by Ijeoma Oluo
I am, even now as I near forty, followed by security staff in stores. I am followed by cops while driving. I am stared at when I attend social or work gatherings. I hear the reliable “click” of people’s car doors locking as I walk past their vehicles in a grocery store parking lot.
My entire life in Seattle has required that I navigate how whiteness refuses to acknowledge itself and yet insists on asserting itself whenever it encounters people of color.
When I discuss these everyday issues with my white neighbors, I’m met with either angry denial or overblown shock and dismay. If I express that I would like to be able to walk through a grocery store parking lot in broad daylight without hearing car doors lock as I approach, I am flooded with explanations as to why those doors were likely locked—surprise, none of them have to do with the color of my skin. Or I have to listen to excessive virtue signaling from whites declaring Seattle the worst place in the world and sympathizing that I have to put up with living in a place like this.
But the little slights live on the surface of a much deeper racist violence, one that white Seattle does not want to address.
When Charleena Lyles was killed in 2017 by police officers, in her own Seattle home while surrounded by her four children and pregnant with a fifth, I was absolutely gutted. Lyles and her children had been living in a housing complex for families trying to move out of long-term homelessness. Many of the residents in the area carry deep trauma from their hardships. Many are people of color.
I had been a longtime financial supporter of the organization that owned the housing development. While attending a “giving day” at my fancy tech job, I watched a presentation given by one of the heads of the organization. When they showed a photo of the apartment complex, I recognized my childhood. Before the area had been developed into housing for formerly homeless people, it was old military barracks that had served as low-income housing for Seattle families in the 1980s and ’90’s. I had lived there as a child.
I remembered playing at the beach down the hill and buying Now and Laters at the corner store. I remembered the community garden where we supplemented our diets when we couldn’t afford or find fresh produce at the local grocery store.
As I read the articles about Charleena and listened to police recordings of officers quickly deciding to end her life and endanger the lives of her children, I saw the anguish of her family on the news. I saw all of it and knew that liberal, self-identified “antiracist” white Seattle would share a few upset Facebook posts and that would be the end of it. There would be no marches that looked anything like the ones that took place in Ferguson. There would be no widespread cries for justice. And when it was determined that no charges would be filed against the two officers who shot Lyles seven times, there would be little outrage in the streets.
Black people in Seattle would be outraged. Black people in Seattle would demand justice. But there were not enough of us to be heard. And that was by design.
Growing up on the north end of Seattle, I was the only Black kid in all my primary-school years except for the year that we lived in the low-income apartments in Lyles’s neighborhood. I did not have a single Black friend outside of that year until sixth grade. I did not have a single Black teacher until college, and then only one.
My partner, who grew up in the city’s now rapidly disappearing historically Black neighborhood, knew only Black friends and friends of color. He had Black teachers. He also attended chronically underfunded schools and was regularly harassed by police officers.
He grew up in the invisibility of the “Black neighborhood” in a white Northern city: the social and structural erasure of an entire community that occurs once all the Black residents have been corralled into a small corner, away from everyone else. I grew up in the hypervisibility of the “Black family” in a white Northern city, as the token Black household whose presence allowed the neighborhood to call itself diverse.
The racial segregation of my city and of so many other cities across the Northern and Western United States is not by accident. Think of the covenants. White residents have banded together to keep people of color out of their neighborhoods, and those efforts have often been supported—and even initiated—by local and federal governments. Our government built segregated, low-income housing projects where integrated ones once stood, keeping poor whites and Blacks apart. And many of the neighborhoods where we find those racist homeowners’ covenants initially had homes that qualified for FHA loans and so were in part financed by our federal government. Yet not only did the housing discrimination keep Black and white families separated, it also prevented many Blacks from buying homes at all. During the postwar era, when the government actively worked to increase homeownership, loan programs like the FHA and the GI Bill were of much less use to Blacks. Banks wouldn’t work with them, and Blacks were banned by covenants from living in neighborhoods with the most affordable new homes. The intergenerational wealth lost to Black families who were kept from buying homes during the postwar housing boom was the foundation for the vast wealth gap between white and Black families today.33
Today, decades after racist covenants were banned, many white neighborhoods maintain their segregation in less explicit ways, but with the same overall effect. Vigorous fights against affordable housing in wealthier, and even middle-class, neighborhoods have kept people with lower incomes out of white neighborhoods. While the discussion has shifted away from race and toward class, the impetus behind the fight against affordable housing often gives the racist intent away. When ProPublica spoke with residents in wealthy white towns in Connecticut about why they were fighting the construction of mixed-income housing developments in their neighborhoods, the dog whistles abounded.
“The challenge to our community is not just to the character of neighborhoods, but also to firefighting and police response, potentially to educational capacity, to human services support and to our tradition as a single-family-home community,” said Jim Marpe, Westport’s First Selectman.
“The drug addicts are going to be here, believe me,” said local resident William Woermer. “There will be a lot of riffraff. Then we go on to, with a project like this, you need security guards in the area.”
