My first food service job was at age 17 in the mall at the sandwich bakery Au Bon Pain. It was there that I started to understand the ways in which my identity as a Black woman was weaponized in the workplace. I was closing the shift with the store manager and another worker when it was realized that money in the register didn’t add up to the orders we had taken in from customers. As I was wiping the counters off with the very strong bleach rag we used, I could sense someone was standing close to me.
“Were you on the register all day today?” my manager asked.
“There were three of us since opening.”
“It’s $50 short. Do you know anything about that?”
His tone got more aggressive, almost like a snarl. Before I could answer, he proceeded to tell me that I acted like I didn’t want to be there and had a bad attitude with customers. Only half of this was true: I definitely didn’t want to be there. I kept to myself and didn’t socialize and joke around with him or the other workers, which was seen as having an attitude problem. I didn’t get to answer before he decided to write me up for being “insubordinate.” As he came out from the back office to where I was now cleaning the glass windows that sat above the food stations, he told me to sign my write-up and flippantly asked again, “And you don’t know anything about the missing money?”
I replied no, left the unsigned paperwork on his desk, finished cleaning the counter, and started to gather my things to leave. It was such an accusatory question. The damage that it caused was great and stuck with me for several years. I left questioning myself and the missing money. Did I punch in the wrong amount during or after a transaction? The other worker, a white girl who got along well with the manager, asked if she could head home. “Sure, see you tomorrow,” he said. She was at the register with me the entire time and never got asked about the money. She also was his after-work drinking buddy who could do no wrong. This situation has repeated itself under different circumstances in various jobs.
At the time, I internalized this treatment and thought it was isolated to just me. There was no social media back then or articles that chronicle the shared similarities of experiences among Black people, women, and especially Black women, which meant there also was no accountability. I felt I was being targeted, but never had the language or courage to vocalize it and take action. This grew and grew and grew as I got older and obtained more professional experience. I felt like the biggest failure when I made any mistakes. As a Black woman I felt put down, as if the way I acted—just by being myself—was harmful.
When I got promoted to White House social secretary, I hit the ground running. I really didn’t know how deep the pressure, anxiety, and fear of being in the role would go because I was really excited about the innovative and entertaining ways the house could open up more. But no matter how hard I tried to push the narrative out of my head, I couldn’t escape that I wasn’t the model fit. The constant thoughts would play on loop in my head.
Since I can remember, I have watched white men and women be afforded praise for their leadership, when in the next breath I or other Black women were labeled uncooperative and unprofessional. Instead of rejecting this difference as racial aggression, I was convinced, Maybe it actually is me? How can I be more likeable?
Ever since my interviews to move to the East Wing, I’d worked pretty hard to keep my issues hidden. I also knew that my newfound position was being watched with admiration by young politicos, especially women, who had dreams of being social secretary or working in the White House someday. I was often conflicted over how much of myself I should show at work. I’d never been good at code-switching (the act of alternating between two different personas according to the environment you’re in)—it seems like so much effort. I did a bit here and there, and it was exhausting. Black people are experts at this. We often feel the pressure to code-switch to get along and be respected by others. Thankfully more and more of us are divorcing from the need to appease others or live up to the ideals and standards of non-Black people.
There’s a population of Black people who see code-switching as necessary in order to move up the social, economic, and professional ladders. Many are too afraid to ruffle feathers in fear of being typecast or seen as someone who doesn’t play nicely in the sandbox. Code-switching could have been the secret sauce to being called a team player or being invited to certain parties. It’s something many of us are pushed into unknowingly since birth. It’s a way of not going batshit crazy in a workplace or a way to climb the ladder for more financial security. While I hate this in all its forms, I do understand how Black people are stuck in this matrix. It’s a form of survival.
However, I couldn’t shy away from being myself, especially in the White House. I entered the political world as a 31-year-old intern. I was too mature in my life to figure out how to be someone else—but also too insecure not to question if being me was okay.
I didn’t want to compromise the parts of myself that made other people uncomfortable because I didn’t operate in the confines of the box they built for me. I wasn’t going to take my nose ring out, nor was I going to wear a weave, nor was I willing to be quiet when I had questions or concerns. I had enough to do and frankly, the energy to twist myself into a hundred pieces to appease the masses wasn’t there. People had to work out their own insecurities, assumptions, and conscious biases. If I was a trigger or a catalyst to ego and power, that was not my bag to carry. If I gave that power over to others, I’d look in the mirror and actually see an imposter, someone I had been fast running from.
