Not all skinfolk are kinfolk, and not everyone's activism includes intersectionality.

Hello, and welcome back to Productivity, Without Privilege. I'm still Alan Henry, your humble master of ceremonies, and author of Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, which you can get in paperback now! If you already have a copy or just prefer to support me another way, send me a tip on Ko-Fi here, or subscribe to my Patreon for early access to this newsletter, VODs from my Twitch streams, and other perks.

In this edition, we're going to get a little personal, and I'm going to tell you a story that I've been hanging on to for a bit. It's a story about what to do when you encounter people whose activism may be personal but not intersectional, and about what to do when you encounter discrimination from people who are themselves discriminated against and should really know better. Ready?

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I was sitting in an airport after a long business trip, waiting for my flight home, when I got a call from another manager. Organizationally, she was my peer. We both reported to the same person; we just had different areas of responsibility. Mine, specifically, were on display during this whole business trip, where I'd just finished shining and working with some incredible people, much to the pleasure of the people gathered to experience everything I had worked so hard on for months prior. But despite the success, the whole affair was tinged with a fair bit of disappointment because we all knew our employer was planning layoffs, and they were due to come at any moment.

Sure enough, the layoffs had been brutal, decimating entire parts of the publication, and most notably, disproportionately impacting journalists of color at the outlet. I had survived, but my peer wanted to “talk about some changes.”

Surprised that she had the authority to talk to me about "changes" at all, I predicted that our manager had simply delegated the task to her because she either had no interest or desire to speak to me herself, and I agreed to hear her out.

When I spoke to her, sitting at the gate waiting for my flight to board, she explained that I was getting a new manager, being moved around in the organization, and getting new responsibilities that were “more in line with my current duties.” She said this came directly from our boss, and when I asked how it would impact my role on the leadership team, she said I didn’t need to worry about it.

In short, I was sidelined, despite my performance and accomplishments, which, again, is usually the case for workers of color: glowing performance reviews and nothing negative to be said about them, but that never matters when you're not "a fit" for whoever decides they don't care for your presence or participation.

“Nothing’s really changing,” she rationalized. Then, without any room for question, she chirped, “It always sucks to ruin people’s lives,” regarding the layoffs, and our call was over. That wasn’t the first time this particular colleague treated me poorly, and it wasn’t the last, but it was the beginning of the kind of marginalization I’m all too familiar with.

Shortly after, I found myself excluded from leadership meetings. I was off projects I had previously led. My direct report was reassigned, but not until after I was explicitly asked by the same peer to make his performance review less glowing, because they wanted "calibration." It got bad enough that, eventually, my former manager met with me to explain that this wasn’t negative action, it was designed to help me “focus on my new responsibilities,” and naively, I believed her, but hoped I could still be involved with the projects that I had previously led. But sure enough, those doors closed quickly, and I was, again, on my own. I had a new manager, who was fine, but it was clear I had been shoved to the side.

One of the architects of that marginalization was a woman of color who held seats on our committee that handled relations between management and the staff, and most notably, the diversity committee (that conveniently hadn’t met for the better part of a year, and had nothing to say when the majority of its members had been summarily dismissed).

In Black communities, we often say, “Not all skinfolk are kinfolk,” when we deal with people like this.

Workers of any marginalized group—not just Black workers, but queer workers, disabled workers, older and aging workers, and more—we all know what it’s like to have to deal with people in their workplaces who minimize their skills and accomplishments because of who they are. We’re accustomed to people who don’t understand our lived experiences.

But what about those who do? When discrimination comes from another marginalized person, for example, it can sting even more—especially when you were hoping that they would show you some understanding and empathy. But that’s not always the case.

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I've been thinking a lot about people whose activism isn't intersectional at all. It's easy for me to say that a lot of those people are straight-up bigoted in their own ways, and it's always ironic when I talk to people about having to convince, for example, South Asian journalists that their anti-Blackness is a problem, or disabled journalists that their homophobia is a problem, or even my fellow Black journalists that mysognoir is a real problem, all of which are problems that are holding us all back.

But lately, and I think that this is more of an overall social media issue than it is a community issue, I've seen people get really upset at each other for trying, even in good faith, to discuss issues that require nuance, like the whole debacle at the BAFTA awards, for example. And it's all brought me back to some of these memories, like the one I started this newsletter with.

