Troublemaking, Whistleblowing, and the Asexual Me
A riddle wrapped inside a puzzle inside an enigma, or me in the workplace
In the first couple of months of 2012, I did a series of interviews for the Director of the MA in Liberal Studies Program at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Between the phone interview, the Zoom interview, and a full day of in-person meetings and meals, I was fully ensconced in the very white world of New England. And New Hampshire in mid-February is as stark and cold a place as its conservative-to-far-right politics.
The program’s founder, Don E. Pease, was also the search committee chair and an American literature professor whose claim to fame was a biography on Theodor Geisel, aka, Dr. Seuss. Throughout the three-interview process, I only met with him once, at dinner at a restaurant across the border in the friendlier state of Vermont. Pease and at least six other members of the search committee accompanied us to this dinner. I was hungry after eight hours of interviews and meetings with whom I could only assume were the majority of Black students on campus that day. They gave me a full lowdown on the prickly and anti-Black campus climate, a place about as nurturing as the New Hampshire soil that barely supported the dead brown grass I walked by that day.
“On your blog, you say that you’re a troublemaker. What did you mean when you said that, and is that who you intend to be if you come to work with us at Dartmouth?,” one woman on the search committee asked, as if her’s was a “Gotcha!” question. I was already leaning toward saying no to the job before the question, but after it, I was pissed. Anyone who had been reading my blog in 2012 knew pretty damn well that I used “troublemaker” euphemistically, a term I would never use to describe myself. It was Elaine Johnson, my former colleague at Academy for Educational Development (AED), who labeled me with “troublemaker.” She would joke about it, because I asked questions about issues that our bosses sometimes wanted us to ignore, or because I would make a quip in AAVE (African American Vernacular English) that I knew she or the other Black and Brown folks I worked with would actually get.
I said as much, all with a smile on my face. Even if offered, I was definitely going to say no. The dinner and dessert and after-dessert went fine. But I was beyond glad when I got out of Hanover, took the bus to Boston, and flew back to DC.
That ridiculous conversation made me think about two things, though. One was about how I presented myself to the world, the polite professional I had been for years. I knew to ask probing questions, make erudite comments, and code switch toward sarcasm, goofiness, and for professional audiences not white and white-adjacent, toward vernaculars that made me relatable. Yet because I had mostly worked in majority white and lily-white settings, that full range of professional and personal motion was only fleetingly available to me. By the time I had completed my doctorate in the 1990s, I had already developed a professional veneer, courteous and non-threatening to a fault, sometimes charming, but also highly analytical. At least I thought so. All of it, though, skewed away from the personal and the emotional, because I didn’t believe in bringing such baggage to my jobs.
Two was the reality that the personal somehow always made it into my work, often not from my end, and precisely because I didn’t share lots of intimate details about my life with bosses and colleagues. That it was so easy for me to be the consummate professional in the classroom, at conferences, in work meetings, on conference calls, and in emails, it never really meant much to me. It bothered the hell out of some of my colleagues and bosses, and at every stop on my professional journey, going back to my teens.
It didn’t occur to me until the 2010s that my compartmentalization of what I considered personal and professional made me a difficult person to read. I’d known since I was 19 that I had asexual tendencies, that I wasn’t as overtly masculine as a stereotypical hetero-Black man with my muscles, athleticism, and height as most folk expect of me. What I didn’t know was that being this person made me an enigma and rubbed more than a few people the wrong way.
I also have a self-righteous streak. One that I honed during my battles with my now-deceased ex-stepfather during my preteen and teenage years, one that would occasionally erupt in classrooms during my time in the magnet Humanities program between seventh and 12th grade in Mount Vernon, New York. I found unthinking and amoral uses of authority abhorrent, narcissistic ambition deadly, and most workplaces a toxic stew of everything I hated about growing up and higher education. When combined with everything else, it likely made me with my professional veneer seem like a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, a mostly quiet weapon that could take out my colleagues’ and bosses’ defenses at a moment’s notice.
I say “seem like,” because it has never been my intent to fight battles or to make trouble. What I really have been over the years, though, has been a whistleblower, not only on my behalf, but in defense of all who’ve been screwed over in any workplace. I have found myself in this role at least a half-dozen times since 1989, because the US workplace amplifies every ill that exists in this nation-state. Especially racism, but also sexism, misogyny and misogynoir, homo-, trans-, and xenophobia, and elitism, elitism, and more elitism.
