Dear M—
I hope this letter finds you fully vaccinated and in good spirits.
Today my boss asked the members of our department to use festive fake backgrounds during our daily video conference. It was a coworker’s birthday, and the boss thought it would be fun to populate our computer screens with imaginary balloons, banners and smiling faces.
However, one coworker had a different look in mind. Behind his smirking white face was a composite image of three oafish, orange apes clambering a white motorcycle marked POLICE. What I couldn’t see was how the birthday celebrant, a Black woman, reacted—I was too busy having an aneurysm.
As soon as the meeting ended, I quit my job. To clarify, this incident was not my last straw. I’d reached that during a video conference on Amazon Prime Day. As my “teammates” gushed over good deals on needless things, all I could think of were the warehouse and delivery workers, many of them Black or brown, who risked their health to work in person through the COVID-19 pandemic. Add to that the sombreros and Choco Tacos my coworkers appropriated for Cinco de Mayo, their discourse on menu choices from a fast food chain that donates lavishly to anti-choice organizations, and other displays of “willful ignorance,” and I was done.
I’m sharing this not to signal my virtue, even if I am guilty of that; and it’s not to disparage my former supervisor, who was a genuinely good guy. Instead, it’s to illustrate how the corporate environment deliberately alienates brown women like me. Bigotry has been standard procedure since I entered the industry 25 years ago. That it is practiced blithely in and out of the workplace after recent events tells me that some Americans have no interest in changing the status quo.
So I quit—not just my job, but the hideous joke that I and other people of color would ever be welcomed as equals in white-dominated spaces. We must build our own media, speak our own languages, define ourselves better than the catchall “people of color” and recreate this country with or without the willingness of the white establishment.
That’s where I am. This letter is the foundation of my work to come. I’ll share details when I write you again.
Be well and stay safe!
Jennifer