“I’m sure they could have their little parking spaces, but somebody throws a party, or it’s Cinco de Mayo or something else, and pretty soon you can’t park there,” said George Temple, concerned about the impact an affordable-housing complex would have on neighborhood parking.34
There was more familiar, coded language: Adding affordable housing would bring loud music and crime to their city. It would threaten school test scores.
This sort of resistance to low-income housing is found all across the country, even in liberal Seattle. It has kept Black and brown people from moving into neighborhoods that might be closer to their work. It has concentrated the poverty in neighborhoods of color, leaving schools that rely on property taxes underfunded. It has kept businesses that are concerned about their ability to recruit white workers out of Black and brown neighborhoods. It has, along with other deliberately designed systemic oppressions, helped trap generations of Black and brown families in poverty.
The pattern has taken a toll on entire states as well. Pockets of poverty compound themselves, concentrating crime in neighborhoods with high poverty and reduced resources, and increasing the drain on public health and safety resources in areas with reduced tax revenue. When I discuss race and poverty, it is a common tactic of white trolls to ask me, “What about Chicago? That’s Black people shooting each other. There’s no white people in those neighborhoods keeping them poor. How do you explain that?” I hear them, and I envision Dr. King being knocked to the ground by a rock flung by white Chicagoans who were angry that he would dare fight for the ability for Black Chicagoans to move out of ghettos and try to improve their lives. I think of Black neighborhoods burned to the ground in East St. Louis. I think about anti-Black violence and terror in Black neighborhoods in Omaha, Houston, Indianapo
lis, Washington, D.C., and dozens of other cities across the country. I think of the massacre of Black Wall Street in Tulsa. I think of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. I think of all the times that Black Americans had to struggle to build communities and to build an economic foothold for those communities, only to have to start all over again.
When I was scanning historical homeowners’ covenants from the Seattle area that had banned people of color from integrating white neighborhoods, I was not at all surprised to see some in the neighborhood where I live. My partner suggested that I go to the records office and get a copy of my deed to see if there was a covenant written into it.
“Maybe we’re illegally occupying your house right now,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
There’s a good chance that if my particular parcel of land had ever been in one of the many communities in the neighborhood that banned people of color, the covenant would still be there, written on my deed. It would not have been removed. It would have been passed down generation after generation, long after Seattle had claimed to have moved past what it considered its small ventures into systemic racism. Only since January of 2019 have homeowners been able to request that the racist covenants be removed from their deeds.
But I don’t need paperwork to tell me that I’m illegally occupying my neighborhood—every person of color in this city has been considered an illegal occupant for well over a hundred years.
CHAPTER 5
FIRE THE WOMEN
The Convenient Use and Abuse of Women in the Workplace
“While you were away we managed to make a few changes.”
In the 1980 comedy film 9 to 5, Doralee Rhodes (played by Dolly Parton) and Judy Bernly (Jane Fonda) are describing the improvements that they and their coworker Violet Newstead (Lily Tomlin) made in the office while their abusive and sexist boss, Franklin Hart (Dabney Coleman), was… away. The women had kept Hart tied up in a bedroom for six weeks so they could implement the changes.
They enter a bustling workplace that has a decidedly “feminine” energy. The room is bright and buzzing. The women at work are visibly happy and relaxed. As they walk by walls freshly painted in cheerful colors, they discuss the new programs they have introduced, like job sharing, flexible hours, and an onsite daycare facility.
Hart is outraged by the changes and vows to return everything to the way it was, until Russell Tinsworthy, the chairman of the board, shows up unexpectedly to congratulate Hart on his division’s 20 percent increase in productivity in just six weeks.
Hart nervously takes credit for the improvements implemented by Doralee, Judy, and Violet, which have brought such success to the company. As Tinsworthy congratulates Hart again, he leans in and says conspiratorially, “But that equal pay thing—that’s got to go.”
Hart is rewarded for his success with a new assignment in Brazil, where he is kidnapped by Amazonian people and never seen again, leaving Doralee, Judy, and Violet free to enjoy their new, more worker-friendly environment without Hart’s abuse. Normally I’d be mad at such a weird, racist characterization as people of color kidnapping white people, but I’m going to be generous and assume that the Indigenous people of Brazil had just had enough bullshit from rich white men like Hart and did what we all should have done a long time ago.
