No, You Shut Up

by Symone D. Sanders

  Change takes time, but change also can’t wait.

  Chapter 6

  Stand in the Gap

  There’s an age-old and well-known Black lady proverb that goes something like this: “Eff it, I’ll do it.”

  Or more elegantly put, in the dedication to their book For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics, the authors Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore wrote the following:

  For the women

  who ride the early bus

  who work the late shift

  who teach the children, clean the offices, nurse the sick

  who stand guard and keep watch

  who build, create, and sustain

  who cut new paths and swim in unchartered waters

  who light the path and lead the way

  who stand up, step up, sit down, and always keep moving

  who do the everyday extraordinary work of family, community, and liberation.

  We sing this song for you.

  Whether we write poetry or tell jokes about it, it all comes back to the hard fact that so very often, Black women are the ones who have to go in and get things done, go in and have the hard conversations, go in and clean things up after someone makes a mess whether of a political situation (um, hello? More than 90 percent of Black women voted for Clinton in 2016) or a living room. Black women in America have long, perhaps forever, been the cornerstones and the cleaning ladies: the ones who form the foundation and the bedrock of their families and their neighborhoods, the ones who do the domestic laboring that no one else wants to, who do the grief work or grunt work that the country or the community requires.

  And you know what? It’s exhausting. Black women, though we can, and we do, and we will continue to accomplish things for ourselves, sometimes want a little help. Sometimes we need someone to stand in the gap for us. So many of us who are disenfranchised, or under-supported, or ostracized, or struggling, or misunderstood, or outcast need accomplices, not just allies. Society needs people who are willing to stand up for one another and step in for one another. We need to learn to stand in the gap, to close the space so other people can make it over to the land of opportunity, which right now is unreachable, no matter how hard they work, how much they lean in, or how far they leap.

  Here’s the problem with asking people to stand in the gap for others. People don’t like to be uncomfortable. But think about. If you can choose to avoid discomfort, you’re already way better off than many other folks out there. You can choose to turn away from discrimination or racism because you don’t want to see it. Some people wake up uncomfortable because they haven’t eaten a proper meal in days, or they’re worried about getting evicted, or they’re living on the street with their kids, or they’re working three jobs to pay the bills. It’s tough for people to embody or internalize: How do I really use my power to stand up for someone else?

  When I think about standing in the gap, I think about Heather Heyer. Heather was a young woman who went out to a counter-protest in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, to oppose the white supremacists who had gathered in the city to rally. She was killed for her convictions and her refusal to back down in the face of racism. Heather Heyer was not Black, she was not a person of color, she was not Jewish, she was not a member of any group of people that the neo-Nazis or the white supremacists were there talking about. But Heather went out to stand in the gap.

  She wasn’t just an ally to those who were being attacked by the Unite the Right folks—she was more than that. She was an accomplice. Me, I don’t want more allies. Because sometimes your ally has an alibi, a get-out-of-jail-free card. They’re with you, beside you, until the going gets tough. An accomplice doesn’t have an easy out. An accomplice goes out there with you, takes risks the same as you. Heather was an accomplice, so much so that she lost her life standing in the gap. I am not suggesting that folks need to or should run out and lay down their lives for social justice. But there are real, tangible opportunities to stand in the gap for others. It leads back to the idea that we have to be radical revolutionaries in our everyday spaces and places. We don’t take these opportunities. Because it makes us uncomfortable.

  It’s uncomfortable work to speak up. I’ll say that sometimes, I just want to go to my job. I don’t want to be the Black girl at the office. Sometimes I just wanted to show up in class; I didn’t want to be the person that people looked at to provide them with teachable moments. It’s uncomfortable to speak up, to ask people to do something they haven’t done before, to buck the status quo.

  Let me tell you about one super-uncomfortable situation in 2016, when I found myself way out there in the gap, looking for someone to grab on to. It was early on the campaign trail in 2016, but it was one of the times when we had Secret Service and the good plane. When things are going well, you’ve got money, you’re riding a good wave, then the plane is nice and you’ve got hot meals and liquor any time you want. This is in a good spell of campaign life, which could come to an abrupt and screeching halt at any moment. You know the moment is over when you go from the good plane to an old plane, you don’t have Wi-Fi, and you’re eating boxed lunches with cold-cut sandwiches and stale chips. That day is always near.

  But at this point we were riding high. It was the first rally of the new year in 2016. I had a poppin’ peacoat from Banana Republic. We arrived at a large venue in Massachusetts to a packed crowd; it was a school auditorium, and there was not enough room, so we went outside beforehand so the senator could briefly address the overflow crowd—about two hundred people that couldn’t get in. So we went outside, I introduced the senator, everyone was all excited, and then he spoke. I was standing just off to the side with a senior advisor; our trip director, who was a tall African American man named Paul; our campaign manager; and maybe one other person. Bernie finished; we were ready to go into the building to do our rally, the thing we came to do.

