On Blackness and Being A Team Player
Being Black is being told you're not a team player for not allowing a workplace to place a metric ton of work and stress on your shoulders while you watch your “affable” co-workers of pallor do the barest of bare minimums while being lauded as great people.
Being Black is being told you're not a team player because you don't want to participate in work parties and picnics and prefer doing your job, doing it well, then going home to live the life you've worked so hard to create in a white supremacist capitalist society.
Being Black is being told you're not a team player because you have boundaries that you enforce and reinforce with co-workers who have none.
Being Black is being told you're not a team player because you don't want to be friends with every person of pallor in your office looking to capture a “Black friend” to co-sign their racist nonsense.
Being Black is being told you're not a team player and being subjected to oppressive actions and attitudes in the workplace that aim to break you and push you into assimilation or conformity as a fraudulent means of survival.
Being Black is being told you're not a team player so much that you start wondering if it's your name.
But real talk?
Being Black eventually comes with the realization that most of y'all don't know what a team player is because y'all are too busy being mired in the nonsense of white supremacist likeability politics.
But you know, keep telling Black folx we’re not team players while we're some of the only ones scoring points for the team.