No, You Shut Up

by Symone D. Sanders

  On the left there has been an emergence of apparatus-adjacent movements, like Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March movement, and the Sunrise Movement to combat climate change, for example. These are all folks who don’t really care to put a big D for party Democrat behind their names, because they don’t see their values as perfectly aligned with the party as a whole. They work in conjunction with Democrats, and their issues align with factions of the Democratic Party at some points and in some ways, but they have not fully immersed themselves in the apparatus; they remain outside of it. I taught a class at USC last year titled “Whose Party Is It Anyway? Navigating the Democratic Party Apparatus.” We went through all these really great discussions and explorations, and then at the end of the class, I said, “Okay, we’ve been here all semester; tell me: Whose party is it?” Immediately, students began to name different factions: Blue Dogs, blue-collar, progressive, Democratic Socialist . . . Nope. Fail. The party still belongs to the apparatus. Because the power and the influence still flow through the apparatus. So, in order to change the future of the party, we, all of the factions together, have to infiltrate it.

  I learned early as a young Black girl growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, that the “we” with access to power did not seem to include me or other people like me. And wherever my pinpoint location was exactly, I knew for sure that I was way outside that innermost central circle. Accessing the apparatus seemed about as likely as making my way to Oz. But I didn’t let that stop me. I’d find my way there in my Louboutins, ruby slippers be damned.

  You know, when I was born, I came into this world silently—no tears. But real quick, once I found my voice, I figured out how to use it. My mother likes to say that my father took one look at me and told her, “There’s going to be one set of rules for this girl, and one for the rest of the world.” I guess I took his statement to heart!

  My younger sister, Averi, and I were both born and raised in North Omaha. My mom still lives in the house we grew up in. (My older brother, Daniel, was born in Alaska when my parents were living out there while my dad was in the air force. And here’s a fun fact: all three men in my immediate family are named Daniel. Yup, I have two brothers named Daniel, plus my dad. My dad was married once before and had a son from that marriage named Daniel Jose Sanders. Then he and my mom had their first child, a boy, Daniel Edgar II.)

  In Omaha, my sister and I went to an elementary school in my predominantly African American neighborhood. Despite this, there was not a single Black teacher in our school (something that is still all too common an occurrence). After that I attended a Catholic high school, even though we were Baptist. My father said if there had been good Baptist schools, we would’ve gone to them, but there weren’t—and my parents wanted the best educational opportunity we could have. You know what? There wasn’t a single Black teacher at my high school, Mercy High School, either. In fact, some of my classmates had never even seen a person of color before meeting me and some of our classmates.

  When I arrived at Mercy, a private, Catholic, all-girls high school, I could feel myself moving closer to the next circle of “we.” Well, sort of. At the end of each school day, I felt myself step back as I headed home with my sister and our friend to our Black middle-class neighborhood. I am fortunate today to not carry the burden of code switching, but as a young person, I definitely participated. As I moved between different worlds, I adapted to my environment to some degree—at times for survival and other times simply because I just wanted to fit in. Moving between different circles of “we” and then back out again is something people have to do to survive. I did it throughout my entire high school career, because I had to go to school and be able to interact with classmates and teachers, and then I had to go home and interact with my family and our neighbors. It wasn’t like I was two different people, more that I was aware of the different realities and worlds that people live in. Even though my classmates and I lived in the same city and went to the same school, we lived different realities every single day, and I came to understand that early on. That said, my sister, Averi, was the one person who saw me in both environments, and she was there to call me out (and laugh at me) if she thought school Symone and home Symone were acting out of sync.

  As I mentioned, there were many girls at Mercy with me who didn’t know any other Black people outside the few they interacted with in our hallways. There were six or so girls of color in my grade, maybe twenty-five or thirty in the whole school of five hundred. In many respects I was your typical overachieving popular girl: I was a cheerleader, a student council member; I had lots of friends. But there was also this sense of being “other” that followed me around.

  I vividly remember my parents throwing me a sixteenth birthday party, to which I invited the whole class. My family told me I could have it at the local social hall in North Omaha, and I was so excited. But the turnout was . . . a little lackluster. I had a great time anyway; people who know me know I can get a party poppin’ without too much help. But still I wondered where everyone was. The following Monday in school, some girls, even a few I thought I knew well, told me, “I wanted to come, but my parents wouldn’t let me go down there.”

  As the months went by, sometimes a classmate would drop me off at home after practice or a game and they’d make a joke about not feeling safe. My family lived in a regular, respectably sized three-story house; we had a yard, a porch. I realized quickly that it didn’t really matter what my house looked like, or even what was actually going on inside my family or my home. External influences like TV shows or music presented my classmates with the idea that my lived experience was not their experience, or the experience of the majority of people around me—whether that was true or not. Regardless of the truth, they defaulted to this belief that I was different.

