The next day, one of my best friends was like, “You know, you were out of control yesterday.” I replied, ridiculously: “I wasn’t out of control.” He insisted: “You were. You need to think a little bit about how you’ve been acting this year.” Again, I was like, UGH. THE AUDACITY! A week later, my good girlfriends at the party—the ones who later kept me off the venue’s official blacklist, and also made sure I had my keys and got my passport that night as I was escorted out of the place—took me to dinner and hosted their own sensitive intervention. They said, “You’ve had a tough year. But you need to pull back. You’re running around the town and the country, traveling, hanging out, turning up everywhere. We’re concerned that something is going to happen that will have lasting implications.”
Instead of quiet time when I was off camera and off work, I was going out, jumping on a plane and traveling to Miami, partying too hard. Here’s something to know about me: I will take the party from zero to one hundred in the first five minutes. (Just as I can take the interview from zero to one hundred in the first five minutes.) I wasn’t dealing well with the loss of my dad. I was worried about how my mom and my siblings were managing, but I was also avoiding going home. My sister’s college graduation had been two months after my father’s passing, and it was so incredibly tough to go to an event like that and not have him there. What made it more difficult was all of the people telling me they were sorry for my loss and that they missed my dad. People would see me out in town and come up and say these things, which I knew came from a good place, but I felt crippled talking about it at the time. I didn’t want to go home again for a while after that. This was the first time I’d experienced such a profound loss. My mother always puts on a brave face and powers through, but I know it was difficult for her, and still is.
Now, through prayer and therapy, I can talk about my father freely, but I’ll admit, I’m a crier, and just thinking about all of this makes me tear up. What people don’t tell you is that when you have a loss like that in your life, your sadness never leaves you. You learn to move through it. When I got the opportunity to work on the Biden campaign, I was sad when I thought about the fact that my dad would never know it. I get sad thinking about how my dad won’t see this book come out, or be there to walk me down the aisle, or that if I have kids they won’t get to know him. He doesn’t get to share in the experience of the great things I plan to do with my life. But you know what? I’m also grateful. I’m happy. I am happy that I’m coping and dealing with it and that I’m moving forward. I know that the best way I can honor my father is to continue to do what I’m doing—to go full steam ahead on the things that I believe in, to work my tail off to make change where I can. But in the immediate aftermath of losing my dad, I did not deal well. I didn’t take the time to get the help I needed, on top of all this professional stuff like having my own consulting business and working with Priorities USA and showing up on the regular on CNN.
One of my mentors, Tanya Lombard, an executive at AT&T who used to work with Minyon Moore, also sat me down for a come to Jesus. She took me out to dinner and she said to me, “Look, I lost my father when I was young, so I know what it feels like. But you’ve got a lot going on, so you can’t do this. You need help in order to really deal with this, Symone. You cannot act out. And you cannot let grief consume you.”
I was so defensive at first: I insisted that my friends who cared about me didn’t understand what it was like to always have people on your back. The loss of my dad came at a time just as people were really starting to recognize me. I was struggling with that loss of privacy, that feeling of becoming a public persona that had to behave in a certain way. I also felt like my friends didn’t understand that pressure to perform. It was new to me—I’d been doing TV since the campaign, but I was a pundit by the end of 2017. I was grateful that Tanya cared, and that she took the time to check up on me, but I also wasn’t ready to confront the bigger issues she brought up.
So when Tanya and other mentors and friends were sitting me down in February 2018, my response was a whiny “YOU DON’T KNOW MY LIIIIIIIIFE!” But their message finally came through—and they were so right. I needed to get myself together. I had no idea that I was so stressed and overwhelmed and also grief-stricken. I had to deal with the newfound responsibilities of my platform at the same time. The latter, I think, is something that happens to most people throughout their lives, even if you’re not on TV—any time you move up, when you can reach things you hadn’t been able to access before, all of a sudden you’re buying stuff you couldn’t afford before, showing up at important meetings even though you’re not really focused or emotionally prepared; maybe you’re a bit loose and maxed out.
I got to that point. I woke up to the fact that I needed to be more in control, needed to better manage myself. I committed to regularly going to a therapist, and I felt a sense of calmness and relaxation that I hadn’t felt before. I’m so grateful that big-sister figures like Tanya cared enough about me to call me and check up on me and question my behavior. My mom calls and checks on me because she’s supposed to. Tanya doesn’t have to—but she did, and she does. People like her are a good reminder that in doing this work, in creating space for change, we also have to remember to be good stewards of relationships. We can’t be so entrenched in the work that we forget to be good people, and to help one another. And we’ll also get a lot further a lot faster if we stand in the gap for one another along the way.
My life went from zero to sixty right around this time—I made HUGE professional leaps. While I felt I’d done the work to be prepared professionally, these leaps came really fast, and I wasn’t prepared to deal with the by-products of that emotionally. Even if it’s not about public exposure or how you behave in public, most people will have to make strategic decisions about how their personal behavior intersects with their career and professional life at some point. You may find you have to make personal sacrifices.
