The power of platform
Hello and welcome back to Productivity, Without Privilege! For those of you following along, this week has been incredible. Tuesday 6/7 was publication day for Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, and if you pre-ordered, thank you! If you’re waiting for your copy, thank you! If you haven’t purchased a copy yet, please do, and thank you!
This week has been a whirlwind of activity, interviews, excerpts, events, parties, and really, truly, just joy and gratitude. For all of you who have come on this journey with me, thank you so much. I can’t properly express how humbled, grateful, and just blissfully joyful I am to be surrounded by people like all of you. Thank you.
As for this newsletter? I’m not going anywhere - I’ll keep offering tips and insights from the book, from real life, and from my (and other people’s) lived experiences to help us all succeed at work and do the kind of work that brings us the most joy (or at least gets us paid so we can go do fun things!) And on that note, let’s get started, shall we?
I kind of wanted to take this opportunity to talk about an irritating editing experience I had recently—not with a writer, but with PR from a company that was angry that we dared publish true things about them—but I don’t want to get either myself or the writer I worked with on the story in trouble (don’t worry, when I do talk about it, it’ll be in the form of good service journalism,) but I will say the company, whose name rhymes with flapjack, operated in such bad faith cloaked in good faith that it’s clear they’re masters at it (and their fans have no trouble descending on anyone who dares say something negative about them, thus proving the initial point.) Anyway, I know this is all a little circumspect, but it leads me to what I wanted to talk about this week: The power of platform.
Many of us who want to be published, either because we have books to sell or we’re freelance journalists who need clips, are told over and over again, and usually from people who have the privilege of platform, how important it is to have one, or use one to elevate our voices.
There are two specific issues with this though: While it’s certainly important to leverage whatever platform you can, whether it’s someone else’s or you build your own, always be wary about who wants to share their platform with you, and why. More than a few platforms, and the people behind them, are eager to leverage your voice and your experiences (and worse, your trauma, your lowest moments, and your pain) to enrich themselves at your expense, and then throw you to the wolves when they’re tired of you, or when you say the wrong thing.
And I don’t just mean “flapjack” here, which loves to talk about “civil debate” and “transparency” while continuing to shovel money, influence, and protection to some of the most odious, hateful, and yes, extreme voices in media discourse today, but they’re by no means alone. Large, legacy, and traditional media organizations, with all of their power, influence, and yes, their platforms, are equally to blame. The same week I published a book about how to deal with discrimination, microaggressions, and marginalization in the workplace, one of the most influential newspapers in the world fired a journalist for daring to speak out about the treatment she experienced at work in a way that, heaven forbid, made some of her colleagues uncomfortable because they had to reckon with the role they play in that marginalization.
And as much as senior management at that paper would like the rest of us to believe that it’s really about conduct, insubordination, and showing respect for colleagues, it’s very difficult to see that as anything but cover for the fact that whenever someone rocks the boat at an organization, especially when they’re right, most managers are more interested in stopping the boat from rocking than making the necessary structural and organizational changes to address the issue appropriately. After all, as I say in the book (and you all likely know by now,) we don’t make people managers because they’re good leaders: we make them managers because they’re good at what they do, so we assume they have to be good at telling other people how to do what they’re good at.
The only thing I find particularly noteworthy about this particular case is that had Felicia Somnez been a journalist of color, she would have been dismissed unceremoniously months ago, and I personally have seen journalists of color admonished, denigrated, isolated, and marginalized for far, far less. (And that’s not to diminish what happened to Somnez, she should still have her job, in my opinion, and the fact that she doesn’t and the people who led to this moment still do, is yet another chalkmark on the ever-growing wall of media failures to reckon with its own issues.) I’ve seen news organizations that had never uttered the words “write up” come up with new (to them anyway) ways to discipline workers of color for daring to mention that they’re being treated unfairly. I’ve seen extremely progressive news organizations completely ignore a worker of color’s union rights before disciplining them, and then pretending they don’t know how to handle it when they were confronted with the fact that they did it wrong.
In short, every platform is problematic, not just the ones we talk about a lot. And before you lend your voice to a platform, instead of thinking in terms of the editor/writer power balance, I encourage you to think about which platforms deserve your voice and your story. Which platforms align with your personal values? Of course, we all want our stories to be read as far and wide as possible, so some will lure you with promises of promotion and huge readership—and some of those promises may even come true (I know I tried my best when I worked at The New York Times, and I still try my best at WIRED!)
