I started off this chapter recalling Douglass’s quote as a reminder that the system isn’t going to change on its own. People aren’t going to willingly give up power, move aside to allow us to access the apparatus. We have to first start the conversations, take steps toward moving and shifting culture, sparking and starting movements, in order to effect change in the way the political machinery operates.
When I joined the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015, I became the youngest presidential press secretary on record. Not the youngest woman, not the youngest Black person, not the youngest Black woman. I’m telling you that, and I’m writing this book, not to say, “Look at me; I’m so special.” What I actually want to say is exactly the opposite. Look at me. I’m just me, a bald Black girl from Omaha, Nebraska, with vision and ambition and a belief that I can do something important to change the state of the world. If I can infiltrate the apparatus, you can too.
I didn’t grow up as part of a political legacy, or even as part of a particularly politically active family. My mother, Terri, was a seamstress early on. I call her a serial entrepreneur because she’s had so many different jobs in her lifetime (guess that’s where I got it from!). She owned her own sewing business, then she went to become an event planner, and then took a job with the Great Plains Black History Museum. After that she began managing a community development project in historic North Omaha, a predominantly African American neighborhood. My mother worked with the Omaha Economic Development Corporation to redevelop and reinvigorate parts of the city north of Twenty-Fourth Street. Nowadays, my mother spends her time working with the Seventy Five North Revitalization Corp where she assists the CEO. She’s making a difference in her community, but politics has never been her jam.
My dad spent the bulk of his career as an engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers. Before that he was in the air force: stationed in Bellevue, Nebraska (literally down the street from Omaha), and that’s how it came to be my hometown. But before that, he was just a Black kid growing up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the era of Jim Crow. My grandmother still lives in the house where she raised my dad; two of her other kids (my aunt and uncle) still live very close by. My dad was driven by an insatiable hunger to learn and an innate curiosity. It ended up taking him all around the world, but it always also brought him back to his faith and to his family. He was always there for the people who mattered to him, and he was unwavering in his optimistic belief that every day offered new opportunities. He refused to dwell on the hardships of the past but was always looking forward. He believed that everyone has a choice, as a person, whether to believe in and speak out about the possibility for positive change, or to get stuck in the misperceptions others might have about us, or on injustices of the past. I know these attitudes and beliefs are gifts that he passed on to me.
Though politics wasn’t a focal point in my family’s life, community was. My mother always took part in a lot of local activities: she would go to community meetings, she was on boards, and she is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated. She was very engaged and involved, even while raising a young family. Today she is also a member of the Links, a Black women’s organization dedicated to community service. I got exposed to community work through my mother. And for us, and many other Black people in Omaha, the true center of community life was (and is) the church. On any given Sunday, Salem Baptist Church is a place where the executives at Union Pacific sit next to the teachers and the politicians and the bus drivers, where they all come together at eight thirty a.m. and again at eleven thirty. As kids, we went to Bible study and Sunday school every week. We also went to Vacation Bible School and met a lot of people that way. In Omaha, the Black community is pretty close-knit. You get to know everybody. You don’t always get along, necessarily, but you all know each other. Chris Rodgers—who was later my boss when I interned in the county commissioner’s office—was also my Sunday school teacher at one point; that’s how I got to know him. Same thing with the assistant to the mayor at the time, Stacy Westbrook, who ended up becoming a very good mentor of mine and is the reason I got my internship at the mayor’s office when I was in college. I really credit the fact that I’ve come as far as I have, as fast as I have, to the community I grew up in.
Piece of Advice
Relationships Are the Building Blocks for Any Kind of Success
I always tell people if you can go back home after it’s all said and done, after you’ve graduated, or even during your college career and after, you should go give back. It doesn’t have to be a permanent move. Just go and participate in the community that helped create and support you—or contribute to the lives of kids there who aren’t being nurtured and supported. Even if your home community is well-off, there are still people (probably closer by than you think) who could benefit from your knowledge or your time or your experiences, and you can join or fund or participate in initiatives that help them.
For an entire generation of people, success meant escaping where you came from. It meant moving on and not looking back. Success was about getting out. Now it’s become accepted truth that we need to find ways to invest in the communities that invested in us. Do what you can to help remove barriers to access and opportunity for others. I go home several times a year and speak to community groups or graduating classes or other gatherings. Some go home to stay or contribute to our communities by buying property or through other economic investments.
I am well aware that I would not be where I am today without the community in North Omaha. I would not be who I am. To illustrate this, consider that the Omaha Star was the first newspaper in the country to be owned by a Black woman, Mildred D. Brown. The Omaha Star is also where I first cut my writing teeth; the editor let me have a column where I could write commentary while I was still in high school, and I continued it in college. It was the forum where I discovered that my voice could have an impact. I would go to church and people would tell me that they read my column. If I missed a week, two weeks, people would say, “Hey, Symone, what’s going on? Where you been?” That would tell me that they noticed. It helped me be accountable. And that was very encouraging. I just thank God for Omaha, Nebraska, because I don’t know who I would’ve been if I’d been born somewhere else. And you wouldn’t be who you are were it not for the community that shaped you.
