Some issues are big enough that they shape us as people. But sometimes we may also feel like we have to pretend to be someone we’re not in order to own our power. And you know what? Faking it until you make it is sometimes okay. I don’t mean selling out or posing; I mean channeling your ambitions. Beyoncé, after all, has her badass alter ego, Sasha Fierce. As a kid, I didn’t watch a lot of TV, but every night my family watched the local news. So I knew that one of the surest ways to get people to listen to you was to be a commentator or a newscaster. That’s when I invented “Donna Burns,” a television journalist who used sticks, hairbrushes, whatever I could get my hands on for a fake microphone. I “interviewed” my playground friends, my family members, anyone who I could get to participate. Obviously, this memory was a big source of amusement to my family once I became a pundit in real life, on CNN on a daily basis, from September 2016 to April 2018, when I served as a political commentator.
Things have changed a lot in the media environment, especially in the past ten years, and there’s a whole new system by which people gain influence and spread messages these days. Particularly now, as commentators and analysts occupy an increasingly large share of the space on cable news, being in front of a TV camera is a powerful place to be. It is also slightly terrifying to consider that there are no rules for the pundit class . . . networks are not “demanding” you tell the truth. When a booker calls you up to see if you’ll be on a show they ask, Are you available? Are you cool with these topics? Not Are you going to tell the truth? There’s no clause in your contract that says, I swear to tell the truth on air. That’s why it’s so important that people are there in the room and on the air with the facts, and the backbone, to call out misinformation when they hear it. More than ever, we need commentators, reporters, journalists, producers, TV and entertainment executives who care about keeping the bar high when it comes to telling the truth. We’re living in a moment when some people have allowed the truth to go by the wayside in pursuit of something else (viewers . . . votes . . .), and it’s a scary time.
And as I was talking about earlier, no one is going to hand you power or open the door for you to voice your opinion or your desires. You have to demand it. And part of the way you do that is saying out loud, to anyone who will listen, what it is that you want, and then backing those words up with actions. (Also, you never know who is pretending like they aren’t listening but truly is.)
Don’t be shy about your goals. I’m a true believer in not only speaking up but also writing down what you want—in your phone or notebook, on a scrap of paper from the bottom of your purse. Thinking about it is too abstract sometimes. So write it down, then practice saying it out loud. Then say it out loud in front of people you know, and then as you get more comfortable, in front of those you don’t. It’s like me saying, “One day I wanna be White House press secretary!” There. I said it. Everyone says don’t tell people your dreams because it’ll kill them. No! You have to express them—you have to give them oxygen in order to let them breathe and grow and become something real. They’re not real if you’ve never told anyone about them!
Piece of Advice
Write Down Your Goals and Hold Yourself Accountable
One of the ways to help your aspirations become reality is to write down actionable steps that will take you in the direction of your dreams. For a long time, I’ve kept a life outline on my phone; I don’t like calling it that, but it’s what it truly is. I keep it in the Notes app.
In that outline, I’ve always got a running list of what I want to accomplish this year; I’ve also got a list of what I want to do before I turn thirty and thirty-five. I started doing this in college, when it was what I wanted to do before I was twenty, twenty-five, and I wrote down stuff like: Intern in China. Get published by an international news agency. But guess what—I did them. In the winter before my second semester of senior year, I interned for the lifestyle magazine company That’s Beijing, via a program called CRCC Asia. I was freezing in China, but it was an amazing experience. And I was published in the January 2013 issue of the magazine!
When I wrote those goals down, I didn’t know how I’d get there, but I knew I wanted to. Early on, I also wrote down that I wanted to work in politics—I was telling people I wanted to work a presidential cycle, and they’d laugh and say, “You and everyone else in DC.” Hey, look at me now! Getting on cable news as a regular commentator was another thing I wrote down. I knew I’d get there, but I didn’t think I’d get there SO SOON!
Your dreams can be open-ended, but it’s up to you to figure out the details along the way. Part of being prepared is being serious about what it is you want, and then giving yourself room to fill in the blanks. Notice I didn’t say I wanted to be press secretary for a specific person in the White House. I’ll figure out those pieces as I go along and when I get there. My life outline also holds me accountable: for instance, if I get an opportunity to host a game show, well, that sounds nice, but it doesn’t have anything to do with my plan for my life. It doesn’t fill in any of the blanks that are going to get me to my true destination. But, hey, if The View calls, that’s something different. That’s on my path—in a different direction maybe, but with the same destination.
If you’re a pen-and-paper kind of person, write down five things you want to accomplish by the end of this year. Now write five things you want to accomplish in the next five years. Here’s the next step, and it’s important: find someone whose opinion matters to you. Could be your best friend, your grandmother, a former teacher. It doesn’t have to be someone you talk to frequently, but it has to be someone who sparked the ambition in you that set you in the direction of one of these goals. Tell that person what you want to achieve, and why you connect them with that goal. It doesn’t matter how you contact them: call, text, tag them in a photo of the two of you together and include this information in the comments. If you’re a social media person and you’re brave, maybe make your entire two lists visible to your friends, or to a select group of people. Ask people to check in with you periodically about whether you’ve made progress. Ask them to share their own aspirations with you.