So what do you do with people who you might think would understand you, but you find out that their approach to their profession isn't intersectional? As in, if they were discriminated against, you'd never hear the end of it (and rightfully so)—but that doesn't stop them from inflicting the same on others? On some level, they don't really care. After all, discrimination is rarely logical or rational, even if those who cling to it try to rationalize their beliefs. It's almost always about power, privilege, and proximity to more of the same power and privilege that they crave.

So in a lot of ways, you have to treat them like any other privileged person. Especially if you're tempted to appeal to your shared marginalization, whatever that may be. Frankly, I've found that if a person were going to be receptive to shared experience, it would have manifested beforehand. So try this instead:

• Use Data They Can't Argue With: I mention this in my book, too, but data is power. At my current gig, keeping a work diary is encouraged, especially for managers who have to give weekly reports on their teams. But, as I've mentioned before, everyone should keep a work diary. It's an easy way to track your wins and challenges, keep track of when you've been marginalized versus when you've been accepted, and who's done either so you know whether to avoid those people or seek them out.

  But keeping a work diary also arms you with the kind of data that you need, so when people tell you that your work doesn't matter or wasn't as noteworthy as you say it is, you can prove them wrong without a doubt. Of course, this isn't to change minds; when the same person I'm talking about above told me that some of my biggest achievements one year "didn't matter" because of a cherry-picked metric she preferred (because it suited her argument), I responded with all of the other metrics that showed my success. Did it change her mind? Of course not, she was actively looking for reasons to minimize my accomplishments, and facts weren't going to stop her. But it did prove that she didn't have a lock on the truth in this case, just because she had the ear of someone important. And sometimes, that matters.

• Appeal to Other Peers or Trusted Managers: This only works, of course, if you have the psychological safety to reach out to trusted peers. And when I'm talking about psychological safety, I mean you know you can bring your whole self to this person without worrying about their judgment. Sometimes this can be a shared manager, although I find that shared managers often have a stronger vested interest in making issues go away than in actually addressing the discrimination or harassment they see. It could be a peer you can confide in, but they usually don't have any actionable steps they can take to help, aside from opting to work with you more often so you don't interact with the problematic colleagues (which can be helpful in its own right). In most cases, it's really about getting the issues off your chest and potentially setting yourself up to work with others or around the problematic person, rather than continuing to butt your head into the problem.

  Personally, I have a (somewhat bad, I think) habit of rushing to those trusted peers when something bad happens to me without fully evaluating whether or not I do have that psychological safety, or I just think that I do because of positive experiences. Situations like this are a good opportunity to determine whether your manager is a convex or concave style. Even in the case above, I appealed to my manager and a trusted shared manager, and whether either of them actually did anything or stepped in, I don't think I'll ever know. But they certainly didn't say anything to me about the situation. So be careful who you trust.

• Get Advice from Trusted Communities: Now, this one really helps, and you've heard me talk about how important it is to find community, especially in the face of injustice, regardless of its scale. And while I do think that a simple group chat is good to have and important, the kinds of communities I mean here are professional ones, replete with people who deal with the same kinds of marginalization that you deal with, and people you can trust with your stories and experiences, and know that you'll get both empathy and honesty.

  It was community that, after the events I described in my book, told me that I wasn't alone and that what had happened to me really was as bad as I thought. It was community that, after what happened above, and again even later, confirmed to me that I wasn't out of my mind or just taking it too personally. Those folks explained that what I was going through was indeed unprofessional, a power play, and that even though the person at fault also likely struggled with being a person of color, their past behavior and their history with others proved that what really mattered to them was the pursuit of power and proximity to whiteness. It was those conversations in those safe spaces that confirmed to me that no amount of trying to work around the problem or trying to appeal to the people involved was going to make a difference. They'd already made up their minds about me despite my work, my accomplishments, and what I brought to the table.

• Get Out and Protect Your Peace: I hate that we live in a world where people of any marginalized group have to make themselves palatable to others and instead can just thrive, create, and be their fullest selves without being mined for suffering, content, or representation by their more privileged peers.

  I want to believe that world exists, somewhere, maybe in our future, but for now, remember that there's no paycheck, no benefits package, no dollar amount that can smooth over the mental and emotional damage that being in toxic spaces and dealing with toxic people, even people who should know better because the hammer can (and will) drop on them next, will cause you. It might be hard, and it might make you uncomfortable, but I promise you, being able to sleep at night and eventually finding spaces where you're actually valued and appreciated instead are worth more.