  We were all feeling good after warming up the crowd outside. The entrance to the building was just about a hundred feet away, and as we started walking in the direction of the doors, I heard someone yelling, “Ma’am. Ma’am! Move to the side! Move!” I was like, Dang, that lady they’re yelling at better move. Next thing I know, a state trooper had his hands on me; he was yanking me out of Senator Sanders’s entourage. I was walking next to Paul, who threw his arm over me, stopped everyone else with his other hand outstretched, and said to the trooper, “Do we have a problem? This is the national press secretary.” The state trooper went, “Uh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” And I looked at him and said, “Because the Black girl couldn’t be with Bernie Sanders, right?” And then I turned around to the senator, who’d been held up by the commotion and was looking on aghast, and I said, “This is what I’m always talking about.” As I calculated my next move, Paul looked at me. He gave me this calm stare and said, “What are we going to do?” and I said, “We’ve got work to do.” He said, “Not going to let the devil get us.” “Not today,” I said. And so Paul and I walked into the event venue, everybody else followed after. But throughout that whole exchange, nobody but Paul said anything. I don’t know that anyone except Paul or myself will even remember that story today, but it is forever seared into my brain because I needed somebody to have my back. I needed somebody to speak up for me. And I’m sure it was really uncomfortable for Paul. But he had my back. And I don’t think that the other folks in the entourage didn’t speak up because they felt what the state trooper was doing was acceptable. I don’t think they didn’t speak up because they agreed with the assumptions at work. I think they didn’t speak up because it was uncomfortable. They didn’t speak up because they weren’t ready to be accomplices.

  There will be times where you have an opportunity to stand in the gap, to speak up for somebody, but it makes you uncomfortable. And you don’t move, don’t act, don’t say something. Part of being a radical revolutionary is stepping in on that homophobic joke, being willing to say something when someone comes up saying s
omething racist, even if that person is someone close to you, someone you never expected to hold those kinds of views.

  In a speech on the Vietnam War, delivered on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Dr. King said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” We have to be willing to speak up, to be uncomfortable. Part of being a radical revolutionary and standing in the gap means being able to engage in uncomfortable conversations. We live in a culture right now where we can choose to isolate ourselves in echo chambers with people who think like us, look like us, vote like us. There’s literally a button on Facebook that says hide all content like this so you never have to see anything that you do not like. We are living in a culture where we are hiding all content like this in our everyday spaces and places. We are refusing to engage with the world and with others in our real-life human interactions, to the point where we don’t even know how to have uncomfortable conversations with people, let alone stand up and put ourselves at risk for people who aren’t like us. People are avoided and left out of the conversation every day, in boardrooms, in communities, in politics, and it takes the collective “we” to step in and stand up. Otherwise people will keep doing it.

  Here’s an uncomfortable truth I hold: I believe that we have yet to have a real conversation about race or equity in America because the conversation has yet to be had outside of the lens of white supremacist ideology and the patriarchy. And let’s not think that people of color and women don’t perpetuate these systems every single day; we have all internalized it. When a Black person tells another person of color, “You talk white,” that’s white supremacist ideology speaking right there: the idea that a Black person is trying to be something they aren’t when they use a certain vocabulary or diction. Or when women during the Kavanaugh hearings said, “I wouldn’t want my son to be treated the way that Kavanaugh is being treated during this trial”—well, wait a minute! Would your son be in that position, where Kavanaugh found himself, if he hadn’t been drunk and pinning down a girl on a bed? Maybe some of my viewers and fans don’t want to hear that, but backing down or watering down my beliefs, just because they’re upsetting to some, doesn’t change the truth behind them. I wake up every day determined to tell the truth no matter how uncomfortable it may make some.

  I take my work as a political operative seriously. A battle is being waged in this country, and eventually it will be over. I don’t want to sit on the sidelines. Because when it ends, we have to ask ourselves: Where do we find ourselves now? Have we helped to create solutions, improve lives? Are we all better off than we were before? Are Black people, young people, women, LGBTQ+ folks in a better position? I hope that we can say that the work we are doing in our communities matters, that when the battle is done being waged, we sit in a better position. That requires some real work. That requires us to be radical revolutionaries. That requires us to do some things that have not been done before. It requires us to stand in the gap for one another, but to know that doesn’t give anyone an exemption from behaving with integrity. The work that happened fifty years ago colors the lives we are able to lead today. The work we are doing right now will dictate the quality and nature of people’s lives fifty years from now.

  For instance, I’ve learned what I have about standing in the gap, and I am able to be where I am today because of people like the women who wrote the poem at the start of this chapter. This group of badass Black women at the upper echelons of American politics call themselves the Colored Girls. They are Donna Brazile, a total shero of mine, who you know by now and who also happens to be a political commentator and the first Black woman to direct a major presidential campaign; Minyon Moore, who was director of White House political affairs under President Clinton and former CEO and chief operating officer of the Democratic National Committee; Yolanda Caraway, a public affairs and relations specialist who was chief of staff of the National Rainbow Coalition and the 1988 Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, and deputy chair of the DNC; and Leah Daughtry, a reverend who was the CEO of the 2016 and 2008 Democratic National Convention and chief of staff to Howard Dean. They in turn got to where they are because of people like Reverend Willie T. Barrow and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who came before and stood in the gap so they could cross over to greater successes.

