Don't Let Them Gatekeep You.
Well, well, well. Look who we have here? You! My honored guest! Welcome back to Productivity, Without Privilege. I’m your host, Alan Henry, and as always, if you haven’t picked up a shiny copy of Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, please? If you have already, thank you! Maybe it’ll make a nice gift for the coming holiday season! Eh? Eh? Aw, you know the drill. Let’s get started.
This week I want to talk about gatekeeping, whether it’s in literature, publishing, media, or anywhere else.
If you’re a marginalized person, you already have plenty of systemic challenges and issues keeping you away from the work and the opportunities that you deserve, and while the kind of marginalization that I experienced—and that many people experience—is a type of gatekeeping, but I want to talk specifically about how to identify someone who’s compelled to do it, so you can recognize it when you see it.
Part of the impetus for this conversation is the vitriolic response to a woman of color daring to say she didn’t enjoy an overrated piece of American literature, but long before that I’d been thinking about Barnes and Noble’s decision that they’re no longer interested in stocking hardcovers from debut authors, which disproportionately impacts new authors, midlist authors who aren’t writing books with huge advances that are guaranteed to sell, and authors from marginalized groups. In both cases, you have groups of people who are extremely eager to pull the ladder up after they’ve reached the top, and then yell at you for having to take a different route.
Whether you can’t be considered intelligent or literate unless you share the literary opinion of a high-schooler, or whether you benefitted from an industry eager to promote new authors when they looked and wrote as they did—only to watch them take that promotion away the moment that pool of authors diversified—the outcome is the same. You have an ingroup of people who insist that their decisions are the best ones, and regardless of your expertise, your skills, your capabilities, or even your achievements, you still have to prove to someone else that you’re not just worth the work that you already do (or have done,) but that you’re even allowed to have the opinion that you do.
That’s the power of gatekeeping: it’s designed to, like microaggressions, force you to spend time on anything except the work you’re best suited to do.
You wind up spending time engaging with people who aren’t approaching you in good faith, to prove yourself or your intrinsic value to someone who truly doesn’t care about it anyway. After all, their goal isn’t to carefully weigh your qualifications, it’s to simply keep you out and away from the spaces they have control over. Whether it’s to keep your book down in the midlist instead of rising to the top as it could have with more exposure, or it’s to tell you that your voice isn’t good enough for a specific publication, the role of the gatekeeper is to continually remind you that you’re not good enough for the space they control access to. Even worse, it’s usually for no other reason than that you’re not already in-group, or because you’re not like they are, because they can’t stand anyone who’ll challenge the status quo or the extant power dynamics.
And like so many other things, you’ll know when you’re being gatekept when you see it, and if it’s not you being gatekept, the key is to listen to the voices of the people being marginalized to understand it when it happens. When people of color are telling you that an issue is racist and deserves closer inspection, it’s worth stepping back and examining it more closely. When disabled people tell you something is inaccessible, you don’t ask them to just make do or consider the hardship they impose on others.
So the natural follow-up is well, what do you do if you feel like you’re being gatekept? Easy: either find another way into the space, or consider whether the specific space is one you need to be in at all.
Quick storytime. When I was a junior high school, I had a wonderful physics teacher who fostered my love of physics and encouraged me to pursue it further. He took the time to talk theory with me, even when I clearly wasn’t making sense, and helped me overcome the fact that I hadn’t taken the math necessary to understand some of the concepts he discussed. Before he left the school and was replaced with another instructor, he encouraged me to take AP physics when I was a senior, even though I’d be taking calculus at the same time, instead of the year prior.
So I did exactly that. But the new physics teacher wasn’t too keen on helping me understand what was going on when I wasn’t sure about some of the math. I knew the theories and equations fine, and I understood the concepts, but even when I approached him after or before school for help with some of the calculus that I would learn anyway later in the year, he refused and just told me that “I don’t have the mind for physics,” and when I told him I was going to take the AP physics exam anyway, told me I’d never pass, and I should pick a different major in college.
Well, if you know me already, you know that’s not what happened. I didn’t do well in his AP physics class, but that was okay because I did extremely well on the AP physics exam, and went on to study physics and astronomy as an undergrad, and eventually graduate with degrees in both.
