Read My Feelings Podcast Episode 3: Diversity Is A Joke | "My Petty Protest" by @shantellewrites

I always see news updates and wish I could go back in time to argue against some idiot who didn’t get it and ram the newspaper, well really the tab on my web browser on my laptop, or rip the 65-inch flat screen off my bedroom wall, and shove the reporter talking into their face and say, “See you idiot, what I tried to tell you?!” But to be honest, I know that people never even remember shit I say. I, on the other hand, remember everything, and when the “breaking news” comes out, I know exactly who I want to go back and confront. I remember every fucking argument, and I’ve replayed them in my head over and over for years; a gift of my neuroses–or genius.

And this article stood out right away, as I ruminated on all my annoyances about diversity I’ve faced in tech companies, startups, and white corporate America in general. I thought about how I had to go to these Friday fire chats the CEO started at this one startup, during the George Floyd upset in Summer 2020.

I had convinced this CEO to take my job out of New York and work from home in Charlotte, North Carolina to be with my daughter. I had waited patiently for his decision, knowing that if I expressed how urgent the issue had become, that would only make him say “No”. I’ve learned that white folks become especially hardened if you show you really need something. Maybe that’s a universal reaction to neediness, but nevertheless, I knew this man would be going against his core belief that people need to come into the office. I’ll tell you how I manipulated him fully a little later…

The CEO scheduled these ‘optional’ meetings on Friday to discuss how racial tensions were affecting us all? But I knew these meetings weren’t optional for me. I’m the only black person whose ideas they must know. I’m the only one, when not in the office, who must participate to be a part of the team. Actually, I had not watched George Floyd die on a New York City block because I don’t watch shit like that.

I agree with Kanye West in some clip^[1] where he talks about how they constantly put those images, black people being hosed and chased by dogs every black history month, to reprogram our hopelessness. Why watch this George Floyd clip when all these other black folks were reporting they were so traumatized they couldn’t think straight?

1. I gotta work with white folks every day, that’s why you’re not gonna catch me watching 12 years a Slave on a Sunday night.

2. My mom has always been selective about what she chooses to watch and when. We could beg my mom to watch a new movie, and she might just say “No, my mind is not ready for that right now.”

I used to go to class with my mom and my favorite aunt, to Housatonic Community College. My aunt taught me algebra at 6 and my mom read me Oedipus and The Odyssey. I visited The Breakers^[2] mansions and sat on a bidet in Rhode Island. I boarded a submarine. I collected fossils in the Catskills^[3]. I’d been to Broadway and become accustomed to reasoning with adults.

Jacques Louis David’s The Death of Socrates (1787) is one of the most important paintings in The Met collection. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/articles/2022/5/the-death-of-socrates-new-discoveries

I was further cultured at an affluent college preparatory school in Connecticut. I visited the MET^[4] every year and dressed up to recreate Socrates choosing to take the poison. I learned French and ate escargot in a quaint French restaurant long before the CEO took us to a fancy restaurant for dinner. I knew how to use chopsticks, which is a skill I became very proud of. It seemed every new boss aimed to unnerve me by suggesting sushi on my first day of work.

I’ve walked on the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard^[5], where presidents vacation. Once, on one of my solo travels about the Vineyard, I sat on the floor in the aisle of a small indie movie theater. The movie was Rush Hour 2, a much-anticipated sequel. I was invisible on the ground, like a fly on a white wall. The crowd was safe amongst their own on the Vineyard; I got to see racism, when it didn’t have to be hidden. Jackie Chan told Chris Tucker he would “smack him back to Africa!” and the entire theater erupted in loud laughter that lasted so long I couldn’t hear the next scene.

 I’m reminded of this when I hear Dave Chapelle tell Oprah^[6] about the time he realized the white execs weren’t laughing with him but at him. I was again reminded of their uninhibited laughter when I watched the debate of James Baldwin vs William F Buckley. If the majority agreed with Buckley, perhaps the standing ovation Baldwin received was just for show. Buckley dismissed the oppression of the black people by Baldwin’s existence. But I, like Baldwin, am a token too. Now, let me brag a little more about my tokenism, possibly to my chagrin…

James Baldwin v. William F. Buckley (1965) | Legendary Debate (185) James Baldwin v. William F. Buckley (1965) | Legendary Debate - YouTube

I’ve played every sport from squash and lacrosse, and even the French game Bocce.^[7] I’ve seen movies from all genres and in all languages. I can name actors and unique camera shots from Soderbergh to Spike Lee. I’ve read infinite texts, my favorites from Dostoevsky to Sister Souljah. I was a first-chair violinist and know every song in the Sound of Music and on DMX’s first album.

