Nine Months into My Job, I Knew Something Was Wrong
This past weekend, I traveled to Alabama and felt rejuvenated. I walked on the soil where my ancestors stood. I breathed that southern air and felt the Alabama heat on my neck.
As I visited my father’s gravesite, I remembered the seeds that had been sown in me by many people who wanted and expected the best of me. As I reflect on where I am professionally, I am finally comfortable sharing this piece with the world.
September 21, 2016
I’ve been a department chair for 9 months and 21 days. I knew that I could achieve this goal and more in my lifetime. I was blessed to achieve this at thirty-nine years of age, five years after receiving an award from the first Black president of the U.S., and four years after meeting the First Lady of the U.S.
These were amazing accomplishments considering that my mother and father are educators who grew up in Jim Crow Alabama. They enrolled me in computer science courses in the early 1980s before coding was popular for girls. My Dad enrolled me in engineering camps in high school in the 1990s although I had never met a person with a Ph.D., had never taken a high school calculus class, and had never met an engineer face to face.
What my parents forgot to tell me was that over twenty years after I began my journey to engineering, there would be people who never foresaw my being in a position where I would lead them.
In our parallel worlds, maybe they saw images of engineering success as only white men whose dads graduated from the best engineering schools and who, as children, had access to cool tools and materials to build things.
In my universe, my Mama and Daddy didn’t have opportunities to attend any flagship universities as undergraduates in their home state of Alabama. Because of this, they made sure that their miracle baby, who grew up on dirt roads and who only read about engineering in books, knew that every aspect that she needed was available via the Dewey Decimal system and the library thirty miles from their home. This is where she would obtain the key to every dream and not be confined by what she saw on those dirt roads.
Today I walk into a room with the heart of a champion, yet something is wrong. I present a vision for excellence, and some people look at me as if I’ve asked them to kill someone. I make a decision for our organization, and some people immediately question my decision and dare talk about me behind my back to not one, but two, three, four, five people. I quickly realize that what I have said has been misconstrued and manipulated. When I confront these people, they smile in my face, yet continue to spew negativity to anyone who will listen.
Every day is interesting. I am that warrior, the granddaughter of people with elementary school educations who sold vegetables on the side of the road in southeast Alabama so that their seven kids could go to college. I am the daughter of people who lived during the Civil Rights era and sat at the back of the bus, who lived the history that most people learn about in movies. When my days get hard, I remember that I am their descendant and because of them, I can overcome anything. I am not a quitter.
There are days that I am annoyed to no end that people don’t want to give me a chance to be the leader that I’ve seen myself to be since I was five years old.
At least once a week, I hear of secret meetings and people who go behind my back to report me to someone for a decision I’ve made or someone who goes to someone above my head about something that they don’t agree with. I cry my tears at home and always emerge with a smile on my face in public. I know that if my haters see that I am upset, they have won a fight that was never fair to me, no matter how many weapons I brought to the battle.
My first-grade teacher Mama never allowed me to be disrespectful, so I entertain myself by asking stories about the upbringings of the people who give me such grief. In my creative world, I have decided that they were orphans like Annie or Oliver Twist, or maybe they were abandoned on islands as teenagers and were raised by nomad tribes in the South Pacific. Maybe, like Joseph in the Bible, they were sold by their brothers to a foreign tribe and were forced to live among people who treated them terribly.
These made-up stories give me peace because they help me to be compassionate to people who find it so easy to be mean-spirited, hateful, and derogatory to me.
I have to be compassionate because even if they don’t acknowledge it, I know that I am their leader, the last one standing, the stoic one who takes the high road even on days when I’d rather punish the people who care nothing for me.
I think of the people, who like me, are being told at this moment that they can be the “first” in their profession. They work diligently creating images for themselves where they are overcoming obstacles and silencing their critics. Little do they realize that they will crumble before their critics if they are not grounded in who they really are. They will have to dig really deep on those days that are very challenging.
I’ve already developed strategies to overcome the challenges. I’ve learned to always have a piece of paper on hand so that I can write down the ridiculous things that people say so that later I can reread the content just to make sure that I heard what people were saying correctly.
I find myself counting silently in my head when people say really offensive and crazy things to me. This helps me not to become the “angry Black woman” who can’t control her temper, because I know that I won’t be given a second or third chance if I make a terrible leadership choice.
Finally, I speak up. I most recently sent an e-mail to one of my faculty reminding her that I am not her servant. I also sent a Maya Angelou quote to this same faculty in which I said, “You teach people how to treat you by what you allow, what you stop, and what you reinforce.” I informed her that she will not talk to me in a disrespectful way any longer.
I am thankful for the strong foundation that I have. I am grateful for being a confident person. I am thankful that I have the faith and foresight to realize that the world is bigger than where I am right now.