I’m a young, Black woman in a male-dominated field who defies expectations and the standards of white beauty every day. I don’t have time for nice (since it so often means please shut up and go away), and neither do you. And honestly, look around at who’s being called “nasty” these days by a certain someone in the White House. I’m just about ready to wear that word like a badge of honor.
Do you think Shirley Chisholm stood around waiting in line for the apparatus to permit her entrance, as the first Black woman elected to Congress? Do you think she became the first Black person to seek the presidential nomination by a major party by being nice, in the deferential, go-with-the-flow sense? Oh hell no. She was the daughter of immigrants, a father who was a factory worker, and a mother who was a maid. She grew up to be an “Unbought and Unbossed” champion for women’s rights and racial equality (the phrase was one of her congressional slogans, and the title of her memoir). She’s the one who helped pave the way for people including Congresswomen Maxine Waters and Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was once the boss of a young congressional intern who’s now my personal hero, the aforementioned Donna Brazile.
Donna Brazile wrote in the introduction to Chisholm’s memoir that Chisholm “did not wait for permission and she did not seek the acceptance of those who came before her. She was her own boss.” Congresswoman Chisholm knew full well that “women in this country must become revolutionaries” and “refuse to accept the old, the traditional roles and stereotypes.” She was a true master of making a way forward though no one wanted to let her through, though no path existed, and she left this trail for others to follow.
And she didn’t stop once she got to a place of power. When Chisholm was first elected to Congress in 1968, representing New York’s twelfth congressional district, she was dismayed to be assigned to the House Agriculture Committee, which she felt had little connection to her work with her urban constituents. But did she sit back, bide her time, fall in line? No. She met with Bob Dole, then a Republican senator from Kansas, and they worked together on the food stamp program, which allowed poor Americans to buy food staples at subsidized prices. She went on to help with the inception of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) to make sure that these vulnerable populations had access to important food supplements.
She knew how to bring her adversaries on board as well as her allies. For instance, she reached out to the infamously racist George Wallace, an outspoken advocate of segregationist policies, after he survived an assassination attempt where he was shot at point-blank range. She recalled their interaction when she visited him in the hospital: “He said to me, ‘What are your people going to say?’ I said: ‘I know what they’re going to say. But I wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to anyone.’ He cried and cried and cried.” And you know what? Chisholm called up Wallace in 1964 when she was working on a bill to ensure domestic workers had a right to a mandated minimum wage, and Wallace helped get votes from Southern congressmen, enough to get the legislation passed in the House. Chisholm noted, “He always spoke well of Shirley Chisholm in the South. Many of the Southerners did not want to make the vote. They came around.”
Shirley Chisholm overcame enormous odds. She grew up in a country that abolished slavery a mere sixty-one years before she was born. In just about another twenty years from now, and certainly by 2045, new government census data shows the United States will be “majority minority”—in other words, people of color will be the majority in this country. Women already outnumber men in America. So what does it mean that women and people of color are approaching majority? What does it mean that we’re entering into positions of influence and power in greater numbers than ever before? What will change look like? That depends on us—what we’re demanding, what we’re asking for. We’re in the middle of a cultural shift, and we need to take advantage of that. We won’t get as far as we can as fast as we can if we’re worried about stepping around people to get where we need to go, or worried about offending them or displeasing them along the way.
But before you start pushing out ahead of everybody else, remember: You have to be prepared. Know your stuff. Because you are going to be scrutinized and called to task for every single thing you say and do, in a way that others (see: white cis men) are not. For me, being a young person (often the youngest) in the room means I always have to have numbers, details, facts—otherwise everyone says I don’t know what I’m talking about. Remember the run-in I mentioned with Santorum about the poopy lettuce? That happens. A lot.
Sometimes it’s the voice in your head that most loudly questions your authority or capabilities. After all, it can be hard at times to overcome a lifetime of conditioning that tells us that we need to wait in line and be accommodating. Even when we decide to step out and take risks, sometimes we are the ones who are holding ourselves back, with self-doubts or recriminations, with insecurities or fear of failure, with a lack of self-knowledge.
Another consideration when stepping out of the line that you’re supposed to wait in is that you need to know where your own lines are internally. What are you willing to do, or not do, to achieve your goals? What in your life is worth sacrificing for a cause that you believe in, and what is not? How vocal are you willing to be about the change you want to see in the world, and what are you willing to do or not do to see it come to pass? One thing is for sure: people are always ready to throw shade. In order to not let it reach you, you need to have a strong light guiding you from within. Others may have illuminated a path for you to follow along, but your own inner light, this self-knowledge, will help make clear your boundaries, what you are willing to do or not do. For me, this light comes from my faith in God and from my family, especially my parents, who instilled strong values in me about community and service.
It took some reassessment of the state of my own self-knowledge in order to feel confident about taking the next step in my political career. In April of 2019, the official announcement came out that I had joined the Biden campaign as senior advisor. Pretty much immediately, I started appearing on TV representing the former vice president. One of the first things that happened, as I mentioned earlier on, was that I was ambushed about the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which passed while Bill Clinton was president and Biden was Senate judiciary chairman. The $30 billion package included an assault weapons ban, funding for drug courts, the Violence Against Women Act, but it also included funding for additional prisons and supported tougher sentences for those convicted of crimes.