They do not know this when they look at me and my black face, thick body, and poor circumstance. They do not know that the first startup, that I worked for after I left the Yale School of Medicine, forgot that I was starting and no one was in the office when I arrived. They do not know that I was the only one who had to take a computer test during my interview and solved it so quickly– to their surprise! They do not know that when they took me out for lunch after the interview, walking back, I noticed that my car had been towed. When I found no one in the office to greet me on my first day, I didn’t leave. I picked up a book I saw in the office and taught myself relational databases. Within 3 months, instead of 6, I was promoted to Business Analyst.

I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X as a young child, and I too must constantly reinvent myself. At every job, I must prove myself, and start from scratch each time. They want me to entertain them with my nigger stories at this Friday chat, and I’m so mad at myself for doing so. I’m mad because I realize, after hearing Buckley, that I fed their crucial desire: their addiction “to care”.

Now I will share the article^[8] that spawned my own. It’s a little ways below, but first I’ll give you background. The software engineer, recently promoted to manager, sat in the front passenger seat while my CEO drove us to the French restaurant. I don’t think I said anything to start their passionate discussion, but they needed to get it out that white and Asian engineers are equal, but you couldn’t find decent minority talent. I sat quietly, like I’d done on the Vineyard, silencing my need to interject. Without an adversary, my CEO objected to his own stance. He told us that once there was a very smart, hard-working black girl that he never recognized, nor promoted. I remember the heavy silence when he realized I was sitting directly behind him. I was overjoyed in the backseat, knowing I’d be going to Charlotte!

That was a cold winter night in upstate New York. In the heat of the summer, that same passenger-seat software engineer would challenge me on Friday chat. He would tell me, with the same passion, that I don’t care enough if I’m not going to protests like him. I love Jewish people for they identify with our struggle, yet sometimes I see their denial of their white privilege. I told him it’s not safe for me to be out there protesting like him, but he couldn’t get it.

NEW YORK (AP) — New York City has agreed to pay more than $13 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit brought on behalf of roughly 1,300 people who were arrested or beaten by police during racial injustice demonstrations that swept through the city during the summer of 2020.

If approved by a judge, the settlement, which was filed in Manhattan federal court Wednesday, would be among the most expensive payouts ever awarded in a lawsuit over mass arrests, experts said.

I suppose they felt these Friday chats, to make me discuss what I didn’t want to, was my care.  An Asian girl, transitioning to the pronouns He/Him, was being supported with care. Well, he was very smart and in tune and said what I could never say. I had another Asian friend at my last job, a bestie, who was also capable of seeing me. We’d take extra-long lunch breaks on rainy days to sit down for ramen, but she was never at risk for her job. She could understand anything I told her, without absorbing my rage.

I was even able to tell her about an article I'd read, that Asians received more money on the dollar than other minorities, but their docile nature kept them out of holding real power.^[9] Like Jews they have whiter skin. Unlike any other race, they are synonymous with being intelligent. Say what you want about Chinese Communism and Japanese Isolationism, the ability to protect your own culture and have roots to it is indispensable. It is history that black people lack; roots to something other than slavery and George Floyd videos.

Baldwin in a debate against Weiss says this.^[10] He says his name is just something a slave owner gave to him. Is that not what I believe? I have this last name Wright and I believe that I’m somehow in the right spot living in North Carolina, close to the visionary Wright brothers that invented planes. And yet, I can only imagine that I was a slave of those brothers, or somehow helped them with the plane design and was never credited. It wasn’t until I met the Sudanese princess in college that I had any sense of royal connections.