  It’s a sad state of affairs that in our country, in the year 2020, every Black child must suffer the rite of passage that is being called the N-word for the first time. It happened to me one afternoon when I was fifteen; I was on the track team, and a group of eight or ten of us ran this route from the school grounds to the track that took us through some residential areas. On one of these runs, a car drove by and someone yelled the N-word at me and two other Black girls. It was completely jarring for me and for all of the other girls as well, black and white. We stood there in silence, and sort of in shock. Eventually, we continued on with our run, we got to the track, we started practice. Nobody said anything because they didn’t know what to say. I didn’t tell my coach; no one else mentioned it either. Much later I asked myself: Why was I embarrassed? I didn’t do anything. The moment wasn’t necessarily this epic loss-of-innocence type of experience for me, but still it’s something I won’t ever forget.

  The next summer, when I was sixteen, I called to ask for a job at a restaurant where a couple of my friends from school worked. The owner knew my friends and thought they did a good job, so he was like, sure, just come in and fill out the paperwork and we’ll get you started. So I went into the restaurant, asked to see the manager whom I’d spoken with, and then I was told to wait. So I waited. And waited. I was there for an hour before some staff person came and told me that it turned out he was “too busy” to talk to me that day. And when I called back, they told me I didn’t get the job. I remember talking to my dad, asking what I could have possibly done wrong. He reassured me that I wasn’t at fault, that I’d done absolutely nothing wrong, but the larger message was one that was much harder to take.

  After high school, I went on to attend a private Jesuit Catholic college, Creighton University. At eighteen I didn’t know much more about my career aspirations than I did when I was ten, which was when I decided I was going to be a judge. Why? I thought judges and politicians were the most powerful people in the world. I already knew then that politicians make the laws, and judges can hold people’s lives in their hands. I could see that these were the positions of real power, and I wanted to be a powerful person.

  We had a mentoring program
in my grade school, and the first question they asked us to answer was: If you could have a mentor in any field, who would you like to learn from? We were all raising hands, giggling and asking, “Anything? Anything at all?” They were like, anything (hey, maybe this was the start of learning to ask directly for what I want! Like when I sat in my first-ever meeting with Bernie Sanders at twenty-five years old and told him I wanted to be his press secretary . . .). I wrote down: a politician, a judge, or a chef. (A chef! HA. Anyone who knows me knows I do not cook [notice I said do not cook, not that I cannot cook].)

  So in seventh and eighth grade, I was assigned two mentors who were federal district court judges. Even better: they were both women! One Thursday a month, I’d get to skip school to go down to the courthouse for half a day, where I’d sit in on depositions. I kept to myself, hoping that people would forget I was there because that’s when you saw the really good stuff: lawyers arguing in judges’ chambers, the drama of a jury trial, all sorts of things. When the morning’s work was done, the judges would take me to lunch, we’d discuss it all over a nice meal at a fancy steak house, and then they’d take me back to school. Hell yeah, I wanna be a judge, I thought!

  All through high school, I kept in touch with these two woman judges from the mentoring program. When I went off to college, they gave me a matching quilt and pillow set for my dorm room in a very snazzy pink-and-orange patchwork (orange is my favorite color). They’ve both since retired, but when I recently went back to speak at the Eleanor Roosevelt Luncheon for the Douglas County Democrats in Omaha, one of them, Judge Lamberty, was there to hear my speech. Afterward, she came up and told me how proud she was!

  And so, like many before me, I arrived at college thinking law school was the end goal. In fact, I figured I was going to be in Creighton’s 3/3 Program, where your fourth year of undergrad is your first year of law school. You end up with a bachelor’s in business and a law degree along with a master’s after six years. Great. The program sounded perfect to me. I’ve never liked waiting. But then freshman year, they were like, “You have to take calculus.” Ooooooh. Suddenly, I didn’t wanna be 3/3 anymore.

  I didn’t quite know which academic discipline to choose, but I figured I should start trying out some career paths and work backward from there. That’s how college quickly became my time of 1,001 internships. (Besides working and going to class, I also squeezed in a bit of partying here and there . . .) One of the first internships I held was at a law firm called Fraser Stryker. I still hadn’t totally given up on my vision of being a judge, so I figured I should try out firm life. I applied to be a diversity scholar; some of the people at the firm had been at an event a few years prior when I had the opportunity to introduce Bill Clinton, so a few people knew who I was.

  On the first day of my internship at Fraser Stryker, I walked around the office being introduced to people. Before I had a chance to say anything, person after person preempted, saying, “Where do you go to school? UNO?” Now, let me just say loud and clear, there is nothing wrong with attending a public university. UNO itself produced the likes of General Johnnie E. Wilson, a four-star general and one of only ten Black men to attain that rank. I also strongly believe that higher education needs to be made far more affordable in our country and that any young person who has the drive to attend college should be able to do so regardless of their family’s economic circumstances. However, I was struck by the assumptions that people in the office were making about me, before I even had a chance to utter a word. Why was the first assumption that the lawyers in that office made about me that I must attend a state school? What other sort of implicit biases did they have about me?

