The Undercover Introvert

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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Everything We Love is Trash

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When you’re willing to keep learning new things every day, it sure does make it harder to burrow into your ignorance, no matter how warm, snuggly, and persistent it seems. Evolution of thought, though a necessary prerequisite of growing as a person, can also be uncomfortable and stress inducing. The things you once accepted without reflection are now problematic. Popular attitudes have shifted beneath your feet, and, suddenly, you are faced with a radically altered landscape. You can either get with the program or risk becoming one of those individuals constantly talking about how things were better in your day. What you usually mean is that they were better for you, and screw everyone else. But occasionally something happens that shines a harsh spotlight on your past ignorance and complacency, making it impossible to ignore.

Such a thing recently happened to me, in fact.

I was on Twitter the other day — mostly because I’m a glutton for punishment, but also because I adore pettiness in all its online forms — and I happened upon a tweet that went something like this:

You’re trying to tell me that Willy Wonka sent Golden Tickets around the ENTIRE world and five white children got them ALL???

I have to tell you, I was shook. I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a child and loved it. I watched Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka more times than I can count, rapt with glee as I imagined myself wandering through the chocolate factory, avoiding all the booby traps and ending up in the glass elevator, an everlasting gobstopper clutched in hand, victorious. But how exactly did I see myself in that story when there wasn’t a single person that looked like me represented in the book or the film? And, seriously?! No kids from Asia, South America, Africa? Not even one? And why didn’t I notice that glaring absence before that devastatingly simple tweet?

I’m not joking when I tell you that single sentence shook me to my core. It made me reevaluate everything I consumed as a child — books, movies, television shows, EVERYTHING — and take a full assessment of the appalling lack of diversity.

I had another such moment of sudden clarity when watching the Last Jedi in the theater a few years ago. I’ve been a Star Wars fan since childhood. Some of my fondest memories involve watching the original three movies on television with my dad and brother. Sitting in the theater, watching the final battle between the resistance fighters and the First Order, there were the obligatory close ups of the rebel pilots in their cockpits, dialing up the drama as you wait for one of them to suddenly burst into flames and explode after getting hit. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a closeup of a black female fighter pilot filled up the screen. It only lasted a few seconds, but it was enough to sit me back in my seat. I clearly recall saying: WHOA! And I was flooded with real elation…until I realized my excitement was born of the nearly complete lack of black people in the original movies. We had Lando, but he betrayed Han Solo, and he was never a central character. All the central characters were white.

And if something I loved as a child isn’t completely devoid of diverse characters, it’s chock full of sexism or stereotypes of what various POCs are supposed to be like. So much of what many of us adored decades ago has not aged well, leaving us struggling to come to terms with the trash we once believed was treasure. When we know better, we do better, but that’s complicated when large portions of our childhoods are bound up in the soft, sentimental feelings all these books and films stirred up in us back in the day.

I wanted a Golden Ticket with every fiber of my being when I was a kid, years before anyone knew about letters to Hogwarts. I wanted to be a jedi, even though there were no black jedis (and don’t start with me that Samuel L. Jackson’s Mace Windu was a black jedi in the prequels, which technically predated the original trilogy, because that storyline didn’t even exist when I was a kid, so sit down), no female jedis, and definitely no black female jedis. My imagination filled in the gaps in what I saw in the world. And, eventually, the world began to catch up with me. But what does it say that I didn’t even identify this as a problem? That I just considered it normal to never see faces that looked like mine represented in the media I consumed and loved?

I say it all the time and, despite the repetition, it’s never any less true:

Representation matters.

I have no idea what eight year old me might have thought at the sight of a little black girl or boy walking into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Who knows how I might have reacted at the appearance of a black jedi as the central character in one of the original three Star Wars movies or, hell, just a black female fighter jet pilot rallying with the rest of the resistance fighters. And if there were fewer movies and cartoons where the long and short of the female lead’s life revolved around pleasing a man or finding a husband, by any means necessary, what then?

Seeing myself reflected in more of what I watched and read as a child might have changed the way I thought of the world and my place in it. It might have expanded my idea of what was possible. I’ll never know, because I didn’t have that wealth of representation as a girl, but it’s encouraging to see more of it for the kids coming up today. When we know better, we do better.

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2020 Burn Book: Men, I’m Lighting You Up

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I already compiled my resolutions for the new year, but in light of recent events, I’m adding one more and moving it to the top of the list:

Men, if you commit sexual harassment, assault, or just general unwanted creepiness, I am calling you the fuck out.

I’m done. Time to burn this motherfucker all the way down. And y’all are on notice. Don’t act surprised when I tell folks how you really are.

