How To Impress Your Boss, An Intersectional Guide

Pogonip steers us to the pages of Everyday Feminism, where Sophia Stephens, a freelance writer and self-described “educator,” informs white employers of how to “ensure the safety of the black people and people of colour who work with and for you.” Not safety in the sense of fire regulations, of course, or loose stair carpeting, but with regard to the exquisitely delicate emotional state of All Brown-Skinned People Everywhere. Due to this perilous and inherent instability of mood, there are “questions to interrogate as you engage with people of colour and their labour.” Among which,

Are you asking or demanding? Many white people who approach Black and non-Black people of colour for labour do not ask for our labour — they demand it from us. Asking someone to do something leaves it open-ended with space for the person to say no… If you are exhausting and hurting Black and non-Black people of colour around you because you won’t take “no” for an answer when you request labour from us… it’s time to check your privilege.

If that’s not catnip for employers with tight deadlines, I don’t know what is. Oh, there’s more:

The most common opening for a demand that most white people don’t even realise is a demand is, “I need.” Of course you have needs, but is it necessary that you consistently go to people of colour, who also have needs that are systematically denied to them, to help you?

Yes, white employers must avoid using the phrase “I need such-and-such by the end of the week,” as this inflicts cruel and unusual hardship on those possessed of brown skin. And as an employer, a white employer, you must always remember to ask yourself, ‘Could I give this person’s work – which I hired them to do, and am paying them to do – to someone else – ideally, someone whiter?’ Or as Ms Stephens puts it,

It is important to reflect on how generations of access and entitlement to our labour does not mean you automatically get it from us now.

Needless to say, there are many other terms and conditions for white employers to observe, including parsing your requests for signs that they may be “inherently racist” or contain unspecified “microaggressions” and “triggering” language; and this:

Take a peek at our social media (if you have access and permission), or go on Google and do some research before you ask us for labour.

Presumably, this is in order to perform a daily, perhaps hourly, check on the current moods of every single brownish employee, and thereby discern whether or not they may be willing to consider doing whatever it is you’re paying them to do.

And finally, at the end of the list, there’s this:

White people: why is it so important for us to always be nice to you? Being nice to a white person means acting and behaving like a white person. In case you forgot, we are not white.

In short, then, having hired a minority employee, you shouldn’t expect too much, or indeed much of anything. Except an awful lot of conditions and mannered agonising, and endless excuses for why things can’t be done, or can’t be done on time. It’s the intersectional way, apparently. And a long and rewarding career will surely follow.

Ms Stephens, who fashionably oscillates between the pronouns she and they, claims to seethe righteously, not only about “social justice,” or even “intersectional social justice,” but “radical intersectional social justice.”

The most social-justicey-justice of all.

And Ms Stephens’ Twitter feed is pretty much what you’d imagine. Lots of like-minded people telling each other how emotionally fatigued they are, and how many mental health issues they have. And complaining about how hard it is to “find a job within your field of study,” i.e., when your field of study is some variant of “radical intersectional social justice.” One young woman, a bisexual art student with depression, is complaining about how hard it is to find a job in which she gets paid to draw unremarkable cartoons about what it’s like to be a bisexual art student with depression.

Yes, the titans of tomorrow.