Here’s another thing about power. Sometimes you have to grow into it. So yes, I got on cable news far more quickly than I expected. But that doesn’t mean my entrée to TV was a smooth ride. In fact, my first appearance on a major news network felt more like a slow-motion disaster. It was January of 2016, in the lead up to the South Carolina primary; I’d been on the Sanders campaign for about five months when I was invited to be on MSNBC with Melissa Harris-Perry. Al Sharpton was a guest, along with Alicia Garza of #BlackLivesMatter and a few other people. When I got my turn to speak, I was breathing really heavy. I was worried that it would be obvious that I was, like, panting on national TV. (Thank God you can’t actually hear it, but you can see it! Look up the clips and you can literally see my chest rising and falling like I’m about to hyperventilate.)
MHP started off with a softball question about whether Bernie’s campaign was “going negative,” since Clinton had started tossing some barbs in our direction. I went at it, spooling out stats and referencing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Keystone Pipeline, national security, education, and, and . . . MHP jumped in to save me. “Damn, girl.” She turned to Sharpton and, talking to us both, said, “That is what you were supposed to do on a cable TV show.” She went on to say, “I’m not kidding, you’re actually good at your job, right, in the role that she’s in right now, you take that mic and you go, right?” Hell yeah. I wasn’t polished, but I was prepared. A little later, Al said, “Symone, you`re doing a great job, I wish I had you when I ran.” It was funny because they were coaching me about doing TV WHILE I WAS ON TV, but I didn’t care. I appreciated their support, and it was nice to hear out loud that I was doing okay.
To be honest, it got a lot easier fairly quickly as I realized that I was playing a role, as a spokesperson for Senator Sanders’s campaign—I repped him. While that came with its own
responsibility of representing him effectively and accurately, what made me more nervous were those moments where I was the spokesperson for me, saying what I want to say, what I believe in. It’s so much easier to do talking points and stay on message when there is a message to fall back on; it’s a lot harder when I’m sitting there on CNN or the Sunday shows and people are asking for my personal perspective on hot-button issues, asking me to weigh in or give quotes or stats. There’s not only the pressure of getting the story straight, there’s the added dimension of being a WOC, and a spokesperson for the culture. I want to be doubly and triply sure I’m on point, because someone out there is going to use my behavior or performance as representative for other people, as unfair as that may be. That’s the way it is in our world for now, and I can’t move through life, especially public life, pretending it isn’t so.
For instance, in November 2018 I was on CNN’s Sunday-morning State of the Union show; Rick Santorum was also there. The issue of the recent recall of romaine lettuce came up. The lettuce was contaminated by E. coli bacteria, and several people had died after eating it. The recall was big and messy and cumbersome, and I brought up how the FDA had killed a rule that resulted in making regulation laxer for produce before the outbreak happened. What had been a political move was now endangering people’s lives. Rick Santorum waved me off and said I didn’t know what I was talking about. He literally shut me down, said I was wrong, and closed the conversation. Of course, I was right about the poopy lettuce. The next day, Valerie Jarrett tweeted on how the FDA behaved irresponsibly and caused the lettuce debacle. I’d been automatically dismissed in a way that other people wouldn’t. Another time I was on with Santorum, he made a factually incorrect statement, and when I called him out on it, he literally put his hand up in my face and said, “I’m not done.” He refused to look at me as he gazed around at the rest of the panel. Behavior like this is not okay! And it’s only going to change if people speak up and make their voices heard. I always have to have my facts because people will assume I don’t know what I’m talking about. So I have to make damn sure that I do.
When you’re working on a campaign, keeping your facts straight is a bit easier because there’s someone who is aggregating news clips for you all the time on the most important issues of the moment. I get email blasts with regular updates, plus tip sheets and newsletters from reporters at places like Politico, the Washington Post, the Intercept, etc. But when it’s you commenting on the news of the day from your own perspective, there is no team to make sure you are informed, and there isn’t anyone writing your talking points. There is just you, your thoughts, and the foresight to read up on the headlines and regularly check Twitter so one is not caught slipping on the latest news. The stakes are super high with social media’s twenty-four-hour news cycle—any gaffe will live in infamy. Even statements that aren’t mistakes are spun and spat out and used against people. On the weekend in May 2019 when Biden had his first rally in Philadelphia, officially announcing the launch of his candidacy for the presidency, I was asked about the crime bill that he took part in passing during the Clinton administration, and whether I believed it led to mass incarceration. It was supposed to be a soft interview, a minute of airtime on all the positive things that Biden was about to talk about in his launch speech, a rah-rah, uplifting little segment. Instead, CNN’s Victor Blackwell caught me off guard, on live TV, asking me to account for a bill that passed when I was four years old, on a subject that’s super important to me, framed in a way that was, shall we say, not too kind. But the reality was, I was back on the field and no longer in the press box just talking about “the game.” I was so used to being a commentator, I forgot how to be a well-prepared spokesperson. It was a great reminder that you always have to plan ahead and prepare, and to anticipate the unexpected. I had gotten complacent, and now I was jumping into very different waters. I didn’t exactly drown at that moment on CNN that day, but there was some flailing involved, the kind of splashing and thrashing around that I promised myself I wouldn’t do again!