  As they got to know me, the comments became about how well dressed and articulate I was. People expected me to be flattered when they paid me what they thought was a compliment, but in reality, I found it confusing and embarrassing. Why wouldn’t I be put together and well-spoken? Was it because I was a “diversity scholar” intern? At the firm there was one Black partner, out of a group of fifty or so attorneys; the few other Black people in the office were paralegals or interns. Did they say the same things to the other Black people working in the office, with the same underlying intonation of surprise? Did they do it intentionally, to remind me I wasn’t a part of their “we” but still outside it, someone to be observed and judged by them, the ones with the real power? I let these questions float through my mind. And then I moved on. Whatever their perception was, I might never know. But I wasn’t going to let it limit or stop me.

  Whatever limitations I felt others might use to try and hold me back, I knew other young people had a much tougher road. In college, I got more involved in juvenile justice work, but I began my work on juvenile justice issues while still in high school, when I interned for my county commissioner, Chris Rodgers. Chris was a vocal advocate for seeking out alternatives to imprisoning young people. The first meeting he took me to changed my life. One afternoon, he invited me to come along with him to a meeting about Annie E. Casey Foundation’s new pilot program, a juvenile detention alternatives initiative (JDAI) program where they were seeking out community partners for the work. The foundation was targeting a few counties across the country as test cases to see if they could reduce the number of young people in detention centers. Frankly, detention is just another word for jail, and far too many young people are automatically referred to “detention.” At the meeting we met with practitioners (nonprofit program operators, school district leaders), judges, lawyers. There were three women in the room, and two Black people: me, and my boss, the commissioner. When we talked about it later, I mentioned the lack of people of color and young people present when we were discussing something that directly impacted them. Chris was like, “That’s a big reason why I brought you there—I wanted you to see that. We need people like you in that room.” Damn, I thought. I’ve got some work to do.

  I saw firsthand just how few young people and people of color were involved in doing this type of advocacy work, and immediately knew that needed to change. During my sophomore year of college, I was appointed to the Nebraska Coalition for Juvenile Justice, which then led me to work with the national Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ) and then the Federal Advisory Committee on Juvenile Justice (FACJJ). I realized that if I wanted to fight for the voices of young people, just showing up wasn’t enough; I needed to speak up too. I applied to be the chairperson of the Emerging Leaders Committee of CJJ and won the spot. Actually, when I first got selected, the committee wasn’t called that; it was called the Youth Committee. One of the first things I did as chair was change the name. “Youth” is a size on a T-shirt. It doesn’t connote the type of respect we deserve.

  There were plenty of well-meaning individuals on the board with me who said they wanted to hear the voices of incarcerated young people, but when I suggested that in fact we should invite them to the table, I was met with a bit of backlash (that was not something that had been done before). I remember our committee doing research to learn about young people who were doing reform work while being incarcerated. Haley Reimbold, who also sat on the committee, noted that she had the perfect person in mind—someone she met during her work with the Vera Institute. Haley was thinking of Hernan Carvente, a young man who grew up in a troubled home and was drinking by age eight, in a gang at thirteen, and the perpetrator of a violent crime at fifteen that landed him in a maximum-security juvenile jail. We sought him out and connected with him over the phone (we still chat occasionally; we’re friends on Facebook). He was a thoughtful and committed advocate for himself and passionate about helping other incarcerated young people like him find a way to survive the system, and to have a chance at a future upon release. I knew right away he’d be great for our committee.

  I asked for video conferencing to be set up for the next Emerging Leaders Committee meeting but didn’t say why. When other board members found out it was so I could have a jailed person attend the committee meeting, I got a quiet phone call from a comm
ittee member. “Symone, we can’t do this,” the person said. We can’t do what? “We” who? Why are we whispering? It turns out they had never had someone currently involved in the system on the committee before. But I was the chair, so I could do this. I had to fight. I know the importance of giving young people with lived experience a seat at the table. It was crazy to me that what seemed like the most obvious idea was met with skepticism. You can’t do this! Why the hell not? Who was the “we” here? Not allowing Hernan and other youth in the system to participate in the process that was supposed to help them was absurd and exclusionary. And anyway, I was the chair. I dared someone to try and stop me from making this move. And they didn’t.

  Hernan joined the meeting, and he was just as prepared and passionate as I expected. Hell, you know what happened? He started attending meetings regularly (virtually). And when I stepped down from the committee, in 2015, he took over as chair when I left! Had I not argued, had I not made space, had I not questioned the assumptions about the “we” that others on the board were operating under, Hernan wouldn’t have had a seat at the table. Other people with more power wouldn’t have been able to see that his contributions were important. He wouldn’t have joined the committee, and his valid perspective on issues that affected his daily life wouldn’t have been heard. Now he’s a nationally known advocate for the Youth First Initiative, a campaign working to end youth incarceration by closing youth prisons and investing in community-based alternatives.