But as often as I ask writers who pitch me: “Why are you the best person to tell this story? What about your lived experiences makes this important to you or for you?” I also tell writers never to A: assume their voice “isn’t good enough” for a platform, because trust me, it is, and B: never underestimate the power of a platform more aligned with your message, your audience, and your passions. As much as flapjack (among others) may want us to think otherwise, sometimes putting your ideas and your story in front of people who will resonate with it, and resonate with you, is far better than a whirlwind of hate clicks, nasty emails, and internet dogpiling because you dared tell that story in a place populated with people who, for example, may not believe you’re a human being that deserves human rights, or that you should be allowed to grocery shop in piece, send your children to school safely, or heaven forbid, just exist.
So before you pitch an outlet, or dismiss an outlet because they may seem too small or too niche, ask yourself: Does this platform, with its history, track record of diverse voices with diverse perspectives, its editorial vision, and its audience, deserve my story? Then reach out and pitch, and explain what it is about that outlet that resonates with you so much. When it’s accepted, and you get to lend your voice to their platform, you’ll know it’s because you want to, and because they deserve your work in their pages, as much as they believe their pages are a good place for your work. If it’s not that kind of platform, it’s even more important to query whether or not this place, this platform, for all of the promises it can offer you in terms of exposure, income, and notoriety, is someplace you want to be associated with, and lifts voices that you want to be associated with. Platform matters, and not just to the people who leverage it.
I know not every editor thinks like this—and that’s unfortunate, I think—but when you do hit on that synergy, it’s a wonderful experience all around. Empower yourself, and believe in the power of your voice. Don’t just give it away.
[Worth Reading]
How Marginalized Workers Can Make the Most of Remote Work, by Alan Henry: I’m cheating a little bit, because well, I wrote the intro to this, and the bulk of it is an excerpt from Seen, Heard, and Paid, but I wanted to include it anyway. I was just over the moon that my colleagues would be interested in running an excerpt from my book, and especially the part where I talk about how the pandemic has changed the way we work, and that the benefits of remote work often come to the people who need it last—but they can come.
Race at work: how hard are companies really trying? by Federica Cocco and Ella Hollowood: This piece in the Financial Times adds even more evidence to the things that we kind of expect: that a number of companies, and the people in them, love to talk the talk about diversity and inclusion and improving their workplaces for people of color, mostly because they know the language of social justice is understood and accepted as a good thing. That’s where it stops though, and they don’t interrogate their own biases, they don’t change their behavior, and they don’t make any meaningful changes, often leaving it up to the marginalized to speak up, which, well, reinforces the entire problem.
Civil Rights Activists Fought for America’s Democracy. They Should Be Honored as Veterans. by David Dennis, Jr.: Finally, an op-ed I can feel comfortable sharing. The piece does a great job making the case in the headline, even if you aren’t immediately inclined to understand and appreciate the argument based, well, on the headline. Written by David Dennis Jr, whose father, David Dennis Sr, was on the original Freedom Ride from Montgomery to Jackson, it’s a stark reminder that white Americans quite literally waged a war of terror, violence, and intimidation against Black Americans during the Civil Rights Movement that destroyed homes, churches, buses, and most importantly, lives—and of course, as with most racial reckonings in the United States, we make incrimental improvements and then try as hard as possible to forget the injustice ever happened, rather than acknowledge it and work to actually repair the harm that took place up to that point.
[See You, Space Cowboy]
When Katrina Miller joined us at WIRED to report on space, physics, and the intersection of science and culture, I was thrilled to talk to her. It’s not often that you meed another Black physicist, and while her background and education far outstrips mine, I was still so happy to sit and chat about what it was like to study physics as a Black person, in spaces where you may not be the only person of color, exactly, but you’re most likely the only Black person of any type. Of course, she’s an incredible writer, reporter, and scientist, which makes her own personal story that much more compelling.
And she shared that story with us in WIRED this week. The piece, The Unwritten Laws of Physics for Black Women, is a longread, but I implore you to read it in its entirety, maybe over a sitting or two. So many of the things she writes, and the things that other Black women who are making inroads in physics in spite of the state of academia in general, pulled me back in time to my undergraduate experience, and to knowing full well that everything I was worried would be waiting for me if I continued to pursue astrophysics as a career would, indeed, be waiting for me, jaws open and ready.
I don’t want to spoil it too much, because it’s definitely a story best read. But suffice it to say I was nodding along, eyebrows raised, and screaming “oh my GOD” in my head over and over again. Give it a read, and I’ll see you back here in two.