As engaged as they were in other ways, my parents were not political. Yes, they voted; yes, they cared, but I wasn’t raised in a house where politics was really a career option, much less a calling. I’ve worked alongside plenty of people who were born into political dynasties, or had activist parents growing up. I’ve worked alongside people with impressive degrees from Ivy League schools (don’t have one of those), people with enormous incomes or inheritances (nope), many of them with egos to match (my ego might get a little bloated at times, but it always shrinks back to an appropriate size). I’ve sat next to world leaders and hung out with Diane von Furstenberg. I’ve made my way into the apparatus, and if you decide you can too, more people like you, me, WE, can work together to start to change the status quo.
In 1967, Dr. King said, “I think it is necessary for us to realize that we have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights . . . [W]hen we see that there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power, then we see that for the last twelve years we have been in a reform movement . . . That after Selma and the Voting Rights Bill, we moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution . . . In short, we have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society.”
The whole society. Not factions of society, but a collective “we.” After all, “we” are the everyday citizens that society doesn’t work without. Who hauls the trash away from the curbs, who picks the lettuce or pulls the chickens, who works the night shift in the air traffic control tower, who rides in the back of the ambulance with the car crash victim, who works the airport security checkpoint? “We” includes people of color,
along with disaffected working-class white people. Who the “we” applies to has changed over time, but the following has always been true: only some people have the full benefits of participation in society, and everyone else finds themselves marginalized, outside the circles of “we” that are closest to the apparatus and the power it contains. And WE need to change that.
Chapter 2
Power
(Hint: It’s Really About Influence)
When we talk about how we can demand and create change in our country, what we’re really talking about is having power. Power to control our own destinies. Power to affect the policies that our government creates and enforces. Power to ensure a livable future for ourselves and everyone else in our country and communities. Power to stand up and say: we aren’t going to let people keep getting killed for their beliefs or their skin color, we aren’t going to allow the planet to be trashed, we aren’t going to sit down, shut up, wait our turn, wait out Trump. Power is also the ability to go on CNN wearing whatever shade of fuchsia or tangerine or turquoise I want, speaking loudly and truthfully and daring someone to tell me to shut up. I won’t. We won’t.
At its most basic, power is the ability to influence others, which in turn affects the outcome of events. A person can be powerful, but only because that person stands on the backs of hundreds, thousands, millions of individuals. If no one watched CNN, it wouldn’t matter how informed or convincing I was when I appeared on the network as a commentator. If no one reads them, then Trump’s idiotic tweets don’t matter. If people don’t work together to create a movement, then we can’t forge a different future or course correct when things go off the rails.
Because it’s only through the voices and efforts of everyone else that leaders have a platform they can stand on to make a difference. If we want to wield influence and lead, we have to create movements that demand to be led. Only through building coalitions and working together can we direct or influence the behavior of others and change the course of events.
Lofty goals. Where do we start? What can we do, here and now? To answer those questions, I often ask myself: Who has done it before? In our country, when we think about the civil rights movement and the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we think of King as a legendary, larger-than-life figure—a Nobel prize–winner, one of the most powerful and influential men in our country’s history, a man who gave his life to change the world. But once upon a time, before he became the leader of a movement, he was a twenty-six-year-old preacher. He had just gotten married, just finished his PhD at Boston University. He moved back to the South for a job at a church in Montgomery, Alabama. It just so happened that within the next year and half, Brown v. Board of Education and the bus boycotts made Montgomery into a major flash point in the burgeoning civil rights movement. It was only at that point that King became deeply involved. But it wasn’t until he moved south to Alabama after his time in Boston that he truly found his cause, his calling, and his followers. When he got to Montgomery, he was one twenty-six-year-old man. A year later, he was on his way to being the head of a movement.
Young people today can make a difference too. We are powerful—we are changing the world in every way, from technology to dating to music to the #MeToo movement and more. But politics, where power is centralized, is still throttled by the whims of the few—largely of an older, privileged white male majority. It’s easy to feel like we have no control of our own destinies when something like the presidential election of 2016 happens the way it did. How did a man who lost the vote of the people end up holding the highest office in the land? But perhaps more alarming: How did we end up with a bigot in the Oval Office, in the twenty-first century? To flex our power on the stage of politics, the stage where things happen that truly matter in the future of this country, we need to embrace what’s unique to this generation, to use the technology, skills, and, yes, cultural mojo to make sure our voices are heard.
