Success Is An Empty Room

Editor's Note: I originally wrote this post last year, shortly after I left HuffPost. It was inspired by a dinner I attended at the home of a very influential, wealthy white person who shall remain nameless. Unsurprisingly, I was the only person of color there, but I was also the only person with roots in generational poverty or who had once lived in a blue-collar neighborhood. This revealed something I would run into over and over again — the game is rigged against us, all of us who aren't "old money," wealthy white people, and no amount of hard work or education will get you out of the trick bag of racialized class stratification.

For most of my adult life, I gave my career everything. This was mostly because I wanted my career more than anything. Being a writer and journalist was a calling to me. I wanted success in my field at the expense of almost every other aspect of my life. As a result, I'm child-free (you can't — or perhaps I wouldn't recommend — moving every two to five years with a kid), and I was single for two decades as I remained laser-focused on climbing the ladder I'd been climbing since I was a child. I wanted to get out of the obscurity of my hometown of Florissant, Mo., in North St. Louis County, and into the majors of media.

But as I ascended, I noticed that the rooms I was in became increasingly exclusive, yet also smaller, until a day came when I climbed so high that what I found was essentially an empty room.

Sure, there were some "people" there, but most had such a tenuous grip on success that things were more zero-sum than "open up the church doors and let the people in." They'd made it to that room and started battering down the hatches, until all you had was the least substantive cocktail party you could ever attend.

I'm an outsider who made it to the "inside" of sorts, and you don't get more outsider-y than a Black, overweight, female, disabled Midwestern transplant who went to a little-known J-school program in the Klan hotbed of Southern Illinois. I knew no one. My parents knew no one. Every step, connection, and career move was hard-earned because I did this the most difficult way by not attending an Ivy; by not being in the "right" groups with the "right" connections; by not having well-heeled friends or other former notable alums to count on; by not marrying the right, preferably rich guy when I was younger; and by not having a parent who could just underwrite my entire life. (My father helped out a lot, though. As much as he could for someone who was as broke as I was for the majority of my career.)

As a result, traditional paths in media were closed off to me. But rather than stress out over not being the "right" kind of person to succeed in media, I got in where I fit and out-hustled, outmaneuvered, and outworked most of the obstacles in my way. I was a head writer for a late-night talk show on BET. I was a literal "social justice warrior" working for the racial justice nonprofit, Advancement Project, on their comms team. I was a popular blogger during Black blogging's first big wave in 2007-08. And I've led two newsrooms as an editor-in-chief — The Root and HuffPost. Part of the reason why my resume is so long and why I'm so motivated is that I lost about 7 years of my 20s to bipolar disorder. I was in and out of mental hospitals from 2004 to 2009, and I came back from the brink of my own self-emmolation, where I spent most of my nights in my parents' basement, drunk off boxed wine from Target and the anti-anxiety medicine, Klonopin, calling the suicide prevention hotline. Then in 2009, I went from folding sweaters at a Macy's in a dying mall in Florissant, Mo., to a week-long stay at St. Mary's Hospital in St. Louis, to speaking at Harvard's annual Black Policy Conference, to moving to Washington, D.C. that same year.

I went from the "nut house" to the White House* — literally.

(*I first visited the Obama White House in 2011 after being invited by his former Black press liaison, Corey Ealons, just a few years after my last hospitalization. Then I met former President Barack Obama and his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, at their final Black History Month celebration in 2016.)

Sometimes, imposter syndrome rears its ugly head, but I mostly move confidently through these situations. This is because I've already seen what the bottom looks like, escaped it, and now relish every moment of my freedom from insanity. I embrace life fully, and life has embraced me back. I'm currently writing a book about this journey, how absurd it all was, but how rewarding it ultimately became.

One night at dinner in Manhattan, I broke down my entire, long, insane journey to a friend, Kate Charles, and she paid me the nicest compliment: she said I was essentially one of the most unique people she'd ever met.

But was I? For some naive reason, I thought I'd meet more people like me when I got to that empty room. But I didn't. The room was full of ... if I'm being real ... clueless nepo babies, rich men who were born on 3rd base but thought they hit a triple, and the stiffest, stuffiest of women.

Everyone drinks, but no one eats the food that's sitting out at the party. It's like Succession but boring. Many of the "elites" are boring. By design. They are so afraid of losing their status, standing, and access that many choose to become vapid clones of each other to the point where the women look the same — flatly gorgeous but empty — and the men look like the kind of men who hope their wives married them for love, but, if they're honest, it was probably the money.