My first time blowing any whistle was after a semester of sexual and racist harassment at my computer lab job with Computer & Information Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. After spending the first week of my sophomore year in 1988 homeless and another ten weeks with $205 to my name, I signed myself up for 24 hours’ worth of shifts with CIS in mid-December. That was on top of the 16 credits I would take that winter/spring semester. At the time, I thought the worst part of my semester would be working the 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift in the bowels of the Cathedral of Learning, only to have to show up for an 8 a.m. recitation section and a 9 a.m. lecture, both for macroeconomics.
But Bill, a CIS veteran and a person educators like me call an adult learner these days, had completed his computer science degree in December and had found a new job with AT&T, somewhere in Virginia I think. It meant extra hours for my cash-strapped behind, which I welcomed. At first. From the end of January 1989 through the second week in April, I averaged thirty-six hours a week. And all for $4.15 an hour as a work-study student. Other than the occasional outing or movie, I had no social life for most of that jam-packed semester.
My new boss Cindy and her high-school friend, my co-worker Pam, turned my already busy schedule into a nightmare. Pan was a twenty-six-year-old bottle-blond partier, a Yinzer white woman who’d come back to school and ended up an Information Systems major. Sometimes I ended up paired with her on my Monday evening shifts. Despite the fact that she was the first white woman I’d met in Pittsburgh that had anything other than a flat butt and that she’d occasionally said something interesting, Pam was just a co-worker, never on my mind when my shift was over.
Pam first hit on me at Bill’s going-away party at the end of January. As I was trying to leave, Pam put her arms around my neck and her left leg in between mine, pushing me up against the foyer wall in the process. “I know you’re attracted to me — that you like this white girl,” Pam said as she tried to kiss me. “You’re drunk!,” I said in disgust as I finally managed to unhook her from my neck and body.
I hoped that my rejection would be enough, but it was merely the start of two months of harassment, enabled by our mutual boss Cindy, who was often Pam’s drinking buddy. She grabbed my butt while at work on two different occasions, called me “a useless prick” when I ignored her, and attempted to bait me with sexual innuendo comments in the break rooms.
By the second week in April, with finals just two weeks away, I went to Cindy to cut my hours. I was exhausted, and I was tired of dealing with Pam’s racism and sexism. Cindy told me that I had a “bad attitude” and that I needed to settle up with Pam or risk losing my job.
My sense of righteous indignation rose up in me. I knew I had nothing wrong, other than existing as a young Black man who didn’t get a hard-on every time a woman walked by, a Black guy who didn’t fetishize white women. I also knew, intuitively, that my not-so-obvious mixture of heterosexuality and asexuality confused Pam to the point where her neurons misfired. It was truly the first time my persona collided with my work life.
My response was to resign my position before I found myself fired or accused of sexual harassment by the very person who was harassing me. After my last final in Intro to Shakespeare that spring, I sent a detailed email to my boss’ bosses about the incidents with Pam and Cindy, connected this sexual harassment to their racist stereotypes about Black men, and then connected that to the lack of Black male and female students on staff at CIS, and the lack of recourse I felt I had in dealing with this harassment.
I went a step further. I decided after writing what was a five-page, single-spaced email to also cc the CIS group listserv, meaning every employee in CIS all the way up to the provost office would receive a copy, 503 people in all. When I hit send that last Thursday in April, I knew I’d have to find other work on campus that fall.
It made me a bit of a muckraker, which wasn’t my intent. I was thinking, I ain’t lettin’ these assholes get away with this racist shit. I had no idea that while I was in New York working that summer that CIS would terminate both Cindy and Pam. I would not know until that fall that the number of Black and Asian students working for CIS would more than double, and more women of color would be on staff, too. I also didn’t know that I had used up nearly two years’ worth of my 1,200 allowable hours as a work-study student while working for CIS my sophomore year. No one at CIS ever thanked me or gave me credit.
In the 35 years since, I have learned to trust my gut about people in the workplace. Clearly most do not compartmentalize parts of their persona while being consummate professionals. Clearly the racism and misogyny and queer-phobia that is rampant in this world people bring with them to their jobs and dump all of them on each other. Clearly my quirks and self-righteousness have seldom allowed me to ignore injustice and discrimination. Clearly I have thought, even with assured vitriol and the occasional threat, If I don’t do something about this, who is?
As actor Wes Chatham’s character Amos Burton from the series The Expanse would say, “I don’t shit where I eat.” To that quip, I’ll add, “I don’t like cleaning up other people’s shit, but when I must, you are going to hear about it.”