First, let’s set some parameters. There’s definitely a spectrum when it comes to creepiness. On one side is unwanted messages from men we don’t follow on social media asking for dates, pictures, to know more about us, etc. Gross, but that’s what the block function is for. On the other side is full on life-shattering sexual assault. In the gray area between these two poles lie microaggressions, gaslighting, unwanted sexual advances, pressure for sexual favors, victim blaming, retaliation, and the list goes on. And on. And on.

Men, if you do any of this shit going forward, get ready to be exposed for the disgusting POS you are. I plan to go out of my damned way to make sure people know.

Why the sudden need to put all of this out there, you ask?

I just got off the phone with a close friend who called me first thing in the morning to tell me about some creep that sexually harassed her at a business meeting. At one point, he followed her into the bathroom, locked the door, and attempted to go even further. Thankfully, she was able to escape. Though shaken emotionally, she said nothing and tried to continue doing her job, which was why she was there in the first place. But this dude wouldn’t stop. He kept making advances and being handsy. When it was finally clear that she wasn’t interested, he ended by calling her a bitch in front of another man involved in the meeting. She left the situation as quickly as possible.

When we spoke, she was angry, frightened, and at a complete loss as to how to move forward. This meeting was about future consulting work. Should she tell others involved in the project? Should she pull out of this business opportunity so she wouldn’t have to see and work with this attacker moving forward? Should she make a big deal out of this? Or just get on with her life?

This helplessness, this terrible, roiling fury that too often ends up turning inward to eat away at us, is such a fucking textbook response to the kind of situation that can happen to women anywhere and at any time. We are always in danger of harassment and assault. We learn to live with it, because what other choice do we have? We teach our daughters how to live with it. We shore up the crumbling defenses of our friends when they take a hit, no matter how severe, and then we do what women have always done: we pull up our big girl panties and we get back to our lives.

It’s unconscionable that we live like this as a culture, that half the population just has to suck it up, buttercup, while the other half gallivants through life, setting fire to the women around them at will.

I’m calling bullshit. I’m not playing the game anymore. I’m done.

While I was talking to my friend, she repeatedly mentioned that she hadn’t been wearing anything that could have led this asshole on (see: appropriate business attire). She mentioned a few times that this was a business meeting that took place in the middle of the day (socially acceptable time for women to assume personal safety). She mentioned that she hadn’t done anything at all to make this POS think it was okay to follow her into the bathroom and then continue to harass her throughout the rest of the meeting (society teaches us that our behavior is directly responsible for how men decide to act). Even as she corrected herself, sometimes mid-sentence, to acknowledge that she understood it didn’t matter what she was wearing or what time it was, it was important to her that I knew she was dressed appropriately and that this occurred in broad daylight.

This call isn’t the first conversation I’ve had with a female friend about a situation like this, and it won’t be the last. Some situations haven’t been as severe, and some have been much, much worse. But the emotional aftermath looks the same in every case: the woman is left feeling helpless, angry, ashamed, and unsure of what to do next. Should she report it? What would happen? Would anyone even believe her? If people did believe her, would they care? What about retaliation? Should she quit her job? Or should she just take a personal day, cobble herself back together again, and then pretend nothing happened?

We should not have to live like this.

This is my solemn oath that if some man says or does something shitty and I find out about it, I will talk about it loudly and openly. I will out you, and I’ll keep telling people until someone fucking cares. If it sets your personal or professional career ablaze, that’s on you. Because women have been paying the high price for men’s decisions for centuries. And silence only helps the aggressor. It allows for the creation of additional situations in which other women are victimized by repeat predators. Even worse, this silence causes our insides to corrode over time. It poisons who we are. It makes us question ourselves and other women. It isolates us.

This bullshit has to stop.

Women shouldn’t be forced to continue removing themselves from professional and social situations to avoid men who have attacked or harassed them. Why do men get to continue on in their lives and careers unhindered by their own behavior? Why are women routinely left to bear the consequences?

I know women who have left jobs, who don’t volunteer with certain organizations, who don’t leave the house at night alone, who refuse to date, because of things men have done to them. I know women who are horrified to learn that I go running alone before the sun comes up, because of what a man could do. But I prefer to run in the dark. Running when the sun is out invites honks, shouts from open car windows, and men pulling their vehicles over for an unwanted chat. I also altered where I run to avoid main roads, which, together with running in complete darkness, has really cut down on the harassment.

That’s the long and short of what women have to do to get by: alter our lives to cut down on the harassment. Choose another route home from work. Quit your job. Start shopping at a different grocery store. Stop taking public transportation. Walk around with headphones jammed into your ears, even when you aren’t listening to music. Move to another town. Don’t make eye contact with male strangers. Only go out at night in a large group. Dress in less form fitting clothing.

