, the ones talking about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? — had been written solely to benefit rich, land owning white men. If we look back at the Cliff’s Notes version of our history, black, brown, indigenous, and female folks have had to fight tooth, nail, and whatever else to gain the same access to freedom, education, the ballot box, property, etc. that said men received by virtue of their being born rich and white. These fights are still going on today.

But, I guess what I’m saying is, though I knew we had a long way to go where matters of racism were concerned, I thought we’d gotten a whole lot further along the road to enlightenment where issues of sexism were concerned. I mean, there are lots of white women running around, right? And they benefit from systemic white supremacy the same way white men do, right? Wrong. Their access to power runs through the white men standing next to them. They don’t own it. They only borrow it, which means that access is precarious at best and can be torn away at any moment.

I digress.

Back to the 2016 election. Actually, let’s take it back a little further to the 2008 election. I supported Hillary Clinton from the beginning in that primary. I just figured there was no way in hell this country was ready for a black president. But an accomplished white woman? Now, that was doable. Also, I really thought someone would assassinate Barack Obama, and that feeling never dissipated after he won the primary and eventually the presidency. It only intensified. That was something about which I’m glad to have been proven wrong.

So, naturally, when HRC ran again in 2016, I was a supporter. We had our first black president, which I hadn’t thought even remotely possible, and I therefore thought getting our first female president would be a BREEZE (next step, a black female president!). And when I saw the asshole that ended up being her Republican opponent, I really thought we were in for some smooth sailing. Remind me never to get into the prediction business…

Everything that could go wrong in that race went wrong, but the sustained and scathing media scrutiny of HRC surprised me in a way that it just couldn’t when it happened again during the current election cycle, this time focused on the many women running for the highest office in the land of the free. Because I saw the process clearly for what it was: this country’s collective refusal to accept a woman daring to rise to the highest level, the level reserved for men. That’s what this electability argument is all about, and you’ll hear it trumpeted from the rooftops by men and women.

Madeleine Albright once famously said that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. That hell is happening now. We’re living in it. We were born and raised here. Many of us just didn’t realize the full extent of the shitty landscape until after 2016. I’ve been a proponent of burning down the patriarchy since I understood what it was, but the fact that women might be its most loyal foot soldiers never quite hit home the way it did during that election. I can call it out now because I possess the ability to see it clearly for what it is. But when I watch other women jumping to do the work of the patriarchy and tear down another woman before she rises too high, it still saddens me.

Ladies, we’ve got to talk about internalized misogyny, and why it’s one helluva drug.

It’s bad enough when guys limit us because of our gender, but it’s doubly fucked up when another woman does it. But this happens all the time. Why?

Think of it like hazing. It’s absolute, unmitigated hell to get through, and you’d think, given your experience, you’d never want to pay that forward to anyone else. But you do, and with glee (just an FYI here: I’ve never been hazed, nor have I hazed anyone else; fuck that shit). Internalized misogyny works the same way, except the hazing never ends, even once we start paying it forward to other women. And remember what I said about white women and their proximity to white male power? Well, if you don’t tow the patriarchal line, you might lose some of that power. And that’d be like being forced to sit next to the lavatory in Coach after traveling your whole life in the cushy comfort of Business Class (First Class is still reserved for white dudes only, ladies, sorry). The horror.

Don’t get it twisted. Internalized misogyny isn’t just for white women. It may be a garment that fits them the best, but we have women of color out here wearing it too. It doesn’t quite fit the same way, but we can make it work. And it’s not really surprising. The foundations of this country aren’t just racist. They’re sexist too, and that means we’ve all grown up in an environment where women were judged to be inferior. This omnipresent misogyny infects us, and we eat it up, eventually learning to turn it against each other. The patriarchy hides. It protects itself. And its greatest trick is convincing women that we can’t support one another. It makes us believe that there’s only space for one woman at a time in a position of power, though not the top position. It makes us think that the only road to success runs through other women, that we have to tear each other apart and step on each other’s backs to get to the next level. Success is being the badass exception that proves the rule about female inferiority. Whose rule? The patriarchy’s, silly. It sets the music, and we dance.

But what if we’re tired of dancing? What do we do about it? How can we change the toxicity of our culture? The way we were raised? How we learned to treat other women and girls?

Step one: admit that we have a problem.

Step two: commit to doing something to solve it.

That means policing your behavior. That means challenging those around you. That means calling out misogyny wherever we see it, especially in ourselves and other women. If we can’t be on our own side, how in the hell are we going to deal with any of this mess? This isn’t a quick fix, ladies. But this shitshow didn’t come together overnight, which means it’s not going to be dismantled overnight either. This kind of massive shift in our collective behavior means we have to get used to being uncomfortable. It just so happens that discomfort is the condition for change. And, goddamn, we’re already uncomfortable enough with the patriarchy’s bootheel on our necks. Might as well go for it.