I decided to get involved in Biden’s campaign in the first place because I believe we are living in dangerous times. We can’t talk about power without talking about the abuse of power, something the current administration knows a thing or two about. This is what happens when enough of us “sit this one out” (election 2016) or don’t pay enough attention or don’t get engaged in the political process, thereby allowing other people to step in and take our place in our absence and to speak up in our silence: we end up with a situation where a certain “we” elects an individual who abuses the system, who makes a mockery of our democratic process, who divides the nation and sullies our reputation abroad. One person can truly make a difference, for good or for bad—but their ability to do so still comes down to influence.
One of the first times I spoke with Joe Biden one thing he said really struck me. He said his parents instilled one strong thing in him: when you see an abuse of power, it’s your obligation to stand up and combat it. He said that was the real, underlying, and undeniable reason he knew he needed to run for president in 2020. What he’s seeing from Donald Trump, what he’s seeing from this administration—from children in cages to the rampant abuse of power from everywhere, from the Department of the Treasury on down—is, one, not who we are as a nation, but, two, is a direct affront to his, Joe Biden’s, personal values. And I felt that to my core. And I was like, You know what? I think this is where I want to be.
Because if power is really about influence, there’s truly no more powerful place to be than in politics. Whether we like it or not, the current bipartisan political system in the United States of America is not changing in a drastic way any time soon. The group of people who create the laws, the people who make decisions on a local, state, and national level about how this country should run, who make judgments about whose voices are heard and whose needs and interests are given priority and attention, is a question of politics. Power concedes nothing without a demand. If we want the apparatus to change, we have to go in there and change it ourselves. Some people say they don’t believe that real progress can come about in this way. They want to say, we don’t want a seat at the table, we want to topple the table, smash it right down the middle, watch all the fine china and silver crash to the floor. But tell me how that’s really going to work out. If you burned everything to the ground, if we suddenly decided to abandon or overthrow our current system of government, lots of people would die. Forget running out of organic kale. Ambulances would run out of gas. The taps wouldn’t turn on. Trash would pile up. Chaos and disorder and sanitation disasters left and right.
Instead, we have to be thinking about how we want to do things differently: How can we bring a sweeping change into a system that does not want it or allow for it? The “we” who runs the apparatus is going to tell you no at every turn. So how do we claim power for ourselves?
Movements have power because they wield influence. So to claim our power we have to assert our influence—but that doesn’t just happen. It must be built. Unfortunately, sometimes attention for a cause, and thereby the degree of influence of those rallying around it, is galvanized by great tragedy. The Black Lives Matter movement was born out of Trayvon Martin’s death, and Tamir Rice’s death, and the deaths of so many other innocent young Black people by the hands of police in our nation. Or the outpouring of support for new measures of gun control, necessarily growing in size and power after horrific incidents like Sandy Hook and Parkland. Activists rally around injustices; movements gain a stronger voice and make demands that are actually heard, rather than ignored. When more people join the chorus, when enough voices cry out and leaders hear them and help take up the cause, that’s when big change really starts to happen.
And then, when you finally have their attention, it’s not enough to demand just a few incremental changes and say, “Okay! We’re good!” or to feel satisfied by the small victories. Criminal justice reform is a recent example—people are s
till getting locked up for marijuana possession in some places, while in others their fellow citizens are making bank off of legal sales of the same thing. We haven’t solved the underlying issues of inequality, of people being treated differently by the justice system depending on their income or their race. The tendency is that when we get a little bit of change, people start saying, “WOW! This is what we’ve been working for! Good for us!”
Why do people like to coast on small victories? What is the appeal of making them out to be a grand win? Well, for one, the president can be like, “I threw a bone to minority communities,” and the next time someone says he has a racially insensitive policy or program or is trafficking in straight-up racism, or suggests the administration is blocking civil rights progress, he can shrug his shoulders and not get beaten up for it. But we always need to ask: What are the next steps? How can we keep pushing forward? I don’t work for incremental change. Yes, I understand change takes time. Sure, I’m going to celebrate the small wins—but then I’m going to get up and go back to work the next day. Please come with me.
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