But it’s never enough. No matter how disciplined we are in policing our own behavior, we can’t control what men will do to us. Because the problem isn’t us. It’s them.

Men, you are the problem. Your behavior. Your sense of entitlement. Your belief that women are here for your enjoyment. In 2020, I intend to make it my duty to disabuse as many of you as possible of the notion that we are simply receptacles for your unwanted attention, abuse, and harassment. We aren’t in the workplace, gym, store, classroom, social gathering, or wherever waiting for you to notice us. And we aren’t the ones that need to leave a situation after you do something wrong. You are. And, please, let the door hit you on the way out.

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One ‘Year of the Woman’ is Not Enough

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2018 was called the Year of the Woman. The first election cycle to take place fully ensconced within the #MeToo era came to a close with a historic number of women running for office and winning. Many of these newly minted legislators were women of color, and the doors they flung open simply by their mere presence at the table reverberated through the nation’s marginalized communities. As a black woman, I felt the power of it. Representation matters, and I saw more faces that looked like mine in a crowd of lawmakers than I’d ever seen in my life.

More of us are at the table. That means we made it, right?

Well, not quite.

We still have a long way to go before we reach the fabled promised land of racial and gender equality. Last year was yet another baby step in a seemingly endless line of baby steps. Slow and steady wins the race. We step forward twice, get pushed back once, maybe even twice, ad infinitum. Meanwhile, the road ahead of us goes on past the horizon, the goal completely out of sight. No one quite knows the distance between where we stand and where we want to be, but moving forward is the only option, because we know exactly what dangerous territory lies behind us.

Thanks to the many hundreds of thousands of women who came before me, being a woman in 2019 is better, but it’s still not easy.

I may no longer pass from the dominion of my father to that of my spouse, but I’m not paid the same as a white man for identical work.

Birth control and access to safe, legal abortion may give me the kind of control over my reproductive system that women living decades ago could only dream of, but the war on women waged by old white men rages on and, if successful, would leave me with few options that didn’t include being either celibate or perpetually barefoot and pregnant.

I may be able to go wherever I want, whenever I want, without asking any man’s permission, but I’m not safe walking alone after dark, being too friendly to a male stranger, being too dismissive of a male stranger, or leaving my drink unattended at a party for fear of what might happen.

I may be able to set my sights on any job that strikes my fancy, but I can’t be taken seriously in most professional spaces, and I often have to push back extremely hard on men who believe, simply by the grace of their gender, that they are more learned than I am, no matter the subject or situation. When confronted on their mansplaining, most men seem taken aback, because they don’t even notice themselves doing it. Yet it happens ALL. THE. TIME.

And those are just a small sampling of the many complications of being a woman in this country.

When you add being black on top of that, all of the aforementioned difficulties magnify, and the discrimination becomes labyrinthine in its complexity.

After an incident, I often find myself wondering: was this because I’m black? Or because I’m a woman? Or both?

But there are no clear answers, only the dark, ugly feeling of being targeted, humiliated, overlooked, or attacked.

Discrimination exists as a claustrophobic maze for those of us that call more than one marginalized group home, and the uncertainty inherent in its twists and turns often makes it impossible to find our footing. You flounder, you double back, you forge ahead, hoping for something better around the next corner. An exit, though you don’t ever expect to find one.

I live in a country that once owned people who looked like me, and also a country in which people of my gender we never expected to contribute to society in any meaningful way. Women were to bear children and look pretty. Black women were to bear children and toil until they died. And though we’re no longer seen as property or lesser than men in the eyes of the law, we’re still nurtured by a society that views us as fundamentally weaker than men, both mentally and physically. Our bodies are still the subject of a dogged legislative agenda that won’t stop until it completely strips away control over our own reproductive destiny. Our bodies are still seen as existing almost exclusively for male enjoyment.

It would never occur to me to tell a man minding his own business in a public space that he should smile, that he’s good looking, or that I’d be interested in dating and/or sleeping with him. These are all things I’ve heard from complete strangers, and not just once. Not even just a dozen times.

It would also never occur to me to interrupt a man who was a subject matter expert because I assumed I knew more than he did, though I was not a subject matter expert, nor was I invited to speak on the topic. Yet this is also something that happens to women with annoying regularity. Even when we are speaking about our unique experiences as women in the world, men will often dive headfirst into the fray to talk over us, muscling their way into a conversation that shouldn’t even feature them.

Again, these are just small things, but if you add enough of them together, they become weights heavy enough to hamper our upward mobility and obliterate our spirits.

So, yes, let’s celebrate 2018 as the Year of the Woman. But let’s not forget that there have been thousands of years celebrating men, their achievements, and their exclusive centuries’ old dominion over the world and all the women in it.

