You don't even have the Master's tools

On being token Black in the workplace

Last month or so, I rode my bike to Prospect Park to read a book up on the hill that I don’t like going all the way over. As I camped on the grass, sprawling my Black legs on the incline, a group of white and non-Black POC lesbians groused nearby. Their directionless friend had botched another marriage.

“I don’t see why she lets him just exist without a purpose,” one said.

“She’s so conditioned to male approval, and it’s the only need he fills if we’re being honest,” another said.

“But then all she has left is to raise him, like so many other men,” someone concluded.

As the tale of the absent friend unfolded, their dog, an untamed terrier, kept marauding my blanket. And every other blanket on the hill. While their creature was running roughshod, I overheard them talking about how men take up space. Their white woman leader went on to pontificate on the genetic defects of men.

“They can’t remember anything. Their brains are capable of, like, half of what ours are. Their pain tolerance is a joke. I think we need to start planning for a world that doesn’t include them.”

Her logic started to stray into some version of eugenics and my Black male self took it as a cue to pedal up on outta there. Yet it made me think: Was she right?

I be trying to tell everyone who can hear it that I stay outta people business.

If you’re a woman arguing over women’s issues, I stay outta y’all’s business.

If you’re a non-Black POC fighting with a non-Black POC about whose oppression hit harder, I stay outta that business too.

If you’re gender nonbinary fam clashing over who gets to identify with what pronouns, I’m out.

But recent struggles at work, and surviving happy-dancing, neo-bougie-comfort-minded corporate types, self-righteous white queers, and weasel-faced fake allies has me on my exact last nerve.

Audre Lorde’s now-famous quote has been through the internet ringer so many times, it’s important to provide the entire passage so that the ashy-elbowed and ripe-breath-ed don’t misstate it. Here’s the full paragraph from her essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”:

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.

Lorde was referring here to a humanities conference she’d been invited to for women who meant to put feminist practice into real world contexts. She found the organizers obtuse to the issues of Black women and other working class women of color. They had booked her last-minute, and in so doing, tokenized her contributions. She was undeterred and resolute, though.

As I re-examine the quote, I’m wondering if Lorde was a bleary-eyed idealist like me, the kind the world doesn’t suffer kindly, or if she was the kind of cynic who makes sure we take stock of goals as the bundling of causes starts to muddle things.

I can’t quote her solidarity mantra from the movement and then clam up when the different groups in it disagree. Like, am I the enemy of the militant white lesbian because she’d try to shank me if we were co-workers or do I need to align closely with her so that our common goal moves even an inch further?

More than that, I’m wondering if I’m an idealist who’ll grow ineffective and bitter that a world I once dreamed of had no shot at existing in the first place? That the groups I’ll rely on for solidarity will leave me out in the specific and horrifying Black cold I was born into?

Years ago, I sought a Jamaican lesbian poet’s advice about how to connect to my writing voice. I’d loved her memoir and thought we might be related because of some Facebook mutuals. She was incredibly warm and invited me to a salon at her apartment in Brooklyn. There I saw a reality I didn’t know but craved.

She had invited her daughter’s father, a donor she’d befriended, along with his new girlfriend. Her newest partner joined on a Zoom call from upstate New York. She was an “always on” kind of writer — the kind I truly envy — who both contained substance and allowed her levity to dissolve tensions in an earnest room of social justice warriors. Trump Volume One had just dropped and she smelled the extra fear rising from our pits.

“To tell you the truth, I need these guilty white ladies to pay expensive Brooklyn rent. I will ride their white guilt all the way to the bank,” she said. I laughed but a little nervously, because white people were there, after all. I didn’t know them nor the checks they might be reluctantly writing.

She went on to describe how the funding at colleges where she spoke and sold her books was tied to how close she kept her elite lovers. She wasn’t ashamed to say that almost all of her lovers had been upper class white women. Her paramours were invested in the direct-to-artist reparations model that had propped up so many great Black writers. While it also dragged those Black artists down into the muck, perhaps afraid to capitulate to the bloody, performative commerce that survival demands of us.

Yet, the poet insisted, “We can get nowhere without a plurality of sloppy, sappy white women who haven’t worked this shit out for themselves or in their families. They need us the same way we need them, and it’s going to be even more uncomfortable for us if we don’t accept that.”

What started out as a resignation to the reality of the times — from chattel to cubicle slavery — has started to sound like strategy lately.

Look, I’m not one to bite the hand that feeds you, but Audre Lorde was right on more levels than I understood the 1st or 15th time I read her essay. But what she didn’t say means a lot more to me now as I circle the wagons on corporate tokenism and its effects on me.

I’m not gonna lie, I’m annoyed at work because I wish I could quit. But I don’t have the master’s tools. I don’t think I’d even want them. I’m around a whole host of people who think they have ‘em. Y’all do not have the master’s tools. A VP doesn’t have them. Nor does a COO.

I wish I didn’t have to smile in [_]’s face as she tries to automate me out of a job. I wish I could tell [_] that she gives the CEO cover for laying off lots of people who look like her. I can do no such thing because both of those redacted people think they have the master’s tools. They don’t.

They are the master’s tools and there’s a difference. When they get rusty, broken, or make a mistake, they’ll be replaced.

I wish I could make the news interesting to people who want AI slop, misinformation, death tolls, and influencer videos. I wish it didn’t make my eyebrows twitch to sit through All-Hands meetings where my healthcare premiums skyrocket because the government is taking bribes from Big Pharma with one hand and gagging me with the other.

I’m writing this letter to you, dear friend, to help you decide whether or not you can accept we’re the master’s tools. And to ask you to please stop masquerading as if you have them. Oppression and hate are not your enterprise, but you are a shareholder. You do inflate and magnify it. I am there with you, just trying to hide that I am. We are lovely knives, you and me.