In the beginning, I was an online news writer for the Daily Princetonian, but I was hanging on by a thread, both socially and in terms of importance. My assignments were very quick one-off pieces that barely anyone read, and I chose not to attend many of the staff parties because they were nothing but heavy drinking and award giving, but to whom and for what, it was too loud to hear among all the bros. One day, one of the editors asked me if I would be interested in applying to become an opinion writer. I had nothing to lose and all to gain. If I couldn’t get into the Creative Writing Program, then surely I could make myself known elsewhere. This time around, I thought I was successful in two ways: one for making the cut and two for being the only black person on staff. I could be special there. I didn’t have much time to celebrate because I had to turn around an original piece in a matter of days. My subject? Why the Creative Writing Program was too restrictive. Since it was my first article, I didn’t think anyone would pay attention to it. It didn’t matter. As long as I saw my name in print, I would at least feel validated that I could keep going with writing. The morning that the article went live, I checked it out on my cell phone and scrolled immediately to the comments section. The first anonymous comment was something like this: “She gets into Princeton because of Affirmative Action and then cries because she’s not good enough. It’s people like you who should’ve been rejected. The university doesn’t need any more whiny black girls.” At first, I was too shocked to be offended. How did the commenter know that I was a woman? My name is unisex. How did the commenter know that I was black? My picture was nowhere in the article. That was when I realized that I was being watched from some imperceptible spot.
Thanks to Facebook and to the many black women whom I considered friends and mentors, word quickly spread throughout the Princeton black community of the vitriolic remarks, and many left comments on my article under their real names in support of what I wrote. There were some, including black graduate students, who emailed the moderator to question why the original anonymous comment was still left up hours after it had been flagged so many times. The outrage led to a forum attended by many Princeton black students. To this day, it warms my heart to think of how many of them, even those with whom I had only shared a few words, were in support of my work. This forum led to the Daily Princetonian board releasing a full-length article explaining that anonymous comments need to exist because of free speech, so on and so forth. I wasn’t upset because I expected that I would not be protected and I didn’t want to be. What no one realized was that when I read that comment, shortly after I processed the gravity of such a remark, I grinned. I don’t know if this strength came entirely from myself or because the black women who catalyzed us all gave me what I needed to stand tall.
I pored over The New Yorker interaction for weeks, trying to assess whether I was overreacting. Would I have given a contact to another young black female writer whose work I had commissioned? Yes. Would I have given a contact to another young black female writer who had many bylines to her name? Yes. Why? Because she deserved it. Nepotism has been reserved for the white and wealthy for too long. Given that mainstream media feeds off black people and their ideas yet hires them at disproportionately lower rates, I do not consider this kind of assistance mere generosity and amiability but a cultural duty for those like me. It would be cruel for me to climb up a ladder and pull that ladder up as I go. This black female writer I had contacted already had enormous influence and a career that many toiled to have. I thought that if she didn’t feel comfortable sharing contacts, then she could have let me know and I would have understood. But then again, what would it benefit her to withhold contacts from me?
The act of withholding is a part of the crabs-in-a-barrel theory that stymies black people in general and, in this case, black women specifically. Our race and gender disenfranchises us; our art often leads to swift rebuke, even from other black people. History has shown us this before: both Alain Locke and Richard Wright blasted Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, calling it “oversimplification” and exploitation of “Negro life” for white audiences, respectively. How do we hold on to our individuality and freedom of expression if we are always held to account to the overarching, ever-elusive black community? There is this constant desire to take for ourselves because only a few of us are ever going to succeed. We have been taught that anyone who tries to grab on to our coattails needs to be pushed back down into the abyss where they belong. I’ve heard of this crabs-in-a-barrel concept since I was a child, and it’s so pervasive that I don’t know where or by whom exactly I was first informed of its poison. Never did I or anyone else in my community take into consideration that some crabs are at higher positions than others. Is it their fault that the lower crabs want to climb and see the light by any means necessary? Why haven’t we taken into consideration that all of us are warring within a contained space before someone outside of our group decides to lift the lid of that barrel?
Perhaps there cannot be too many of us because then we won’t be special anymore. It feels good to be special because you’re seen as the beacon set upon a hill, a lighthouse illuminating the dark sea. Everyone else within that sea knows and sees you, but you don’t necessarily have to see them. Until you finally wake up and realize that it was all an illusion. You are not special; you are tokenized, thrust out into the open to perpetuate the lie that America is the land of equal opportunity. You are expected to be yourself, but not so much that you forget which spaces you occupy, those in which you are the only one or one of very few. You are outnumbered, and you can either fight to change the game or be so broken by playing the game that you fall in line. At least the latter promises that you’ll be safe, although by how much and how long, no one else is to say.
Black women, especially those who are writers, exist in a continuum of attacks on all sides. It is natural to want to focus on individual survival because no one else will look out for us. Mainstream feminism won’t. Nonblack women won’t. Black men won’t. White men certainly won’t. We are both precious and precarious. But if we don’t value and support our individual, disparate experiences, who will?
When aspiring black female writers email me to ask questions, I respond promptly. When I am asked for contacts, I give them. I do not want to leave this earth knowing that I had a sumptuous feast while other black women had a pittance. But I am not immune to tokenism and crab survival. I do wonder if I’m being too nice to complete strangers, those whose works I haven’t commissioned, and they need to struggle a little bit more. Be more proactive in their approach. My heart used to palpitate whenever I saw another black girl get published somewhere great, even if I’d written for that publication months prior. I grew anxious if I wasn’t included in lists of black writers to follow on Twitter or link roundups of pieces by black women—it was as if when the other black girl had her shine, somehow that robbed me of mine.
One of the greatest mistakes for black women is believing that solidarity ruins their individual trajectories and that in order to protect themselves, they must repel those most like them in shared oppression. I do not agree that every black woman has to be friends with every other black woman whom she meets. We all have different value systems that will logically make us incompatible to some or many. However, we must criticize when those who have become more successful and white-adjacent than others have not made an effort to lift another up in order to dilute that blinding whiteness. We have the responsibility to bring other black women to the forefront of the culture we’ve helped to create and sustain.