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It, by Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye: When I was in grad school, one of my favorite things to do was case studies about better business practices. There's a lot of research on ways to improve productivity and employee retention, as well as contribute to business success. Overall, there's a direct relationship between companies being good to their employees and offering them flexibility in how they work, what they do, and when they do it, and those employees staying in their jobs longer, being happier, being more enthusiastic at work, as well as doing more and better work. But we ignore that research because decision-makers are less interested in those kinds of win-win solutions than they are in power, control, and ego.

In the context of this amazing piece, that shines brightly: if the same business leaders who are so invested in AI (and in some cases, literally invested in AI) paid attention to how it's been used by the people they've shoveled it to, they'd see that it actually produces awful results that usually require significant rework to fix, which actually makes people have to work harder to do the tasks they would be able to do easily without AI. I think about that disconnect—between what the data says would help us build a better world and what decision makers and their egos make us do instead—a lot.

Washington Post Layoffs Disproportionately Affected Union Members of Color, Preliminary Guild Data Shows, by Hanaa' Tameez: I had a feeling this was going to be the case, but having the numbers to prove it doesn't bring me any joy. Sure enough, when the Washington Post essentially gutted its newsroom, newsroom leaders effectively targeted journalists of color. I wish I could say this was a Post problem, but, to go back to the example I started this newsletter with, the layoffs that day targeted the publication's journalists of color, as well as its queer journalists. No one with a marginalized identity survived, and like with most things that involve discrimination, getting caught up in the question of whether the discrimination was "intentional" or "accidental" misses the point: the impact is the same, the lost voices are gone, and the representation of the communities that the publications in question are supposed to cover and speak to is diminished.

It's an injustice for sure, but a common one in today's journalism landscape, which is rapidly coalescing around white, cis, straight, able-bodied figures in flashy promo pieces and leadership dinners, pushing out anyone who doesn't fit that mold, and retaining people who are comfortable being mined for their brilliance in the context of their suffering: again, content that's palatable to people who look like them.

My Fitness Tracker Is a Secret Weapon Against My Chronic Illness, by Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Arielle is a friend, and this read was more convincing to me than any product review or glowing product announcement I've ever seen when it comes to whether I should get a fitness tracker or smart wearable. I used to have a FitBit long before Google absorbed the company and its products, and when it was clear that "big data" (remember that phrase?) was more important than providing useful health information to wearable users, I decided to drop them categorically.

But Arielle's piece revealed a world of people to me who are using fitness trackers not to hit exercise goals or rack up fake points in an app designed to make them do more, but actually to pay attention to their bodies, their energy levels, and manage their chronic health conditions in a way that other tools aren't able to. Chronic illness and disabilities are the quietest ways people are discriminated against, even commonly, in our society—whether it's by RTO mandates that overlook people who are chronically ill and use working remotely as a way to be productive but also manage their energy levels or managers who purposefully ignore and sideline their employees with valid accomodations or disabilities because they, quite frankly, don't care. I'm always happy to see examples of people using technology to improve lives, something that's become tangibly rare lately.

It's not too often that I read a nonfiction book that makes me want to cry because I feel so seen, but when I finished Black Genius by Tre Johnson, I did. If you do read this book, and I truly hope that you do, you may notice some similar language in this newsletter (and likely future ones).

Starting off with stories of various types of Black genius that Johnson has observed, both in his personal life and in broader culture, the book is an incredible tour of how Black people have managed to not just survive, but to thrive and create forms of art and expression that are uniquely Black but also completely transformed our society. He discusses the same concepts of Black suffering and struggle mined for content and the approval of white audiences that are near and dear to my heart, but he also shows us the small, sometimes overlooked ways that Black people create their own spaces to be themselves, and the ways we have to struggle to be seen, not even accepted, in predominantly white spaces.

By the end of the book, I shared Johnson's hope for a future where all of us are allowed to shine in our own ways without those ways being judged for how palatable they are to people with power or privilege, and to connect with one another and share our whole selves in a way that makes the whole Black experience richer. I'll be thinking about it for a long time, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. If you ever miss me, look for me specifically in Chapter Six of this book.

(Thank you so much to Lydia, who's probably reading this, for the recommendation! Thank you, thank you!)

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That’s all for this edition of Productivity, Without Privilege. If you enjoyed the newsletter, consider supporting me by dropping me a tip or by subscribing to my Patreon for early access to this newsletter, as well as some other treats. Look after yourselves, and I’ll see you back here soon.