No, You Shut Up

by Symone D. Sanders

  Chapter 3

  Redefining Normal

  (or: Why Be Normal When You Can Be Fabulous?)

  We the people—young people, women, people of color, differently abled, nonbinary—do not always get to set the terms of our existence. So much of what we are able to do—the types of jobs we are considered for, the maximum income we can attain, the highest levels of power we can achieve, the places we are expected to live, and how we are supposed to spend our time and money—is confined by the expectations of society, by precedents that were set long ago and have been maintained over our country’s history by those who wish to stay in power. By design, our presence is felt to be “out of the ordinary” in many circumstances. It’s not “normal” for us to show up in certain places, like an elected position or the corner office. We are often made to feel like we aren’t, in fact, “normal” at all. We’re different; we’re the “other.” We’re told we have the wrong name, the wrong color skin, the wrong religious beliefs, the wrong body type. That we’re too “out there” to be taken seriously in politics. Too loud for cable TV. Too young for power.

  Black boys and girls are still being killed at the hands of police, folks coming to this country for better lives are still being deprived of citizenship, women’s reproductive rights are being curtailed and denied. We are still demeaned in the workplace, refused privileges enjoyed by others; we are still fighting for equity in this nation. Activists are organizing to stop gun violence, lobbying to remedy the fractured criminal justice system, decrying the economic inequality that feeds the huge gulf of opportunity between the rich and the rest. Sixty-six percent of young Americans have more fear than hope concerning the future of this nation. Half of young Americans believe the American dream is dead. Seventy-five percent of young Americans have very little trust in the government.* Folks want out with the old and in with the new: they want to see new topics being discussed in the Democratic Party, new people taking leadership roles, and, most important, concrete action to follow these deliberations.

  To start taking steps in this direction, I’ve come to the conclusion that together we need to reject the concept of normalcy. Normalcy is the very concept that empowers purveyors of racism, sexism, and white supremacist ideology. How can one set out to do the things that haven’t been done before, to shift power dynamics, if we are concerned with being “normal”? “Normal” is the status quo—ignorance of the needs of the entire “we.” Instead, WE want to be acknowledged, appreciated, recognized. To be able to make a difference in our communities and in our country: that is what we should truly aspire to. To discard any previous definition of “normal” and make our own.

  I sure as hell didn’t grow up aspiring to be normal. I don’t want to ask permission to exist or for entrance to any group of people. I know that won’t get me anywhere, or surely not at the rate of speed that I consider acceptable. I take to heart what the ancient leader Hannibal, one of the greatest strategists of all time, said: “I will either find a way, or make one.” No one is standing at the door to the apparatus saying, “Welcome, person that has been locked out of opportunity for decades! Let us help you find your footing.” So how do we find a way in? How do we make a path for ourselves when no such trail exists?

  First of all, we need to be prepared to hear “no” at every turn. We need to be prepared for struggle. We need to know that the changes we make might not feel good at first, certainly not to everyone involved. The system will still be in place—some system always will be. Change-making work doesn’t mean you get to just toss out the system, the apparatus, and install something new. We have to take the system we have, which thankfully is a somewhat flexible and open system, our democratic republic, and change it to make it work for us. To do that, we need to allow everyone to play a role, depending on their strengths and how comfortable they are being on the front lines of change. As individuals, I would say that also goes hand in hand with knowing your boundaries. Be prepared to have them questioned. Know how you are going to act and react when a cause or a person or a candidate pushes you to the limit of your moral or ethical beliefs. I’ll go into that in more detail in the next chapter.

  But first, I know a thing or two about being told “no.” Right before I went to work for the Sanders campaign, I was told no twenty-seven times—and that was just in one season of job interviews. I knew that I wanted to work in politics after my experience with my 1,001 college internships. In late fall 2014, the day after we lost the gubernatorial race in Nebraska, I packed up my stuff, and I got on the road to Washington, DC.

  My first DC job was working for a consumer advocacy think tank. I wasn’t super into the idea of working on trade policy, which was the focus of the organization, but when I interviewed for a job that I really wanted, to be the press person on house financial services working for Maxine Waters, I didn’t get it. The interview went well, though, which was encouraging—they said they really liked me but that I needed technical writing experience. So I thought, Fine, I can do that. I started to look around and found something at Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. It doesn’t get more technical than America’s trade policy! I knew nothing about trade, but dammit, if that’s what it was going to take to get me in the door to my next stop in politics, I would learn about trade policy. My boss was super tough—everything I wrote, she would send back dripping with so much red ink it looked like blood. The topics weren’t ones that I came to most naturally. But I learned a lot there, including about Senator Sanders, who was deeply invested in these issues of economic equality. And so I learned the issues, I took what I could from the experience, and six months later, I knew I wanted to move on to a job in politics-politics; I didn’t love issue-based advocacy work. So I started going on interviews . . . a lot of interviews.