Critics of Biden immediately pounced and said that the bill contributed to the crisis of mass incarceration in this country, and that it was directly responsible for the huge problems we have today in our prison and criminal justice system. For instance, nonviolent first-time drug offenders are serving decades of time in prison: 49 percent of Black men aged twenty-three or older have been arrested at some point in their lives, according to a study conducted by the Obama White House in 2016. Also, the US represents 21 percent of the global prison population despite only having 4 percent of the world’s people, according to a National Research Council report produced by an interdisciplinary committee of researchers. In other words, not a good scene. But to say that this one bill directly led to our problems of mass incarceration is more than a little simplistic. Nevertheless, I wasn’t quite expecting to answer attacks on Biden about his role in our country’s prison culture on basically my first day on the job. But I had to, so I did. Live on CNN.
I don’t think people understand sometimes that my role is as an operative, a political operative. When you are an operative or an aide—that is, a good aide, a good spokesperson for your candidate or your principal—rule number one is that you don’t get out ahead of your candidate. You wait for them to vocalize their opinions and their responses, and then you back them up. And while I have feelings and thoughts, I’m not going to express those thoughts or opinions to millions of people on CNN, because I’m a consummate
professional ☺. So instead of getting out in front of Biden on this issue of the crime bill and mass incarceration, I twisted myself into a hot, salty pretzel to not say anything that he hadn’t already said.
It is my job to support my principal and make him come out looking as best as he can, no matter the circumstances or the accusations. That can be confusing to some people, but I rely on my strong sense of personal integrity to pull me through. Nevertheless, in a word, the interview was terrible.
From the outside looking in, I could see that it was set up to look as if the campaign had sent me out there to talk about this issue, when in fact the media ambushed me. This interview was conducted right before Biden’s first official rally in Philadelphia. There was so much I was excited to say about Biden’s campaign launch and all the things he stands for, all the ways he could help improve the state of our economy, our foreign policy, our environment, our domestic issues of inequality. Was I expecting the media to grill me about the ins and outs of a twenty-five-year-old bill? No. But there I was, doing my job. What was I going to do when something like this happened—take my mic off and walk away? Refuse to answer? Give a blank stare? No. This was what I’d signed up to do. And honestly, digging into a candidate’s record is something we should expect and desire from our media.
Sometimes you have to take a deep breath and focus on the long game rather than getting caught up in the painful moment. Moments like that do make you stop and question what you are doing, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You should evaluate where your lines are, what you are willing to do and say in pursuit of your larger goals. I need to know that I can sleep soundly when I take my eyelashes off at night, confident in the knowledge that what I am doing is right, that I am working for someone who could definitely make America a better place. I feel that way in my work today; I felt it on previous campaigns too. That said, I understand my role and my lane.
Piece of Advice
Know Your OWN Boundary Lines
Though I encourage everyone to do what they can to jump the lines that society puts us in, I also feel you need to find the personal and professional lines that you want to stay within; that is, your own internal boundaries. Far too many people haven’t thought enough about this concept, and it can lead to real problems: reputational damage, hurt feelings, severed relationships, getting fired, and so on. Look at someone like Sean Spicer, who I knew socially before he went to work for Trump. Once upon a time, before he was a punch line, Spicer was a really good communications professional. He had worked in the business forever. But he messed up big-time, because he didn’t understand his personal or professional lines—he lost his inner compass, tossed it aside in favor of doing what his boss wanted him to—and that caused him to flat-out lie on multiple occasions. Part of being a communications professional is that you don’t lie. You can spin, you can fudge, but you do not lie for your principal. And frankly, a good boss would never ask you to lie—and that holds true in any industry.
The moment someone asks you to lie, to cross your professional lines, you have to make a decision about whether that is something you are willing to do or not. Part of taking on challenges is understanding your boundaries, whether you are in a relationship, whether you are at work, whether you are doing activism in pursuit of social justice. If you don’t know where your boundaries are, your limits, how you will react to personal affronts or unreasonable demands then how will you be able to define what is and is not acceptable to you? You won’t have the words to respond when someone insults you or asks you to do something that seems questionable, or inquires about your motives or actions, because you don’t know what is and isn’t acceptable to you as an individual. When you know your own boundaries, then you can find the answers when you ask yourself: Am I willing to work this shift, answer this question, sacrifice this vacation, put up with this person’s attitude, live with this uncertainty, take this pay cut, relocate for this job?
I’ve been a line jumper for most of my life. I was never content to wait around when I saw so much in the world that I wanted to do. And I knew early on that to do the kind of things I wanted, I needed to be in DC. The first time I visited DC was with Girls Incorporated of Omaha. When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I took part in a program called She Votes through Girls Inc., and that’s how I discovered my passion for politics. The program introduces girls to the political process: how and why we need to vote, about women serving in positions of power, about different elected officials and what they do. In my year, there was a cohort of about six of us who came to DC—this was when Hillary Clinton was a senator. We had an opportunity to visit the Hill, we got a personal audience with Senator Clinton, and we visited the Girls Inc. national offices.