9 to 5 received a lukewarm reception from many male critics. Roger Ebert, for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film one of the more generous reviews at three stars and called it “only a fairly successful comedy.” He reserved most of his positive comments for Dolly Parton and her portrayal of Doralee. Ebert was careful to point out that he was not praising Parton for her famous bustline, even writing that “she hardly seems to exist as a sexual being in this movie”—before stating that he needed to regain his composure to be able to finish his review.1
Vincent Canby, writing for the New York Times, only doles out praise for the male star of the film, saying, “Considering the militancy of Nine to Five, it may be fitting that the funniest performance in the film is given by Dabney Coleman, who plays Franklin Hart Jr.” He describes as hilarious all the horrible ways in which Hart harasses and abuses the women in his employ. Canby apparently found that his enjoyment of the parts of the film that caused the majority of women in the audience to cringe with uncomfortable familiarity was cause for deeper reflection. For women. He closed his review by saying, “There’s some sort of lesson to be learned from the fact that the biggest laughs in Nine to Five, as well as in several other feminist comedies, depend on enthusiastic, unabashed sexism.”2
Despite the grumbling of critics, 9 to 5 was a success. The comedy resonated with many women. In workplaces across the country they had experienced their own version of a Franklin Hart—an incompetent male boss who treated the women in the office like shit while also depending on their competence to make him look better. 9 to 5 was a revenge fantasy wrapped in the safety of absurd comedy. Many women had likely wished that they, too, could exact payback for the sexual harassment they had endured at work. I don’t doubt that many women also recognized themselves in the underutilized talents of Doralee, Judy, and Violet and knew that if anybody had thought to ask them, they could make some great improvements to their workplaces.
While the improvements that Doralee, Judy, and Violet brought to Consolidated Companies were very much based on the workplace changes that many real-life women had been requesting for decades, the movie was a comedy—and a fantastical one at that. 9 to 5 was absurd not only because three women kidnapped a rich and powerful white man and held him prisoner for days without spending a moment in jail, but also because they got to run a company. Women—successfully running a company! Listening to employees! Establishing corporate daycare programs! What will Hollywood think of next?
Although 9 to 5 was released eleven days before I was born, it still resonated with me when I first watched it as a young adult, new to the professional world. Yes, the fashion and cars were outdated, but I had already been subjected to years of sexual harassment and other abuses in the workplace, beginning with my first job at sixteen. I had already seen the way that women were spoken over and overlooked. And as I had children and became a working mother, I grew even more aware of how far we still were from the workplace improvements that had brought so much contentment and productivity to the employees at the fictional Consolidated Companies.
For centuries, Western society has tried to keep women out of the workplace. Men have ruled over government, offices, mills, plants, cubicles, and more—the domains of power—while women worked at home. The definition of success for a middle-class family was a man who earned enough money outside the home to support the wife, who raised his children.
Of course, situations have always existed in which women had to work in order to earn their own living or because one income was not enough for their family to live on. Even in those cases, strict gender segregation of work was usually enforced. Domestic work, caretaking, teaching, and eventually secretarial work were “pink collar”: women’s work. Just about everything else was for men. With that segregation came a distinct difference in the value and compensation afforded such work. Women were paid less, and their jobs were considered less skilled, less essential, less physically demanding, and less intellectual than men’s work.
These classifications were always a white working- and middle-class ideal, and they never quite fit poor households and households of color. Poor women and women of color have always engaged in physically demanding—and often very dangerous—jobs. Women and girls worked long, grueling hours as maids and cooks. There were the laundresses who suffered regular injury (including burns) and illness from their working conditions, the radium girls who lost their lives or were permanently disfigured from working in watch factories. Women and girls died in factory fires and building collapses. Sex workers often faced abuse and disease. In all these occupations, women regularly withstood sexual abuse and exploitation from their male bosses, coworkers, and other men, who took the women’s socioeconom
ic status as an open invitation to indulge their violent whims. Women and girls who had to take on demanding work—especially those who were unable to quit after marrying—were pitied or ignored. They didn’t fit with society’s ideal of itself. And because they were invisible, they were exploitable. They often labored in conditions that many men would balk at, and at a fraction of the pay.
But women have always shown their intellectual and leadership skills. Since before the time of the pharaohs, women have been fierce leaders, savvy politicians, and skilled teachers. Women have created masterpieces since the first cave dwellers were drawing on walls. Women have invented some of our most important devices, have led some of our most important scientific advancements, have written classic novels. They have healed the sick and philosophized about the world’s biggest questions. Women’s work has greatly benefitted society throughout history—even in the face of dismissal, derision, and hostility from male colleagues.
The idea that women were not made for work is only true to the extent that men have ensured that work was not made for women. Men have designed offices that don’t suit women’s needs, have established work hours that compete with child-rearing, have developed education and training programs that regularly discourage women’s aspirations in male-dominated fields, have formed mentoring and networking relationships on golf courses and in clubs, places where women are not welcome or comfortable—or sometimes even allowed.
Men have used these deliberately structured environments to prove why women are naturally “not a fit” for the workplace. Nursing mothers who cannot work in spaces that don’t accommodate breast pumps are “obviously not that interested in the job.” Women who need flexible hours to care for children, in a society that still expects women to do the majority of child-rearing regardless of employment status, “lack the work ethic necessary to put in the hours needed for the job.” Women who have always loved math but were told from primary school on that they would be better at English and art than science and engineering “must not be interested in STEM.” And men who make all their business connections at the country club or through their old fraternity buddies “just haven’t come across any women who are as qualified for a job at their company as men.”