  If there was a Democratic entity in Washington, I interviewed there. I prepped for, dressed up for, showed up to, and sat through twenty-seven interviews. The DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) put me through eight rounds of interviews only to decide not to hire me (the position was for speechwriter for the chair of the organization). They said I was “Really nice! A joy to have in the office!” I present so well! But they were “promoting internally.” WHAT! Why did they keep calling me back? Oh, and the parting words: “We’ll keep you in mind for campaigns when we’re hiring for fall.” Damn. I really had a moment of reckoning at that point: Am I not going to get a job in politics? Should I start thinking about some other career path, where I fit the mold of normal? I applied for a communications job at an energy company, I looked at doing fund-raising, I thought about going to work in corporate communications or at a public affairs firm. A good friend of mine had just gotten a job at Deloitte. “Come work with me!” she said. “You’ll totally get a job if you apply.” I thought about it. I decided maybe I should. I waffled. The money was great, the work was reliable and predictable, and I’d be good at it. I talked to them, and they said they’d hire me, but I knew it wasn’t what I truly wanted—I wanted to work in politics, where I felt like I could truly make a difference while also doing work I found personally rewarding.

  Then one day, while I was still at work at the trade organization, I got a random call from someone named Jeff Weaver. He introduced himself as Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager. He told me he’d gotten my résumé from someone whose name I didn’t even recognize. (Eventually I learned Jeff had gotten my résumé from the former campaign manager of the governor’s race I’d worked on in 2014. It just goes to show that you have no idea where the critical connection will come from, so impress everyone!) Would I consider coming to work for Bernie Sanders? Jeff asked me. At this point I got up and shut the door to my office. “Tell me more,” I said.

  Two days later, I was on my way to Senator Sanders’s office. I met Jeff, and we had a good rapport right away. He said: “We need help. I really like your résumé.” Jeff told me, “We’re struggling with some of our messaging. We need someone like you on board.” At the end of it,
I thought, I like him, he likes me, but there was nothing really official said.

  Two weeks later, I heard from the senator’s communications director. We agreed to meet up at a restaurant. When I sat down, he had two phones on the table and they both kept going off, one after the other, back and forth. It was pretty immediately clear to me: they needed help. We started talking about issues like trade, the economy, and criminal justice reform. The communications director commented that he thought I would be really good talking about these issues on the radio. “Hmm, well,” I quickly retorted, “I would be good at talking about these issues to actual reporters as well as on television if need be.”

  Another two weeks went by. Now it was June 2015. Another week. Crickets. So I was like, Cool, I’ve had twenty-nine interviews now . . . and I still don’t have a new job.

  In the midst of all this, Netroots Nation—a major annual progressive political conference—happened. The 2015 conference took place right after the death of Sandra Bland, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman who was pulled over for failing to put on her turn signal when changing lanes: three days later, she ended up dead in her jail cell while in police custody. As Senator Sanders was addressing the conference, activists started interrupting him by calling out the names of Bland and other Black people killed in recent years by the police. Needless to say, the encounter did not go well; Bernie looked flustered and out of touch, and the videos and coverage went viral. I saw this and thought: Okay. Maybe I don’t want to work for him anyway, because perhaps he has a Black problem. But a nagging voice in my head also said, Maybe you should go to work for him, because his message is important. And he might not actually have a Black people problem. His larger vision was important, and I believed in it. I also believed in the value of having the voices of the activists heard.

  Had they not called me, I would not have pursued the job further. Here’s why: it is important to me that I am working for and with people who have a level of cultural competency where people of color, especially Black people, are concerned. So when watching Bernie fumble with response to BLM interruptions at his rallies, part of me was like, Oh . . . maybe this is not the place for me. I was uninterested in going to work somewhere where it seemed the boss did not get it, “it” being why young Black people felt the need to insert themselves in this conversation and proclaim that Black lives matter. But then they called me.

  So about a week later, as I was running around doing Capitol Hill visits with some juvenile justice advocates, my phone rang. “The senator wants to meet with you today—are you available?” I told the aide I was only available until four p.m., and then I wouldn’t be available until after seven. It was two thirty p.m. at this point. She asked if I were at all flexible on the hours. I said, “No, but I’d love to meet with him.” She asked if she could call me back. We hung up. The phone rang again: “Can you come right now?”

  I decided to go to the meeting because: one, you just don’t tell a sitting United States senator no when he wants to talk to you; two, I thought it would be an opportunity to express my thoughts to him; and three, I hadn’t gotten any other callbacks (HA).

  Piece of Advice

  A Word on How You Look and Who You Are

  A word of advice about appearance and so-called normalcy. I am all for personal expression and finding a way to let your unique character show through details in your appearance. We come from different backgrounds and cultures and heritages and have different senses of style as individuals. Decorum dictates that in certain environments and situations, we dress to certain standards. That’s fine. That doesn’t mean we need to dress like everyone else, or that we need to change how we look in order to fit people’s expectations. Once when I was on CNN a viewer wrote me a comment that my nails weren’t “appropriate when talking about politics” on television. To that I say, there are lots of people telling us what we can’t do and very few people encouraging us and telling us what we can do.

  I think people—especially young people in industries where oftentimes there are not a lot of folks that look like them—should strive to blaze trails and do the things that haven’t been done before. It wasn’t normal for a really long time for women to wear pants in the workplace until somebody started wearing pants. And now nobody thinks twice about a pantsuit. But somebody had to be the one to put on the pantsuit. Make that person you.