It’s easier sometimes just to go along a certain path—perhaps it’s the path of least resistance or it’s the path that you feel was set out for you by societal pressure to achieve a certain income, or family expectations to go into a certain line of work. For me, when I joined the Biden campaign as senior advisor, some people were aghast. They were like, You’re a traitor to Bernie and the causes that he supports—a traitor to millennials, essentially—and all kinds of other stuff.
I will forever respect Senator Sanders for taking a chance on me. I was like, “I want to be national press secretary,” and he basically said, Cool. I’ll give you a shot. But I scoff at the idea that I should be expected to forever toe the line, when the nature of our relationship was he took a chance on me, and I took a chance on him. Look, nobody talked me through the talking points—matter of fact, there weren’t any, so I wrote them myself. Nobody taught me how to gaggle with reporters. I figured that out by trial and error, and sometimes it was ugly. So now that I’ve come on board with the Biden campaign, I find it audacious that anyone demand that I be loyal to somebody that ain’t necessarily going to be loyal to me. People would not be telling me the same things if I were a thirty-five-year-old white man.
But I’m confident in the direction I’ve chosen. My values are not tied to a particular person. My values are tied to what it is that I believe, not wrapped up in some political personality. For folks that really want to go out and change the apparatus, people that want to remake the system, you have to have some solid core values. That sounds like common sense, but in reality I think that’s a problem for many people who get involved in politics. They get it twisted and they find their values are wrapped up in Obama, in Bernie Sanders, in Joe Biden, in some other political persona. I have immense respect for all three of those people, but my values are not wrapped up in any one of them. I didn’t go to work for Bernie because I was a die-hard Bernie fan. I went to work for him because the things he was talking about at the time and the way he was talking about them aligned with my values for the most part.
And I asked for a particular job—basically I demanded a seat at the table—and they gave me the seat I asked for. That seat put me in a position to do real change-making work, and to put my career on the trajectory I wanted.
Piece of Advice
Clear Space for Your Goals
Freedom isn’t easily attained, and no one is going to hand you the next level of freedom—by that I mean financial freedom or more time off or the freedom to do more of what you want in your day-to-day work life. You have to figure out how to demand what you need, and make the time for what you want. We are ALL busy, but we must make time for things we consider valuable. So if addressing poverty is important to you, make time for it! Give your time to a group that is working to combat poverty in your community or one nearby. If you want to improve the educational system . . . make time for it. Figure out how to join the school board or run for office in your school district. You want local organic lettuce in your neighborhood grocery store . . . make time for it! Go talk to the vendors and suppliers at your local farmers’ markets. Voting is one of the necessary tools in the toolbox of social justice, but voting isn’t enough. I say pick ONE thing in addition to voting and do that. You don’t have to start from scratch, and you don’t need to do it alone. There are other like-minded people out there already doing the work. Make it your mission to find and join them.
I didn’t 110 percent agree with Bernie on every issue while I was working for him. I don’t agree with Biden on every issue, in every instance. But I think in order to make change we have to make strategic decisions. That’s not sexy. Nobody wants to talk about it. No one wants to make choices or sacrifices or do the grunt work, but somebody’s gotta transcribe what was said, somebody has to run security, someone has to book the travel, and someone’s gonna be up till two a.m. the night before a debate, reviewing and reviewing and rereviewing talking points. People don’t talk about how many times Whitney M. Young Jr. or James Farmer or John Lewis or other people from what’s known as the Big Six (a group of civil rights leaders who helped mastermind and steer the movement) had to run around behind the scenes in the White House, talking to other people, the policy makers, not to mention staff assistants, schedulers, and all of that while Dr. King was talking to the president. Or how King then had to go back and talk to the business community after bartering with the president, be a broker between everybody, and try to convince people to change their minds and their practices. You have to be strategic. Dr. King didn’t just give a good speech, wave his hand, and say, “All right, now change is gonna come.” Get the heck up out of here.
You can’t achieve anything good if you aren’t standing in the gap for somebody else. Those other people need to hear your voice in solidarity with theirs. And working to continue in the spirit of those that came before us, we need people that are committed to shifting the status quo, using all means and methods at our disposal.
Chapter 7
Don’t Take No for an Answer
(But Do Your Homework First)
In the age of radical revolutionary work, if we are going to truly accomplish anything, we need to believe in ourselves. Young people, melanated people, differently abled people: if we are out there doing the work, showing that we are prepared, showing that we take ourselves and our ability to create change seriously, other people will start to take us more seriously as well. It’s not always easy to feel confident about what you are doing, especially when society at large might question you or your tactics or motives, but it gets a lot simpler if we start by supporting and standing up for one another. This will help us as individuals to become more confident in our skills and knowledge and what we have to offer.