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Angry Women Get Sh*t Done

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Immediately after the 2016 election came to an end and the results were clear, I dressed in all black and began mourning the country I wanted America to be. This wasn’t necessarily the country it was, but the idea of it as a shining beacon in the slowly receding darkness of its own reality. My already flagging hope for the future had taken what I worried was a mortal blow, leaving me stumbling through the next few days as I nursed what felt like a repeated sucker punch to the stomach. But after a few days, that deep sadness morphed into something different.

I became enraged.

I wanted to scream, to burn shit to the ground, to roam the streets bellowing my refusal to accept the country as it was. And that fiery anger led me to do something I never thought I’d do: I got political. I became an active member of my local Democratic Party and joined every other progressive group I could find. That didn’t feel like enough, so I started a grassroots organization with a few other pissed off women that also wanted to get shit done. Instead of howling into the void, we figured out how to make change happen in our community. We built coalitions of other pissed off people, mostly women, and held our elected representatives accountable. When that didn’t work (I’m from a ruby red district in the Sunshine State), we rolled up our sleeves and worked to get local candidates elected. When the 2018 midterm cycle began, I threw myself into working for a gubernatorial candidate and hit the ground running. I’m still running today, and I’m still livid. I haven’t stopped being furious since a few days after November 8th, 2016.

Now, let’s cut back to the present day.

In a recent primary debate, a certain female candidate eviscerated one of her male opponents so completely, I was waiting for someone to hiss FINISH HIM. She then proceeded to carpet bomb the rest of the participants with devastating arguments and critiques while simultaneously making an ironclad case for her own electability. In short, there were a lot of things she came to do on the debate stage that night, and playing wasn’t one of them.

But after that performance, in pure this is why we can’t have nice things fashion, there was quite a bit of buzz that essentially centered on how angry this female candidate seemed, and how that was unfortunate, because this was a contest of ideas and likeability, and no one likes an angry woman. The immediate application of this annoying double standard especially rankled me, considering two of the male candidates spend the better part of their debate performances yelling at the audience, and one of them appears perpetually enraged, as though an entire coterie of grandchildren just ran through his precious flower beds after being repeatedly warned to stay the hell away from them.

Here’s the larger question in all this: why is male anger seen as a sign of righteousness and female anger is seen as a sign of instability?

We’re living in a political climate that’s akin to an endless dumpster fire that just keeps getting hotter and more destructive by the minute. We don’t have time to play nice. I want my presidential candidate to be angry. I want the person to be able to summon the flames of hell if need be, and focus them directly on the problem. This isn’t debate club, y’all. This is a fight for what the soul of our nation could become. It’s a fight for our shared future. Will we continue down this path of destruction and widespread inequality, or will we start to veer in more constructive, equitable, and sustainable directions? We have a man sitting in the White House (or gallivanting about the golf course, more like it) that would use the Constitution to wipe his ass if we let him. He’s damned near doing it now, and his cronies are more than happy to ask how high before he even thinks to demand they jump. This isn’t a drill, folks. It’s a five alarm fire. We need a fighter. We need someone enraged by the status quo and committed to do whatever’s necessary to change it.

The criticisms of that debate performance stem from society’s penchant for only allowing women to operate in one of two speeds, and they just happen to reside at the opposite end of the spectrum: serene and refreshing as a southern breeze or batshit crazy, hysterical, irrational. If a woman shows even the slightest hint of anger, that automatically labels her unfit for certain high level positions for which society agrees men are just better suited. And if she remains sugar and spice and everything nice, well, she’s too soft for those positions anyway, isn’t she? Just leave it to the men, sweetie.

This double standard is amplified to nearly insupportable levels if you’re black or another woman of color. God forbid any woman be angry, no matter the situation, but if she also happens to be a person of color, she’d better learn to balance on eggshells while keeping her emotions locked the fuck down or face swift repercussions.

As is my custom when faced with the worst American society has to offer, I’m calling B.S. on all of this. I categorically reject the implied premise of your argument that this female presidential candidate is unfit because she unleashed her righteous anger on several of her opponents.

This isn’t a tea party. It’s a race to see who is best equipped to do what’s arguably the most important job in the world. And, anyway, world history is basically the story of pissed off men conducting their conquests and wars while women mostly looked on from the sidelines, smiling sweetly as they lay the table for a home cooked dinner. It’s about damned time we have some women take center stage for a change, and if that means slicing through a number of less qualified men to get there, I’m here for it.

I don’t care who you are, what you believe, or who you’re supporting. If you can look at what’s going on in this country and not feel a deep seated, unquenchable rage, then you must not be paying attention. And if you’re still clinging to outdated gender norms, that shit is on you. Women are pissed. We’re running for office. We’re winning. Get over it or get the hell out of the way.

