By Rachael the Lord
You know that scary feeling that creeps up your spine when a co-worker tells you to “be careful” when standing up for yourself at a job? You’ve done your fair share of gigs, and you know it’s a warning. You know they mean, “don’t fuck up because this opportunity will never come around again.”
It begins with subtle, cautionary looks or side-eyes. When you go to divulge the issue to another co-worker, it’s brushed off into an abysmal silence. In the last stages, you are desperate for consolation, encouragement to face an organization, editor or manager. Instead the co-worker tells you, “Don’t burn your bridges!”
The biggest bridge I’ve burned recently was calling out an organization that would not fire a white woman after she called a group of middle-school aged Black and Latinx instrumentalists “monkeys.” The organization is attached to a symphony orchestra, and at the time I was pushing hard to shove myself into those spaces. I did not come out unscathed. No matter how overwhelming the support was online – it rarely translated into real life. Even from people I knew, and from people who knew I was right, there was still that look riddled in their eyes and twisted at their mouths, “Be careful.”
At the time, I confided in a friend who was also in the trenches with me during the messy ordeal. We took turns sharing other experiences where we believed to have scorched our chances at a work relationship. I grieved. I mourned the loss of a job I knew I would have had great potential to upscale when time came. I even experienced moments of regret, sick of the daily vitriol I was receiving both professionally and personally.
I came to, eventually, but as much as I wanted to brush my shoulders of it, moments of feeling exiled or self-pity didn’t let go of me. I didn’t know why until I realized that the finality of the term “burning a bridge” is false. There was more for me to do. I needed to know why the term permeated conversation with other Black people, and what we could do about it.
This “stay or die” ultimatum that bargains your well-being and your rights away does not exist for white people and their careers. I can hear the clash of celebratory pints of ales the moment a white man fumes out of his job after he believed he was mistreated. For white women: a crown of flowers and a shoulder to cry on. They do not have the same difficulty stabilizing after quitting or being fired.
Black people are rarely afforded the opportunity to stabilize following a severed work relationship that was catalyzed by speaking up. Instead, we are faced with judgement, isolation and unfair long periods of unemployment. This truth is a part of the very reason why we promote fear around standing up for ourselves in work spaces. It’s more than the fear of the unknown, it’s the fear of knowing that standing up for ourselves leads to further trauma that jars us into silence when we are in pain or wronged.
Sometimes on hot, hazy Sunday afternoons, my grandmother would show me old photographs of white families she used to work for. She categorized some as monsters, others as “good-to-me” white folk. Yet all those stories unfolded the same, her reminding me that this was just the way things are. Even then, I knew I didn’t want to live in a world where this is just the way things are. “Settling” means death of self – the opposite of the liberation we are struggling for.
Our dedication to spreading warnings in work conflict is akin to capitalistic ideas that value white interest, consumption and production over Black existence, needs, desires, and rights. Prioritizing white interests has and continues to harm us. Whiteness actively works to decenter our existences, experiences and interests by creating incidences where we are penalized for speaking up. The interests and greed of colonizers prioritizes productivity over humanity. Warning Black people who choose to assert their agency is asking them to exploit themselves for validation and coin. Capitalism drives society to pocket our pain, especially at work. It is why this practice is so inhumane. If there is a world worth building devoid of white destruction, colonialism, and greed, then we must actively confront it.
Challenging anti-Black racism, sexual violence, misogynoir and queer antagonism at places where we work unjustly puts us in lines of fires we didn’t ask for. If we are approached with a situation from a coworker where they feel the need to address injustice then our response should always be to yield to their need. Zora Neale Hurston, charges us not to be silent about our pain because adversaries will tell us we enjoyed it. We do not owe each other respectability-bathed responses about how we should have stayed or remained quiet. We owe ourselves protection and support.
Burning bridges keeps whatever is marching on it away from you and yours. It is a form of protection and a moment that belongs to you, victoriously. This severance shouldn’t be observed as means of despair but as opportunity rooted in dignity.
What to do with all the ashes now? Do we gather them, smear our faces with them and mourn? No.
I am aware that writing this does not alleviate the quake in your bones the day you finally decide to quit or the tears that follow because you’re unsure of which direction to take. The day I wrote publicly about the discrimination and racism that occurred where I worked, my hands were shaking. I thought I had lost something that I would never get back. Working through it with friends and myself, I learned that resistance doesn’t stop at defiance, raising my voice, or holding my ground. It begins there.
Resistance should extend long after those moments and breathe life into new ones. New moments that teach and stretch to those around us in similar situations, creating resources for Black workers, and cultivating safe Black spaces. Resistance is life-work. I couldn’t see a world working solely with my own communities, and that was a problem. I (wrongly) associated Black-anything with failure or inadequacy. Mostly, the latter because I was taught to shoot for the stars and those stars were always white. I never considered my own and that also affected what I thought about myself as a working Black person.
“Making a way out of no way” is a saying that follows behind the shadow of burning bridges. I think when I was young I misunderstood the power behind those words. I thought it meant using resources and access around me to carve a path. At the time, it didn’t sound complete to me. I was dissatisfied with the feeling it left me. But it’s not a term that begs me to accept the violence around me. It means to be creative in the ways in which I choose to make that way.
Burning a bridge should lead us to forge new ones, big and small, in order to enhance our communities. Liberation requires creation. Refocusing resources, our time, our labor and creativity into our freedom is more fulfilling than mourning a bridge that was questionably crossed in the first place.
This new perspective is still cooking inside of me. I assume it always will be because this professional unapologetic approach reshapes how I interact and preserve my whole self as a freelancing Black artist in New York City. I’m learning how to create the world I want to live in. It’s not impossible or out of reach. Bridge-burnin’ Black rebels are doing the work and transforming spaces, but more importantly forging stronger and firmer ones that will continue to lead to the construction of others until we are all connected and inexorable.
Suggested Reading:
- Wilbert Kizer Moore, “We Can’t All Be “Radicals”, But We Should Support Them“, RaceBaitr, 2016
- John T. Edge, “The Hidden Radicalism of Southern Food“, New York Times, 2017
- Michael Morris, “Standard White: Dismantling White Normativity“, California Law Review, 2016: “Whiteness serves a normative function by defining the expected or “neutral” range of human attributes and behavior. Other racial categories emerge as deviations from this norm, which places them outside the protection of the law and civil society.”
Rachael the Lord is a writer and performer based in New York. She writes about Blackness, pop-culture, faith, feminism, fanfiction and arts equity. She is the Social Media Coordinatorfor RaceBaitR. Follow the Lord on twitter @rachaelthelord
We increased pay to writers because of the generous donations readers like you make. Please support us with a one-time or monthly donation.
