In the conference room that Inauguration Day, I was deeply distraught. From the moment I set foot in London, my great dilemma had been that of belonging. Not knowing whether to move back to the US or stay a bit longer. To wait until my son was school age, until I was ready to move on from my job, until we had had a second baby, until the exchange rate improved, until stricter gun control was in place back home, until the volatile rhetoric calmed down, until we had a clearer idea of how Brexit would look, until the next election year, until the global pandemic subsided, until, until. While friends of mine moved abroad, happy to never look back, I was forever sensitive to the pull of home, constantly aware that despite being wildly happy here, I would never belong. And still, Trump’s election made it painfully obvious I didn’t belong in America either.
My shoulders shook as I tried to swallow sobs and feelings of anger and betrayal. Fifty-two percent of White women voters had chosen Trump. Ninety-four percent of Black women voters chose Clinton.
The English adage to keep calm and carry on has always felt uniquely American to me. Underlying the stock image of the Strong Black Woman is a sense of unwavering calm and unflappability in the face of trauma. And the narratives about us, sometimes authored by us, regarding the elections played this out. “Trust Black women,” a popular sentiment in news articles and Twitter commentary went. “When they go low, we go high,” as Michelle Obama famously encouraged. “We show up,” another popular message circulating on social media said. We show up at the polls, where we consistently vote for the Democratic Party, a party that consistently takes Black women for granted. “We do the work. Why won’t America show up for us in return?”
Around this time, women’s magazines, including the one I worked for, began actively exploring the importance of owning anger, commissioning writers to author pieces about why now was the time to get mad and let the world know about it. I couldn’t figure out what to do with all my rage, let alone write about it. I struggled to lean into my feelings and face them. My ability to quarantine my personal disappointments and frustrations for the sake of preserving my mental health had served me well up to that point, whether it was learning how to shut down microaggressions at work or a classmate’s request to touch my hair (something that continued to happen a shocking amount well into my adulthood).
I knew how not to take the bait. I wasn’t the type to easily snap. Instead I’d fold the hurt, irritation, and anger up into neat little Marie Kondo–style rolls and tuck them away in the annals of my memory, only to be pulled out when I needed to prove a point. But that felt impossible that Inauguration Day. Years’ worth of folding, tucking, and rolling came undone. And the more I sat with my despair and inspected it, the more I realized what I was feeling was not the anger of women’s magazine coverlines and rallying retweets. It wasn’t rage at all. It was fear. I was afraid. And no amount of willful compartmentalizing could undo that.
Months before, friends of mine had sent me messages joking that they too would be packing up and leaving America if Hillary Clinton didn’t win. We laughed hard and nervously, refusing to think through the inconceivable.
And then the inconceivable happened, and I had to face the reality that sometimes optimism and willpower aren’t enough and that this is when the real work begins.
Chapter 6
Sally Hemings and Hidden Figures
At first glance, the furor surrounding the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s decision to step back from their royal duties in early 2020 and a White supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 appear to be two unrelated events, taking place in different worlds and times. But what the two have in common is how they made plain to one segment of society what is obvious to the other: that racism still undergirds the world’s biggest institutions, from our governments and schools to monarchies and media. It remains the great unacknowledged elephant in the room, even now when it’s discussed more frequently than ever. That’s because the discussion rarely seems to yield an appreciation of how the privileged got there and who was oppressed and overlooked along the way—at least, by the people who benefit most from racism. In the case of Charlottesville and the Duchess of Sussex, Black women are central to both events.
On the 12th of August 2017, I woke up to images of White supremacists carrying tiki torches. It was just early enough that the air (in London’s hottest summer on record since 1976) still felt cool. As I clicked through the news alerts on my phone, a tableau vivant of angry White men looked back at me. Eyebrows pushed up, jaws jutting down, chests puffed out. Flames from the torches winding snakelike through the night. Faces exposed for all to see. Sieg-Heiling. Proud.
They were standing on the iconic lawn of my alma mater, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, in protest of the planned removal of a Confederate statue from the school that had been started by one of America’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. The protest, the biggest and most violent White supremacist rally in recent history, staged at one of America’s most historic and picturesque campuses, had made global headlines.
The men wore polo shirts and white button-downs and khakis, and I remember being slightly amused by this—the idea of hateful behavior dressed up in the uniform of Southern American gentility. I rubbed sleep out of my eyes, and upset began to settle in. On social media, former classmates, most of them White, posted messages of shock that such a bold act of hatred had taken place at the school, which up to that point was largely known as a utopian academic village. Their messages eulogized a school they thought they knew, a state they thought they knew, a country they thought they knew. Meanwhile, my Black alumni friends were communicating a different message about the protest: “This isn’t surprising or new.”
The cable news networks were playing the protest footage on a loop. The sheer volume of men was chilling. They had come from all over the world to join in the Unite the Right rally, which had been organized by two alumni of the school. Most had come from Virginia, but a significant minority had traveled from other states, including Ohio and Alaska. The rally even drew men from Canada, Sweden, and South Africa.
And as the world watched events unfold—a series of violent clashes throughout Charlottesville that left one woman dead—I couldn’t help but think that the ghost of Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s most prized slave and mother to six of his kids, was watching too.
Much has been written about Sally, and yet we don’t know very much about her at all. We don’t know her hopes, fears, or thoughts about bearing her enslaver’s children. She left no written accounts. We don’t even know how she looked; there are no painted portraits, only two written descriptions of her appearance as “mighty near White” with “long straight hair down her back,” according to a former Monticello slave. Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson’s grandson described her as “decidedly good-looking.” What we do know has been pieced together from testimony about her.
History is filled with Sally Hemingses. Black women behind the White men taking center stage in history, invisible women with barely a footnote: the laborers who built the landmarks and powered the industries that propped up global economies with their bare, calloused hands. The internet is filled with modern-day versions of this story. Search the phrase “Meet the Black Woman Behind,” and you’ll find a litany of results: the Black Woman Behind the Green New Deal, the Black Women Who Helped Send America to Space, the Black Woman Helping Starbucks Get Its Buzz Back. The Hidden Figures narrative has played out for hundreds of years. But it’s taken on a new tenor as both appetite for these stories and racial tensions increase globally. It’s hardly a coincidence that the rise in visibility and power of Black women—and people of color, queer, and trans people as a whole—is coinciding with a rise in pushback to all those things.