The newly Asian man boldly asks the CEO what we’re going to do to help the George Floyd cause besides talking about it. Every company, from Apple to McDonalds, was giving their public support. She asked if we could make a donation. And you know what the CEO said? He said a donation wouldn’t really matter because our company (well his company) isn’t big enough to be seen giving the donation. Basically, why do it if no one would know? That’s when I felt really horrible for telling them about that time that I’d gone over to say hi to my cousins in the projects and police had apparated from thin air in a raid. I told them this story on the first Friday chat, but I was so drained and regretful afterwards, I never told them another.

I tried to walk to my car only to hear the threat from a big strong white man in full SWAT gear say, “Bitch, you don’t think I’ll tase you?!”. They sat us all down on the pavement in a line in the projects and looked at my face and compared my facial features to my cousins in line and knew we must be family. Then the chief detective, well known to my cousins and the residents as someone not to be fucked with said, “I can’t stand you niggers. I hate you fucking niggers. You all out here on welfare…” He didn’t see me as cultured at all, and the sting of the situation hurt for weeks. He wrote me a ticket for trespassing, because I guess the projects are technically government property. I never was summoned to court for that ticket, but I do remember the over $100 fee causing me stress. Not too long ago, not paying off a remaining $45 fee and missing court had resulted in a warrant for my arrest and Marshalls and SWAT coming, cornering me in my 3rd floor apartment. (Luckily, I had reopened the ticket just the day before, and used my pretty looks to seduce one of the officers so that I could avoid being arrested, which they said was not even possible).

William F Buckley said, most importantly, that we could not entertain a threat to the current structure of society, especially if it was going to be a violent conflict. He said that the negro plight was too complex to fix; and that any suggestion to change it was ideological at best. He said that people like Baldwin, and of course myself, are proof that there is opportunity for the black man. But the part that really gets me, is he said the only thing white people can do is to “care”. Buckley’s piece, though not as eloquent and easy to follow as the amazingly eloquent Baldwin, made me realize that white folks want to care more than they want to help. I mean I always knew this but hearing it from this white man’s own mouth made it so obvious. This is the same response to mass shootings, why they keep continuing just like George Floyd events. Rather than changing gun laws, they send prayers.

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension. It is the presence of justice.” - MLK

And this is why I’ve always excelled in history and loved to read, because my mother always told me, “History repeats itself”. This is why she and I never throw away clothes, because bell bottoms will always come back. The other day, my social influencer daughter rocked the detailed denim piece that I wore next to her when she was 2 and went to take pictures. She said they don’t embroider denim like this anymore. She can wear my high school clothes and scour the closets of her grandmom and great-aunt to start “new” trends.

And this is why I hate DNI, Diversity and inclusion, Chiefs of Diversity, etc. I’ve hated them since their birth, and apparently billions of dollars were invested into these programs during George Floyd, only to now see these chiefs, black women, stepping down from major companies, complaining that they have to “whitesplain” (I’m not gonna explain what that means) with no power or autonomy. I read an article that finally made sense. It said the CEO has to be the other chief of diversity^[11] - for aren’t they the ones who set the culture and have power to make change?

This CEO agreed with the Jewish protester and incompetent software manager that black talent could not be found. He didn’t meet the black engineer I met on the train that introduced a new graphical coding interface he was using at his job to take leaps and bounds beyond what they had. He could not see that for a black person to make it to the level they were at, they had to be more exceptional and persistent than anyone else. They had to figure out VLOOKUPs at the drop of the dime and learn relational databases on their own.

I was never heard at that first startup. I told my VP every Friday at our one-on-one that I’d have to fly out to Michigan soon for the next phase of a VIP project. When I flew out on my own and held it successfully with the top academic scientists from ivy leagues and top universities, I came back and was congratulated with dismay. “Why hadn’t I told him?” I taught the white girls hired after me all that I knew, and he loved them now. I used them to handle the busywork so that I could lead the new project and I’d taken too much power on my own. They celebrated my birthday with cake one Thursday afternoon, and on Monday, Valentines Day, I was fired before the meeting to present our work. I was relieved, but the disrespect sent me into a nervous breakdown. Valentines Day? 

The week before, on my birthday, I’d seen a letter posted on the fridge that was awarding the company I helped build from 8 to 40 people and move into a new building, saw me as nothing. The letter awarded them $50,000 for employing a minority that lived in the inner-city. That was me and that was my salary. They’d come even.