I joined Bidenworld as a total newbie to that particular, peculiar scene. Yes, I have lots of experience doing campaign work at this point, and I’ve done plenty of political commentating. But I’ve never worked on a presidential campaign this early in the process, I’ve never worked in the White House before (as most of Biden’s staff and advisors have), and perhaps most important, I had not previously been involved in Biden’s forty-plus-year career in the public sphere. A good number of the people working with and around him were there when he introduced and sponsored the Violence Against Women Act in 1990, or when he helped push the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban through the Senate in 1994.
All of that is true, but it also doesn’t mean I have no place being involved in his campaign. I’m a young, intelligent, well-spoken Black woman who has already served as a national press secretary for a leading presidential candidate, a paid regular contributor on CNN, a political pundit and commentator, and a juvenile justice advocate. I know firsthand the bravery, dedication, and commitment it takes to clap back at existing power structures. I didn’t get to this place alone. I’ve had my self-doubts along the way. I’ve also gained a lot of confidence from the people around me who have supported and encouraged me. And perhaps most important, I’ve learned not to give a you-know-what when someone tells me no.
We cannot afford to stop at the no. Because you’re going to hear a lot of nos if you are out there trying to change the way power works in our country, if you are standing up as an ally for others, if you are challenging the status quo. I believe you need to push back EVERY SINGLE TIME someone denies that which you know you have worked for and deserve. If you believe it is yours, if you believe that it is due to you, don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t have it. Do not let others define the terms of your life for you. Do not let others tell you that because it’s always been done a certain way in the past, or has never been done by someone “like you,” that you need to step back. That’s exactly when to press forward.
I have heard from people who question my role in the political sphere at this level entirely—and I don’t mean the haters, who I just dismiss out of hand. I mean people like the young Black woman who heard me give a keynote at her university, and then tweeted about how she couldn’t believe the direction that I chose to pursue in my career. “Symone Sanders out here talking a big game about being a radical revolutionary and then joins the Biden campaign. What??” She’s not the only one; plenty of people come up to me or ask me online: How can you be talking about the revolution and Black people and go talk to Biden? I am at a place in my career where I can really influence not only the conversation, but also the direction and outcome. I know people might not think what I’m doing is radical or revolutionary, but you know what? It IS radical and revolutionary that I have an opportunity to be as involved as I am in the making of a president. We are literally in the process of creating and choosing our next president in the wake of the tenure of one of the most disastrous leaders we have ever elected. We need to stop demonizing people for going to work on the inside of the apparatus or taking a job at a certain company or whatnot—we’re always talking about “Where are the Black women?” or “Where are the young people?” or “Where are the women?” and then the moment somebody shows up or steps up, we criticize them for where they stepped up to.
I gave up a lot of money for a lot more stress when I walked away from my solid salary—which I earned while literally sitting on TV, where I was getting my makeup done every day, perched in a comfortable air-conditioned studio, talking to interesting people, and getting to share my opinion with a large audience—to go bust my tail flying all over the country to big cities, small towns, and everywhere in between, putting in eighteen-hour days, in order to work for a candidate that I believe can make a real difference for the world. I walked away from being able to brunch on the weekends because I wanted to go be effective. Because I wanted to contribute. In the end, I really like doing the operative stuff, the behind-the-scenes communication work. Because that’s where the real work is and the decisions are made.
I got into politics because I wanted to make a difference. That’s it. And on that journey to make a difference, I figured out that politics was nothing more than a bunch of messages people strung together—usually while sitting around a table—and t
hen they dictate to other people how they want that message delivered. A campaign is just repeating that message over and over again in various communities across the country, or within a state, a district, or a city, and convincing those people to be with you on what you are saying. The comms people, whether it’s on a campaign or in a high-level meeting about a company’s message, always get to sit at the table, and I knew that. But at the same time, the people at that table didn’t look like me—they weren’t young, they weren’t Black, and they weren’t women. And then it hit me the other day. We were sitting at a table in a conference room, doing a senior strategy session with staff and senior advisors. I looked around and realized, THIS was the freaking table I was always talking about! It blew my mind. I zoned out for a minute just thinking about that. Most people work their whole careers to be able to sit at that table and make those decisions. Now I’m there, at twenty-nine. And I’m not going to waste a second of my opportunity to be there, or listen to anyone who says I don’t belong or that I’ve somehow “sold out” by being part of the political process, by joining Biden’s campaign.
One of the important questions I really want to answer before the next election is lofty: Why does the Democratic Party’s messaging seem to not be working in some places? Where is it failing, falling short? My feeling is some people perceive that the party is too concerned with telling the voters how they can keep the American experiment intact without focusing on what we the people are actually saying we want to change about our democracy. The message put out by the apparatus is: we will help you, we know best, we have the answer. But the American people, those who make up the factions of the Democratic Party, are tired of this.
No, You Shut Up Page 13