As a young person, I got an early firsthand view of what political power looked like. As soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted it. I was lucky enough to participate in a special organization in Omaha called Girls Inc. I like to say that I was good before I joined Girls Inc., but that program made me great. Girls Inc. was where I first got introduced to political process through the She Votes program, which teaches girls about how elections are decided and how the political process works. The board of Girls Inc. has been populated by people like Susie Buffett (yes, the Oracle of Omaha’s daughter) and has hosted the likes of Stedman Graham, Malala Yousafzai, Michelle Obama, and others at their annual Lunch For The Girls fund-raising luncheon. The girls themselves serve as emcees, introducers of our special guests and hosts. In 2005, my friend Camille had the honor of giving the introduction at the annual luncheon for none other than the then senator Barack Obama. My entire life, I wanted to be just like Camille, and watching her introduce Senator Obama only upped the ante on that feeling. So when the planning began for the next year’s luncheon, I lobbied the organizers that I should be the one to give the introduction to the as-yet-unnamed guest. I wasn’t a natural public speaker, I’ll just tell you. People often said I talked too loud, too fast, and said too much. But what I lacked in experience I made up for in enthusiasm, or so I figured.
When they announced that next year’s speaker would be former president Bill Clinton, I was like, Oh yes, I need to do this! I told everybody I wanted to be the one to give the introduction—I told my mom, my friends, my peers. They all laughed. I told some staff and they were like, “This is a job for a public speaker”—in other words, not you, Symone. But I took it as a challenge, not a shutdown: If you want this job, you need to demonstrate that you’re a public speaker, I decided. So, how to do that?
First stop: I went to Roberta Wilhelm, the executive director, and said I wanted to introduce Bill Clinton. “Show me,” she said. Show me you can do it. Prove to me that you have what it takes. So I joined all of the volunteer committees I could. I inserted myself at the center of the organization, making sure they could not forget who I was. I emceed the talent show, just showed up whenever I could. I went back to Ms. Roberta and asked, again and again, almost every day.
And then I got my chance: Girls Inc. was doing a joint presentation with Camp Fire USA, and I volunteered to be one of the girls to participate. I prepared the hell out of my speech, practiced it over and over, made sure I was polished and prepared. And then, showtime. I spoke slowly, I was funny, I didn’t yell or get freaked out. I took the opportunity to demonstrate that I could do the job and do it well. And I killed it. The next day when I arrived at the center, there was a message for me at the front desk that I should go to Ms. Roberta. When I got to her office, she told me that I would be the one to intro Bill Clinton at the luncheon. Now I needed to write my own speech, and the Secret Service had to vet me. I was like: The Secret Service?! It sounded super scary. What were they going to ask me? What if I failed some kind of top secret quiz they had? I told Ms. Roberta I was freaked out. She asked: “Have you robbed anybody lately?” “No, ma’am,” I said. “Okay, then. You’ll be fine.”
And then suddenly it was the day of the luncheon. This was going to be the biggest moment of my life thus far, and of course I wanted my parents there to witness it. I had been very adamant to the Girls Inc. folks: “I need two tickets, one for my mom, one for my dad, two tickets.” They kept telling me I could only have one, and I insisted over and over I had to have two. I had been talking about this for such a long time at home. I had practiced, I had prepared, I had read up on Clinton and was so excited. The morning of the event, it felt like a holiday since I didn’t have to go to school. I got dressed and I was standing in the hallway, and I’ll never forget, my dad came out, and I was like, “What time are you coming to the luncheon?” And then he told me he wasn’t going. You know what he said to me? He said, “Tell Bill I said hey.” I could not believe it. And then my dad made some sly remark, something about the economy. And I just looked at him dumbfounded. “Yo
u’re not coming?” And he said, “No, I’m not going to see Bill Clinton.” Oh. Oh. Okay. That was when I figured, Oh my God, my daddy is a Republican! That’s the only way you’re not coming to see your daughter have a life-changing moment introducing a former president; you must be a Republican. He could have told me he was a vampire, that’s how shocked I was. He denied he was Republican when I asked, and when I asked again and again in the years after. He swore up and down that he was an independent voter. Okay, I decided. I can respect that. It fit with my dad’s persona—the value he placed on knowing yourself and choosing to do what you believe is right, rather than what any leader or party says you should believe or do. That’s where I get some of my nerve to be loud and strong in speaking out for what I believe in.
So I got to the venue, and I walked into the room where I was going to meet Bill Clinton. As soon as he arrived, he put me at ease. He was friendly and warm and gracious. I remember saying to him, “I’ve read so much about you.” He shocked me by saying, “Well, I’ve read about you too!” Turns out the organizers had given him a packet to prep for the event that included a bio and some other details about me. He remembered them all, and he also asked me some additional questions about myself and what my aspirations were. So, this is how it’s done, I thought to myself. This is how an excellent politician gets you to vote for them! They make it about YOU, and they make you feel important, like you matter as much as they do. Because after all, there wouldn’t be elected leaders without an electorate.
No, You Shut Up Page 3