I’d work at many jobs who received those type of minority grants; an Indian-woman-owned company, where his mom only came in sometimes and fixed tea. My most recent sales job, the CEO laughed as he proved his Native American status to push a deal through to Native American schools and businesses and created a marketing capabilities one-pager to highlight it. I remember going to the Casino and looking at a photo of the board on the wall, surprised to see only one Native American face. They always profit from these sympathetic movements for their own gain. It’s always just a plot.

Watching Succession, the new tech mogul that aimed to take over, told Logan a quip:

“In ancient Rome, they wanted to make the slaves wear something so they could identify them, like a cloak. Then they decided not to do it because they realized if all slaves dressed the same, they would see how many of them there were, and they’d rise up and kill the masters.”^[12]

My first black teacher, in college, taught us that Martin Luther King was not assassinated because of his civil rights movement. Rather, the greater fear was him speaking out against the Vietnam War. One of the texts was an olive green paperback that was titled something about the Black and Asian alliance in WWII. The movie Glory, and the movie Dead Presidents, show us how black men fought in great wars, only to be denied the American Dream they thought they’d now be a part of.

My black professor taught us about black leaders taking boats to France and traveling and making alliances with Asian people in an international movement.^[13] They’d started to build the narrative that it’s not just white versus black, but colored vs uncolored, or white. Back in the days at Housatonic Community College, my mom had a professor that said a couple of things that always stuck with me.

1. He said the Bible is the best-selling book of all time. That always kept me open-minded to the fact that it is a literary piece, and my philosophy teacher in highschool, in a 4-person class that I petitioned him to start, taught us that King James had selected which books could be in the Bible; that he’d dismissed lots of books about angels, lest they be thought as powerful as God. When I found a unique version of the bible and questioned my pastor about a chapter called Titus? Or something with a T, he’d thrown my bible in the garbage. I took it out. How dare he censor knowledge? From experience, I know that any measure of the Bible is The Living Word.

2. He said, “What is white culture? Is it not just the absence of every other culture?”^[14] White people have traveled to every other land and pillaged and raped and violently taken over. What is white food? White rice? And so for Bob Marley and MLK to spread the idea of One Love is to put all slaves in the same uniform to recognize their strength and to take over.

I realize now it goes beyond race. We’re so surprised to see a white person dancing or singing black. Last night I read racist comments and accusations referring to the strike down of affirmative action as unfair to Asian students. The comments were under an Asian man singing his ass off on a black gospel song. Someone wrote “vocal appropriation”. But I challenge that nothing is appropriation. Everything is just a skill that anyone can work on and become good at. When this Chinese kid started his acapella audition at college listening to his headphones and bouncing, we laughed. Then he opened his mouth and reincarnated George Michael singing Faith. These race accusations keep us from wearing the same uniform and identifying our strength.

I watch Baldwin’s “pin-drop speech” over and over again because he says that Black people are like everyone else. He says that our ancestors are both white and Black. I’m dark-skinned, but isn’t my paternal grandmother high-yellow? Isn’t my daughter part Irish? We simply work off the antiquated one-drop rule.^[15] He says until we can be seen as helping to build the country… (And I think of only recently learning that a black woman invented call-waiting and caller id, and a black man–cell phone technology; not just what I knew for years about George Carver and the damn peanut.) Until our efforts are credited in helping build The American Dream, the very existence of us will wreck it. And so, my hatred of diversity initiatives is very clear to me and haunts me in every position in white corporate America.

I remember when I first learned the word diversity. A new Chief of Diversity was hired at my private school to help me fit in. I already fit in before she came. I was a part of a class that had been in school together since we were five years old. We were all raised together and I was the top in all my classes. I did my best to ignore differences and we were equal. It wasn’t until the 6th grade whale watch trip that they had an evening pow wow and told us that at our age people were in cliques and not to worry. It was that night that everyone cliqued up.

When the first black adult woman at my school, the new diversity chief, was hired, she started pulling me out of class. I had nothing to talk to this lady about. She was making me stand out more and I hated her for it. I noticed candid pictures were being taken of me by professional photographers outside the science lab. Me and my brother were asked to pose in the courtyard to go in glossy admission brochures to show our school’s diversity.