What I didn’t get at the time was that he was distinctly keeping me out of physics for reasons he saw fit. He had judged me as unworthy and decided the field was unwelcome to me. Suffice to say, I found my own way in, and in this case, it was by beating the door down with sheer tenacity.
So sure, that works sometimes, but other times, when the place you’re being kept from isn’t a field but a job, or a publication, or a specific entity, the key isn’t to batter the door down (because often, you’ll do more harm than good to yourself by trying) and instead to make use of whisper networks and trusted social groups to offer you an alternative path in that gets around the gatekeepers in question. A friend willing to give you a shot, another marginalized person who knows what it’s like but can put in a word for you, something like that. The trouble with this approach though is that while it often works (and works for people whose intentions are good and bad,) the gatekeepers in question eventually then become the marginalizers, the microaggressors, and the cool kids I talk about in Seen, Heard, and Paid. They’ll turn their energy from keeping you out to driving you out. Just be aware of that.
Part of why I mention that is because you always have the option to take your skills and capabilities elsewhere. You don’t have to prostrate yourself at the feet of a glamorous or prestigious institution, school, platform, or person in order to do your best work and build the career—and life—you deserve. I discussed this in a previous newsletter, but remember, your voice and your story have power. That’s why platforms are willing to pay you for it, and that’s why they’ve shifted the power dynamics to create the impression that you need them, as opposed to both of you needing each other. There are other platforms, other outlets, other people who’ll help, and other paths forward that don’t involve you spending your precious time and mental energy dealing with people who have no interest, vested or otherwise, in you and your work.
Reclaim your time.
[ Worth Reading ]
John Boyega Won’t Let Go of ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Coming to America’, by Chris Kornelis: One thing I’ll maintain is that they did John Boyega dirty in the most recent Star Wars movies. And for the crime of talking about that fact, and being willing to discuss the racial dynamics at play in his own career, just like any other career, John Boyega has been all but blacklisted for future work opportunities. That may be actually a bit harsh, maybe he’s not blacklisted, but the trouble with being someone who’s willing to call out systemic marginalization when you see it is that some people who would have dealt with you, even as a token, don’t want to deal with you at all. But luckily, that’s not going to stop him from speaking. (h/t to Lydia Kan for the link!)
Foraging TikToker Goes Viral Teaching Sustainable Consumption Habits, by Luria Freeman: This video interview passed my feed and I was glued. I mean, I know NowThis is designed to make that kind of content, but this resonated particularly because I’ve always been interested in identifying edible plants and mushrooms in the wild. The trouble with that though is often the people who are really passionate about that, or about teaching, aren’t…exactly the people I’d be most comfortable trusting teaching me which mushrooms will kill me if I eat them, you know? So it was refreshing to see someone like me involved in, well, the joy of being outdoors.
Why are some people left-handed? MRI brain scans are finally revealing an answer, by Christopher Zara: As someone who’s proudly left-handed, I adore any additional insight into why people are the way I am. I did have a few early school teachers who tried to more or less beat it out of me, but my parents were having none of that. But this isn’t a story about me, it’s a story about left-handedness, and how left-handed peoples’ brains work. And it’s fascinating. (h/t again to Lydia for the link!)
[ See You, Space Cowboy ]
My friend Kendra Pierre-Louis, who I’ve said before that I think is one of the most important journalists of our time—and as the effects of global climate change become more and more apparent, will be proven right on so many things—recently tweeted about this episode of How to Save a Planet that she worked on and recorded for. It was already on my list of things to listen to, because it’s all about making biking cool again and why we could make such a huge impact on greenhouse gas emissions if even a few of our major cities, like New York City, for example, embraced bicycling the way that some of our European counterparts do. Not only would doing so help with climate change, but it would also significantly improve the quality of life and the health of the people who live in our cities.
It also helps that just today she and I had a great conversation about getting into cycling, even as you get older, as a form of activity. And by “activity,” I don’t mean “designed to get you in shape or make you look good,” I mean the kind of activity that improves your mental and physical health just by virtue of getting your body moving. Not torturing yourself in the gym or going for a stereotypically attractive body, just the kind of activity that helps your body fight disease and regulate itself. So you never know, you might catch me on one of those Citibike e-bikes here sometime soon. In the meantime though, go listen to this episode and subscribe to the show. I'll see you back here in two.