There's no meritocracy in America, which I kind of knew, but that didn't sink in until it became clear that, despite working for more than 25 years, I was almost always the poorest person in the room, yet somehow the one with the most real-world experience. And in this empty room, people "liked" me, but I was a curiosity, a parlor trick. I made them feel good. A regular brokey made it into the highest echelons of influence and society! How quaint! I had more respect for the ones who ignored me, because at least they were honest — I was not one of them and would never be, so why bother speaking to me or asking my name?

But who wanted to be one of them? I was on this journey to the top to obtain the power and influence to help others — not to be the token Get Out Negro in a sea of rich dudes and dudettes managing their hedge funds. Where was everyone?

I quickly realized that so many barriers, traps, and obstacles had been set in the way of ambitious Black people who came from obscurity; it was a miracle I'd even gotten to this room despite getting there the hardest way — earning it.

I once gave a keynote at the Women's March in Roanoke, Va., where I talked about my mother, who would have turned 81 this year, and how the real tragedy of her journey as a young woman was that it was simply too hard. No one should have to suffer or struggle as mightily as she did to simply be a school teacher in St. Louis.

My mother was the daughter of sharecroppers and the eldest of nine children. She grew up in rural, segregated Arkansas. She was often sick, thanks to a case of strep throat that went untreated and turned into rheumatic fever, damaging her heart valves. She'd worked in some capacity since she was a child, helping raise her many siblings, cooking, cleaning, and chopping and picking cotton alongside her parents. Because of her family's circumstances, she had no support when she got into Philander-Smith, a historic Black college in Little Rock, and she almost ended up being put out of school for lack of funds. Often, she had to choose between buying deodorant or feminine napkins and buying food, and her whole world fit into one suitcase.

In the end, a woman working in the school's financial aid office helped my mother get the loan she needed to stay in school. My mother was so grateful that she joined the woman's sorority, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc., of which I'm also a member. Due to systemic racism and this country's lack of a social safety net, there were endless traps set up for my mother to fail in her effort to escape poverty and the Jim Crow South. She outwitted and outlasted by being a perfectionist who knew there was no margin for error in her life. After marrying my father and settling into life as a stay-at-home mother, she inadvertently passed that perfectionist streak on to her children because she knew those same traps existed for us — her daughters.

My mother, as a result of her struggles, abhorred the "Jack and Jill" set because she felt they looked down on her and people like her when she was growing up. It didn't matter that she, too, was college-educated and married to a successful man. She never shook the feeling that she didn't belong, even when she did.

I, too, briefly had a bout of impostor syndrome the first time I walked into a room, quickly realizing that I was the poorest person there. But then I did the math — how did a "poor," regular person from Missouri end up with a seat at the table? I wasn't born at the table. I didn't marry the table. I didn't know anyone at the table beforehand, and I definitely did not go to school with the table. And yet, there I was, at a seat with my name on it.

How was I any less legitimate when I got there by a mix of hustle, talent, and sheer willpower? We'd all made it to the same place; some simply took a shorter, more direct route, whereas I'd once written the words that came out of T.J. Holmes' mouth on a show that lasted only four months, then returned to the world of nonprofits, before hustling my way into The Root by writing 75 out of 100 Root 100 entries under then-managing editor Lyne Pitts. Like, I knew how I got to "the room where it happens," but I kind of didn't. It was a wild one.

Needless to say, nobody saw this coming. Not even me. All I ever wanted was to be the Black female Dave Barry. Editor-in-Chief was a nice consolation prize.

While I'll probably never be best buds with billionaires, I do have lots of amazing friends who, like me, did the work, have done the work, or are currently working. They are brilliant. They are talented. They are steadily climbing that ladder or trying to burn it down. I, on the other hand, continue to do what I do best — make it to the room, then open all the doors and windows, and tell everyone to run in here before they figure out what I'm doing. I'm a woman of the people, for the people, by the people. I'm not about gatekeeping hard-working, aspirational folks from their shot at success. If I can help, I will. And if I can't, I try to point people towards where they can find it.

Because success is an empty room unless you make the effort to start helping others like you, and fill that room with artists and educators, writers and math-wizards, neurodivergent nerds, and culturally creative innovators from every walk of life and background. People whose talents and intellect are raw and real, and simply need a crack to open so they can burst through.

Because someone let me into this room so I'd learn the truth. Someone let me into this room so I could fill it. Will the vibe change, though? God, I hope so.

I can't have another chat about hedge funds.