So when I got into Tufts, and this girl told me it was kind of weird racially, I ignored her. I know how to fit in. When I got the letter over the summer from the Afrikanna Center, I ignored that too. I ignored another invite posted on my dorm door from them. How could I fit in if I separated myself from the get-go? I got called back for the second round of auditions from an all-white a capella group and I chose to go to that rather than the black trip to Cape Cod. That was a big mistake. The black people I would need didn’t know me.

I tried to correct my mistakes at my first amazing sales position. I commuted 3 hrs in a snowstorm that had shut down my state to get to the interview. I ignored them when they asked if I was African after my presentation, and they laughed and said what a shame that I wasn’t. I shrugged it off and welcomed the African software developers that would travel into the company to make them feel wanted, which probably should’ve been the black woman diversity chief’s job.

The diversity chief couldn’t be trusted. She would report our unhappiness so she wasn’t a part of the secret black Slack channel. We participated in the Coming to America screening after hours on Friday, where our allies got to see a black classic and eat McDonalds in jest. Diversity initiatives are a joke. They don’t matter to anyone. When the new COO joined, she said she wanted a more conservative look. She fired all the slackers and all the blacks. I was #2 on the sales leaderboard and I got fired, just like the black guy who was still in training. How could he have done anything wrong?

Though the nanny at my rich friend’s house is Jamaican just like my mom when she was a nanny. Though the Puerto Ricans in the cafeteria take the train with me and give me rides home and extra food to feed my family. Though community service projects are done across the street from my house, and the kid who stands up during morning announcements says we can’t throw away lunch meat because people in my hometown don’t get a pound of food to eat each day. Though I walk in waist high snow to school and my classmates wave at me from Audis and BMWs. Though I hand write my papers for years before I get the donation of an old computer. Though the only other black person at my new office is there to empty my trash, I should not be affected because I am proof that blacks have opportunity. Though I’m asked if I want gin and juice in micro-racist aggression at the sales conference. Though I have nowhere to live, and I have to put in my two cents about how my weekend was at the Monday morning meeting, I should be unaffected. George Floyd is most important to share about so that they can show care.

I’ve said this before as a joke, but now I really mean it. You know what real diversity would be? A day off to do my hair since it takes so much longer to do, and not be forced to come on camera, or hear comments about how my style has changed. Real diversity would be time off to attend to my kid and not have her get jumped on the school bus because I had to sit in a meeting that went past work hours. Real diversity would be having the option to really not go that Friday chat or events at the bar because I had to take a train for 3 hours after that. Real diversity would be not having my new Mormon manager deny the work from home days I’d earned and to dock me for being late to her new morning meetings, because she’d never even been on a subway. Real diversity is not caring about what I’ve whitesplained. Real diversity is not pontificating or quote on quote caring about the major racial issues of the world, but actually caring about me.

The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community. -James Baldwin, On Being “White” And Other Lies (To Be Read Next!)

Transcript: James Baldwin debates William F. Buckley (1965) | Blog#42 | Blog #42 (rimaregas.com) (Finale Read!)

Competitive Integrated Employment

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[1] Kanye West Declares February ‘Black Future Month’ in Poetic Video – Billboard

[2] The Breakers | Newport Mansions

[3] fossils catskills - Bing images

[4] About The Met - The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org)

[5] Martha's Vineyard - Wikipedia

[6] Why Comedian Dave Chappelle Walked Away From $50 million | The Oprah Winfrey Show | OWN

[7] Rules of Bocce | Bocce

[8] New York City agrees to pay $13 million to 2020 racial injustice protesters in historic class action | AP News

[9] Asian Americans in the workplace | McKinsey (not the article I read at the time)

[10] James Baldwin and Paul Weiss's HEATED Debate On Discrimination in America | The Dick Cavett Showhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzH5IDnLaBA&t=601s 

[11] Why the CEO is the Other Chief Diversity Officer (kornferry.com) 

[12] Succession season 3 finale recap: Tom delivers the killer blow (smh.com.au)

[13] Black Radicalism’s Complex Relationship with Japanese Empire - JSTOR Daily (not on class syllabus)

[14] Baldwin_On_Being_White.pdf

[15] One-drop rule - Wikipedia