I Got My Dream Job and Ended Up Enabling Racism

Office work becomes an empty parody of real human social life. A dried-up husk of having to pretend to laugh, having to pretend to care, engage in small talk and business talk indefinitely. Futures postponed; emails answered.

W. E. B. Du Bois taught us this, and we teach it to our students. Whiteness was offered as a promise. Precarity makes it less sturdy. There are White people who work hard all of their lives and Whiteness gives them little materially. On the other hand, there are White people who come from powerful edifices, who can point to paintings on Vanderbilt’