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The Myth of Electability

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Now that we’re officially in the 2020 Presidential Election year, we should probably take a moment to seriously reflect on an issue that hasn’t so much been lingering on the periphery, as standing in the middle of the room, sucking up all the air and shrieking like the squeaky, troublemaking wheel it is.

Electability.

Since the end of the 2018 Midterm Election cycle, we’ve been beaten over the head with this blunt object of a word by every political pundit, both amateur and professional. We’ve had to watch as they frantically and repeatedly consider the viability of every black, Hispanic, and female candidate that bought a ticket to ride the nonstop crazy train that is the Democratic Presidential Primary. This hysteria quickly bled from TV screens and print media to the streets, where everyday voters continued the circular conversation, becoming more agitated with each trip around the roundabout, never noticing they weren’t actually getting anywhere (Look, kids. Big Ben. Parliament).

This level of fanatical public interrogation on the matter almost made this philosophy major wonder if there’s a platonic form out there labeled Electability that I just never saw mentioned in any of the Socratic Dialogues, and we’re all stuck in a frenzied search for earthly manifestations of it in every presidential candidate. And, sadly, it seems none of the brown, black, Asian, and female folks running are able to measure up to the heavenly ideal.

Look, I get it. This election is massively important. And not just in the way that every presidential election is called the most important election of our lives. This one is critical in a way that we can understand viscerally, not just academically. Four more years with this tweet crazy madman at the helm will surely lead us straight into the deadly (and melting) iceberg lingering not-so-distantly on the horizon. We can’t afford to lose in November, which means no one wants to go all in for a candidate that can’t ultimately win big on Election Day.

Given these legitimate and albeit somewhat hysterical concerns, I’ve talked to many dozens of people who demand to know who can win against Trump, because that’s who they want to support in the Primary. They never mention who they like. They might not like anyone, not really. They’re much more interested in the odds. They want me to whisper the name of the person that will win, as though I know such a thing simply because I work in politics.

I tell everyone who asks the same thing: vote for the person you love in the Primary and then vote for the Democrat on the ballot in November. If luck exists as something more than our crossed fingers and anxious entreaties, it’ll be the same candidate.

But this advice isn’t good enough. These people are desperate to keep from making the ‘wrong’ choice. And they look to me as an authority (how did we get here, America?!) that can ensure they make the ‘right’ choice. These folks don’t have time to waste. The Primary’s coming. They need to know who’s going to win big. They need to know who’s electable. They want me to tell them the name of the person guaranteed to deliver us from this ever worsening nightmare.

Okay, I lied before. But I’m ready to come clean now. I do know who can win in November, and I’m willing to tell you, provided you really want to know. Lean in close…

The candidate that can win is the one for whom we vote.

Mind blowing, right?

But it’s true. And I tell people this too, even though very few actually want to hear it. They want a silver bullet that will slay the were-asshole currently occupying the White House, but all we have is our votes, our sweat equity, and our enthusiasm. The candidate we believe in, the one we’re willing to work for, to put in volunteer hours for, to eventually cast a ballot for, is the one that can win.

The field of Democratic candidates has already been culled of the black, Hispanic, and Asian hopefuls, each a victim of the cult of electability. And what does that word even mean, anyway? If we’re being real, electability is code for white male. And why wouldn’t it be? Besides one solitary individual, all of the other 44 presidents have been white and male. And because white supremacy and misogyny are deeply ingrained in our culture, no matter your race, your sex, your level of self-identified wokeness, when we look at that office, too many of us see it as the sole territory of white men. Throughout history, they’ve always led at the highest levels. Why shouldn’t they keep leading? And, no, Obama’s election didn’t fix this situation, or we wouldn’t still be having this conversation. He’s the exception that proves the rule, not the outlier that breaks it down.

We can’t identify this as a problem until we say it out loud. And we can’t fix it until we hold ourselves, those around us, and the punditry class accountable. Electability just means who we vote for. And no one is unelectable simply by virtue of their race or gender. No one ever says that part out loud, but why has no one asked about the electability of the white male candidates, including one that’s not even out of his thirties? Imagine a 38 year old woman running for president having never held statewide office. She’d have been laughed off the stage and then eaten alive for her ostentatiousness alone…

Electability is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, here’s my advice, if you still care to hear it. Vote for the candidate you believe in. The candidate that lights a fire under your ass and makes you want to donate, knock doors, make phone calls, or just bother the hell out of your friends and family because you can’t stop talking about how great the person is. That’s who can win, if more of us commit to putting in the hard work, the donations, and the votes. Don’t fall victim to the bullshit myth of electability. That’s just a way of keeping diverse candidates from daring to imagine they could one day ascend to the White House.

Electability is what our votes say it is.

When it comes time to cast my ballot in the Primary, I plan to vote for the candidate I believe is best suited to be president, the one I want to see in the White House in 2021. There’s no magic to it. Just votes. So, vote.

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