We women can’t be content with a single year that only sees our total representation in Congress reach 25% while we make up more than 50% of the population. We have to keep pushing until the many layers of glass ceilings shatter, and we can breathe the fresh air and feel the full strength of the sun on our faces.

The thought of a world in which the full range of possibility and promise isn’t limited on the basis of sex, race, disability, who you love, or how you self identify is what keeps me going every day, despite the constant backsliding, the defeats, the frustrations, and the heartache.

As always, women of color, disabled women, women identifying as LGBTQ have a harder path, one we’ve often had to walk alone as our more privileged sisters moved quickly along the path ahead of us, leaving us behind. But none of us will truly be free until we all are, meaning we’ll have to wait for that last woman to make her way across the finish line before we can consider the battle won.

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Dear Trolls: Write Your Own GD Post

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I write about racism and sexism quite a bit, and the touchiness of the subjects only seem to underscore why these are still such pervasive problems for us in this country. It’s always amazing to me that anyone living and breathing today can deny the existence of racism or sexism, but plenty of people do (why, hello, privilege, you oblivious devil, you), which is most of the reason I choose to feature these topics so consistently in my writing. Also, spoiler alert, I’m a black woman, and the intersection of gender and race happens to be my particular jam. Write what you know, as the old cliche advises.

As you might imagine, I get some pretty fun responses to my articles. In this case, fun is a convenient euphemism for disgusting, rude, racist, sexist. Etcetera. These less than witty replies are normally short and sweet, an attempt to devastate my argument in a way that normally just ends up proving my original point. Reading these kinds of responses always makes me cackle with self satisfied glee, because the commenter really doesn’t get it, and I find that level of absolute obtuseness amusing beyond reason.

But there exists another class of responses entirely. To be honest, I don’t actually read these responses in full, mostly because of how long they are. A short, grammatically incorrect insult that aims well high of the mark is hilarious and fun to read, mostly because it doesn’t waste that much of my time and provides much needed laughter. But a response that goes on for paragraphs — some seeming to closely follow the five paragraph model of writing persuasive essays that I learned as a freshman in high school — astound me. Why? To what end? Did you honestly expect me to read this novella and respond? Because most of my thoughts on the matter are in the original post, which you can reference to your heart’s content if you didn’t properly track my argument during your first reading.

Seriously, y’all, if your nasty response to my article or blog post is longer than the 700 words I originally wrote, how about you write your own goddamned post?

In light of this odd tendency, I’m just going to go ahead and put everyone on notice: I write because I have something to say and I want to share it. I actually do enjoy vigorous dialogue — in person — but the beauty part about writing is that I get to launch my opinions out in the digital ether and you can either read them or not read them. What you can’t really do is argue with what I’ve written down. You can let it simmer and change the way you think about the subject, or you can disagree with what I’ve said and move the fuck on, taking absolutely nothing with you when you go. But if you reply to something I write with an article of your own, you’ve just wasted your time. That’s a big fat TL;DR from me.

Ain’t. Nobody. Got. Time. For. That.

If you find that upsetting, don’t despair too quickly. There’s still a wonderful upside to the magical medium that is the internet: you can write what you want, whenever you want, and maybe someone will actually read it. How fabulous is that?!

If your impulse upon reading my 1,000 words is to reply with 1,000 snarky, densely packed words of your own, I invite you to kindly follow these steps:

Fully assess if this is the best place to leave such lengthy commentary.

Unless and until you perform step number one, don’t begin to reply to my original post.

Calculate the probability of your response actually being read (Spoiler: it’s 0%).

Kindly compile a list of pros and cons before you place itchy fingers on keyboard.

Only continue writing when you are sure you can keep any response well south of 100 words.

Fully edit your response to eliminate all spelling and grammatical errors.

Finally, highlight all and delete.

By carefully following my trademarked FUCKOFF method, you can save yourself so much unnecessarily wasted time and energy. Think of the free minutes suddenly opened up in your schedule that you would have spent throwing poorly chosen words into the wind.

You might be asking yourself what you should do if, after following my FUCKOFF method you still feel compelled to let loose a stream of noxious online commentary in hopes of putting an uppity black feminist in her place? Well, as aforementioned: WRITE YOUR OWN GODDAMNED BLOG POST.

It really is that simple. If I can do it, you can do it — maybe not as elegantly, but, you know, we can’t all be wordsmiths.

And if something I’ve written about racism or sexism has really hit you so hard that you find yourself enraged to a level that makes it impossible for you to let it go, maybe take a nice long look in the mirror. Sounds as though it was written with someone like you in mind. As always, reflection is your friend, as is personal growth…

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