Working that philosophy out in real time sparked a wave of unnecessary distractions. One of them was tone-policing: being told that my voice, when I’m giving a particular comment or opinion, is too loud, too strong, too bold, too brash, or too harsh, and that the tone has offended other people.
This rhetoric against Black women in the workplace, whether we are running major corporations, running a country, or working at a café like Au Bon Pain, is exhausting and insufferable. Rarely were my conversations about the matter at hand; instead they involved someone’s feelings about me. This happens all the time in the workplace, and there is never accountability for those who commit these offenses, except more blame on us as Black women insinuating that we’re being “sensitive” or “taking it the wrong way” when we are upset by being seen as threatening because of who we are.
To a certain group of people in this world, I was someone who was never meant to be seen in a position of power or authority. I, like many who aren’t white men, have to fight, climb, and overcome barriers that have been present since the beginning of time. We as Black women know we are leaders, we know we hold power, but so much time, energy, and money are spent telling us otherwise. It’s about the power that others, who see us as inferior, wield over us. So we spend a lot of time spent chasing the dream of overall acceptance, when just being ourselves isn’t enough.
I wasn’t fooled by my title or the prestige of my role; I knew what I was up against so I acted accordingly, turning my fight mode on full blast.
Human beings in stressful, complicated, threatening, or controversial situations typically have four modes of responding: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Fight is a physical response. You may tense up your shoulders, make fists, bite down on your teeth, or cry with emotional anger. This is your body preparing to defend itself. Flight urges you to get out of Dodge quickly. Often this looks like avoidance: a lack of eye contact, leaving the room, or hands and legs fidgeting. Freeze is exactly what it sounds like: You feel stuck, numb, sometimes physically unable to move to flee a situation that’s causing you discomfort. Your body is not sure how to react, so it feels a little suffocated. Lastly, fawn is usually a secondary option when one of the other three doesn’t help you feel better. Fawn is going to the extreme to people-please as a method of avoidance. This looks like always expressing agreement, even when you disagree, and constantly putting others’ needs before your own as a way to navigate a situation by taking the path of least resistance—faking it until you make it out of the distressing or threatening situation.
In my new role at the White House, I was firmly planted in fight mode, sometimes dipping my toe into fawn.
I knew that in order to survive, I had to hold tight to pieces of me that wouldn’t budge. I was aware that this could garner me a reputation—one that I still carry. A reputation that confirms what the world thinks of Black women in general: no matter how many degrees we hold, promotions we obtain, or problems we solve. This reputation is that we are combative, not a team player, and difficult.
I finally gave up and stopped caring, really. I accepted that these labels would follow me throughout my life. I decided to embrace them. I had to divest from the need to seek and want approval. I made peace with this and it became a challenging comfort and palpable joy for me to stand 10 toes down on my authenticity. It helped me sleep better at night and smile in the mirror when I woke up. Finding this peace remains the most solid part of me. At the same time, the loss of belonging flickered into a functional depression. I kept doing my job day in and day out but felt sad and just down.
I always lived in conflict with who I was, who people wanted me to be, who I was becoming, and what I was doing. I didn’t have that foundational grounding that seals in a secure sense of self. I only knew how to survive, and to my credit, I thought I was doing a pretty good job. So I decided to stop trying to look for compromises in my conversations, clothes, thoughts, and everything else. All I could think was that every self-help anything I’d ever bought, listened to, or digested owed me a refund because it was not fun just “being myself.”
Your people will find you. Catchy self-help-book-ish advice like that wasn’t proving true in my experience. As many times as I’ve heard this, it was never comforting to me. I’m impatient, and hearing that in my bout of loneliness didn’t soothe my need for community and friendship in workspaces. I had a multitude of follow-up questions, like When will they find me? And will it be soon? Will these be people who accept me just how I am, with flaws and all? People who’ll be friends without judgment or competition? Where are they?
Excerpted from Undiplomatic: How My Attitude Created the Best Kind of Trouble by Deesha Dyer. Copyright © 2024 by Deesha Dyer. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
Deesha Dyer is an award-winning strategist, on-the-ground community organizer, and executive operations expert. She served as the White House social secretary during the Obama administration and is currently the founder and CEO of social impact agency Hook & Fasten.
