I hate working for white people. That’s because they’re good at demanding more than your salary warrants and scheduling conference calls too close to happy hour. This Friday was no different. If I had a dime for the number of swivels of anxiety I’ve made in this meeting, I’d be able to pay for the Hennessy that I’d rather be meeting the bottom of. But after several hangover-induced missed editorial deadlines, I found myself in a boardroom full of white men in starched suits—filled with flesh just as stiff and dense as the mannequins they were once on. Rubbing my eye, the crust from last night’s mascara and wrinkled work dress confirmed that I gotta stop drinking during the week. Not this week, though. My eyes and Herman Miller chair rolled and twirled about like a Sufi in reverence. My mind was jealous of the wind that lifts the mystics’ skirts for it asks not permission nor forgiveness—a privilege Black girls like me don’t have.

You would think the white-ass schools I went to would have prepared me for this nonsense in Corporate America. I’m sure my parents meant well by raising my sister and me in the suburbs. But that shit fucked me up. My chemically-processed hair wasn’t the only thing that suffered. Its follicles were never straight enough for the white girls. My tongue was too straight for the Black girls. And I was only pretty “for a brown-skinned girl”. These were two different ends of the spectrum—yet an equal rejection of me who lay in the middle. While I could have barely passed the brown paper bag test, my peers made it clear I couldn’t pass the ‘black enough’ exam. Fucking middle school. Was Black not beautiful, or was my Black not beautiful? Twenty years later, I’ve got this Caucasian in front of me, turning his lips up from disappointment in my work ethic rather than my beauty. Screaming to only myself, “[Insert generically white name here], go fuck yourself about these ‘late’ social media posts.” My unwillingness was the flatulence from the rotting of bleached nutrients that my whiteness-intolerant system could no longer digest. Now, I’m drowning in bills in the world they accused me of assimilating into—and I’d rather drown in a bottle.