  At my first internship in DC, they told me that folks only wear three things in this city: blue, black, and gray. I thought, Oh my God! I was about to wear a color-block jumpsuit tomorrow! But you know what? I went to work in my color-block jumpsuit because that’s who I am. I like making it my personal mission to show up as my authentic self every single day—because my authentic self is absolutely appropriate. I have the right to be who I am, whatever the circumstances.

  If I waited on someone to pick me, I’d be waiting for a really long time, and I probably wouldn’t be talking to you in this book. I’m fully aware that when I show up curvy, with a low cut, a bold lip, an oversized bow, amazing nails, and a chilling analysis . . . people don’t know how to take it. Because I am not supposed to be able to give you solid political commentary with a bedazzled nail, right?

  Blaze a trail. Break the mold. Be who you are.

  But, while I mean it when I say you should always be yourself, I also mean you should be your best-put-together self when the occasion calls. Keep some business wear in the trunk of your car, and at your office if you have one. You never know who might show up, or where you might get invited to when you are out running errands in your sweatpants. A little effort goes a long way, whatever effort that may be.

  I ran out of a congressional building to my car, grabbed a blazer and shoes out of my trunk, and booked it to Senator Sanders’s office. When I arrived, Bernie came out and said, “Come on in!” I thought to myself, This is not a normal workday. And then I thought, Why should it not be? Why should it not be “normal” for a sitting senator and presidential candidate to talk to an informed and ambitious twenty-five-year-old Black woman? The fact that I even asked myself that question, though, is interesting. I questioned why things were the way they were, and decided the answer was that it did not have to be that way. It was kind of surreal. In the moment, I didn’t grasp the significance, but I definitely thought, I have something to say. And I am glad I went in and I said it.

  We had only said a few words to each other when we led right into the start of a joke that we would go on to make hundreds of times: yep, we have the same last name. “Maybe we’re related,” he said, and I was like, “Well, my dad’s from Mississippi, so I dunno . . .”

  From that oh-so-awkward start, the dialogue went something like this.

  Senator: I didn’t know there were so many . . .

  Me: Black people in Nebraska?

  Senator: I was gonna say Democrats.

  Ha ha, ha ha. More small talk; more getting-to-know-you chatty conversation. He asks me about school, about my current work, and then we get down to business. Anything you might have thought I would ask, I asked and the senator of course had thoughtful responses. We discussed Netroots, his reaction to the protestors, and overall strategy. Then we got into an argument. As the senator promptly let me know, we had “a fundamental disagreement” about economic policy. I suggested there was valid criticism out there about his policy, and he obviously did not agree. He then gave me his spiel about inequality and concentration of wealth and how politics is controlled by Wall Street.

  Here’s the thing: I don’t necessarily disagree with the spiel—but he was missing a bigger issue. I started off trying to say something about how racial inequality in this country is not a subset of some other set of issues. But instead of fighting, I decided to backtrack and tell the senator a story that I’ll share with you now.

  I was on my way to the library one night in my car while I was in college. My parents lived in Omaha, near the university, and I was driving back from their house—it was around ten p.m. on a weekday. My ta
illight was out; I got pulled over. The officer ran my license.

  “Ma’am, did you know you have a warrant out for your arrest?”

  A warrant? That’s just not possible. I’ve never been in trouble with the police before, ever. For what?! It turns out, he told me, I had a, uh, small number of parking tickets, let’s say. At this point it had escalated to a bench warrant—which means I had to come in to deal with it. I asked, “Can I pay the tickets right now?”

  Officer was like, “No, ma’am, that’s not how it works—I’m gonna have to take you to jail.” Oh my God. I cannot believe this is happening.

  I got out of my car; he handcuffed me. I started crying as I got into the back of the police vehicle. Then I realized I couldn’t wipe my nose because my hands were cuffed, so the tears stopped. There was another officer in the car too. I told them I was a student at Creighton. The other officer was like, “Oh, my wife went to Creighton”—I was thinking they’d let me go. No dice.

  At this point in my story, I told the senator: I dunno if you’ve ever been to jail, but when you go, only one car is allowed in the parking stall at a time, because they don’t want folks mingling when you get out. So we were waiting for a few minutes, and then one of the officers came around to open my door, but he told me not to move. I saw him bend down like he was picking something up off the ground. Then he told me I could get out (easier said than done with your hands cuffed) and he took me up to stand at the door to wait to be buzzed in.

  Then, as this was happening, one of the officers said, “Oh, we found your weed.”

  I wasn’t paying attention, because I didn’t smoke, and so I didn’t think they were speaking to me. So I didn’t respond. “You hear us? We found your weed.” My thoughts were racing, wondering what the hell they could be talking about. I didn’t smoke. I hadn’t been driving around with anyone who did. They couldn’t possibly have found weed in my car, so why would they say such a thing? My mind switched into overdrive, trying to flip through all the possibilities of how I could prove this was impossible. While freaking out on the inside, I kept completely quiet.