  Willie T. Barrow was born into a family of seven kids in a small town in Texas in 1924. She started her lifelong involvement in activism early, when she organized a protest at age twelve to argue for the right of Black students to ride the bus to school. She grew into a national civil rights leader despite her small stature of four foot eleven, which earned her the nickname “Little Warrior.” Barrow worked with Reverend King in the 1950s as a field organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; she organized and participated in the Selma and Washington marches of the 1960s. With Reverend Jesse Jackson, she helped create Operation Breadbasket, which became Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity), and later served on Jackson’s presidential campaigns. In the ’80s, she succeeded Jesse Jackson as executive director of Operation PUSH, and in the ’90s she continued her lifelong practice of standing in the gap when she went out there supporting the LGBT community and fighting for HIV/AIDS victims. She became godmother to Barack Obama—and to nearly one hundred other people too—and a national icon. She did so by recognizing that she couldn’t, and didn’t want to, do the work alone. In the civil rights era, “I opened my house up to all the powerful women in the movement—Coretta Scott King, Dorothy Height, Addie Wyatt,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times. “That’s how I learned.” In her later years, she observed, “We have to teach this generation . . . [we must] train more Corettas, more Addies, more Dorothys. If these young people don’t know whose shoulders they stand on, they’ll take us back to slavery. And I believe that’s why the Lord is still keeping me here.” She tirelessly worked for the rights of the oppressed until she died in 2015, at the age of ninety.

  Another trailblazing figure still doing the work is Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. Congresswoman Norton was born in Washington, DC, in 1937, the daughter of a teacher and a civil servant. While at Antioch College she became an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and organized and participated in sit-ins. As a student at Yale Law School, she joined in the Mississippi Freedom Summer and worked with activists including Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer. She became a stalwart advocate for civil rights and women’s rights: she served as assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first female chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, appointed by President Jimmy Carter, and professor at Georgetown University Law Center before being elected to the House of Representatives in 1990, where she still serves, now as a Democratic superdelegate.

  These women are just a few of the people who enabled me to get where I am today. I owe it to them and to the activists and revolutionaries and operatives coming up now to continue to stand in the gap for others. But while standing up and acting on behalf of other people, you also need to look out for yourself. Because you are not going to be a good accomplice, radical revolutionary, or even friend if you aren’t feeling good about what you yourself are doing. A big part of this is being honest with yourself about your long-term goals, and also reclaiming your time from all of the forces that want to pull it away from you, toward frivolous or meaningless or unfulfilling stuff. The first step for me is understanding what it is I want to do, short term and long term, and then making commitments that will hold me to those goals.

  Oftentimes we can’t seize opportunities because we’re not clear on what we actually WANT to do, and so we end up doing random things and a year or five or ten years later you’re like, Why I am over HERE doing THIS at this company? I was supposed to be over THERE by now . . . wherever that may be. Maybe you’re making more money than you once thought possible, but you’re not fulfilled or the work itself lacks meaning. Maybe your family life sucks because you come home at ten p.m. every night and ca
n’t spend time with your partner or your kids. Or maybe you’ve never taken a risk and gone in pursuit of that dream job that would pay you well to do what you like. Perhaps you’ve lost track of your best friends, all because you didn’t take time to sustain your friendships when your career took off. We can’t be our authentic selves if we don’t know who we aspire to become. If you’re not your authentic self, you can’t get to the place where you want to be. This goes back to my advice earlier about writing down your goals. It sounds small, but writing it down and expressing it is what makes it real! You can’t say it as a joke either: part of being prepared for an opportunity is taking it seriously. It’s an important step to take at a time when you can think with a clear head and create a vision for your future. Because sometimes people will push you off track, sometimes you’ll meander aimlessly for too long, and sometimes life comes along and smacks you to the ground.

  That’s what happened to me on March 18, 2017, when my father died suddenly. He had a stroke while he was working out at the gym, back home in Omaha, and two weeks later he was gone. I didn’t take time off to process what happened, or to be with my family, and I should have. The day after his memorial service I was doing a speaking engagement; two days later I was back on TV. But inside, and in my life beyond the cameras, I was not well.

  Things finally came to a head on my birthday in December 2017. I had a party at a fancy lounge place in DC. I didn’t reserve it exclusively because the party was supposed to be twenty friends; one hundred people showed up. I don’t remember too many specifics about that night, but I can remember that I caused a scene. The police came. I remember leaving the venue with coat over my head and being like, “TAKE ME OUT OF HERE; THEY’RE TAKING MY PICTURE!” Weeping, absolutely a mess.