I was in love. This was what I wanted to do, and DC was where I wanted to be. Five or six years later, while in college, I served on the board of the National Coalition for Juvenile Justice and had the chance to start to really get to know Washington. I started coming back and forth regularly from Omaha for board meetings, two or three times per year. Then the summer after my sophomore year, I interned in DC at the national public policy office of Girls Inc. It was a rich summer and a poor summer. Rich with experiences, poor in that I was just scraping by since it was an unpaid position. I’m so thankful to the family friends who let me stay at their place, even if it was out in the boonies, in a suburb called Bowie. Every morning I got up at six a.m., walked a mile from the gated community to the bus stop, got on the bus, took the bus to the Metro, sat on a thirty- to forty-minute Metro ride, and then walked from the Farragut North Metro station to the Girls Inc. office. After that summer, I went back to Omaha, but I knew when I finished school that I would make DC my home. This was where I needed to be to make an impact on the largest level. Plus the city had a vibrancy, an energy, a feeling of possibility about it that I had never sensed anywhere else.
In the fall of 2014, I’d been working on Chuck Hassebrook’s campaign for governor of Nebraska. The day after he lost, I was like, Nope. Got to go. So that day, I got on a plane to DC and crashed at my friend Amber’s place. Even though I was sleeping on a couch, I still knew that this was where I wanted to be. I stayed for a couple of weeks, starting to hunt for an apartment, and then went back at Thanksgiving to see my family and get my car. My dad was like, “Symone, you’re just going to get in your car and drive to DC? Do you have a place to live when you get back there?” “Nope, but I’m looking on Craigslist,” I told him.
My mother was very supportive of what I wanted to do, but my father was very skeptical of me uprooting myself. There was no stopping me, though; I packed my life into my car, got in with my friend Aja, and we drove off back to DC. By December, I had moved into my own apartment with a roommate I’d found on Craigslist. My life was about to begin, albeit in a third-floor walk-up five miles out of the city center.
My first month in DC was miserable. When I first went to work at Global Trade Watch, it was a steep learning curve. On my first day they were using acronyms that were totally meaningless to me: NAFTA—okay, got it. CAFTA? TAFTA? WTF? I thought. Trade issues were very new to me at the time; everything I was writing came back with red ink all over it. I would go to work early and come home very late, and oftentimes I would have more work to do once I got there. I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t like my roommate, it was cold, I didn’t have any money, and my job was hard. In other words, I was in my early twenties in a big city.
It was tough, but the truth is when I left Nebraska, I was stepping out of line—I was getting out of my comfort zone in a big way. And I moved because I wasn’t going to hit the political jackpot at home. I knew moving to DC was what I needed to do, to take a chance on my dreams. But it was hard. I missed my family. My job was tough. I wasn’t doing what I’d wanted or expected to be doing. But I knew I had to make it work. And, of course, once I got a little bit comfortable in DC and in my job, once I started building a network, I started getting a little impatient, and I knew I needed to g
et out of line again. So I started interviewing. And I went to interview after interview after interview (twenty-nine of them, remember?) before I landed the Bernie Sanders job. I was trying not to get discouraged. My mom was saying things like “You can always come home.” Yes, but I didn’t want to come home! I appreciated her support, but I knew if I just went back, I would feel like a failure. I had to exhaust every option first, because I was unwilling to go back to standing in line.
After the crazy season of seemingly endless interviews, I suddenly found myself, at twenty-six, as the national press secretary of a man running to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. When I first started working on the Bernie Sanders campaign, I was confident—and just wanted to do a good job. Contrary to the expectations of everyone who inquired, I was not nervous. Even though I was entering a new territory professionally, even though I was very young, I knew myself: what I could accomplish and what I was willing to do. I would never have been offered the job if I hadn’t just stepped up and asked for it. In my initial conversations with Bernie, when he asked me what I wanted my role to be, I could have thought, Well, I have many years ahead of me in my career and I’m relatively inexperienced, so I should just take X position while I wait to become Y. Nope. I asked for Y. And I got it. As you know.
The campaign itself was a real start-up-type situation at this point. A week after I got a verbal offer, I still had nothing official. I thought to myself, Did I dream all of this up? No timeline, no protocols, nothing. So I was still working at the trade organization when Jeff Weaver called me up on the last Thursday in July. He said, “We’re so happy you work here, kid. How do you feel about coming out on the campaign trail in Seattle next weekend with the senator? Not in your capacity as press secretary quite yet, but in your role as a juvenile justice advocate?” He mentioned that the weekend would be the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown. Hmm, I thought. This doesn’t feel quite right. Why still not in my official role? Is this a test for whether they are going to officially hire me? But—am I going to say no to this opportunity? I cut right to the point: Am I going to get paid? Jeff said no because I would not be acting in my official capacity as press secretary, but all my expenses would be covered. “I need you to write a speech,” he told me, “because you’ll intro the senator to the crowd. Oh, and what’s the largest crowd you’ve ever done? We’re thinking fifteen thousand people at this thing.”
No, You Shut Up Page 10