Narration/Interjection Voice (23:01)
Okay, picture this medium sized conference room and I am sitting at the head or maybe the foot of a medium sized conference room table. The setting is classic, right? Crown molding, low light, single window, books and awards on the shelves, newspaper cutouts celebrating the accolades of this institution that I'm sitting at. Across from me at the table, three white men. Classic. Okay, so I am in the final stages of my first executive interview process for a museum. I'm competing to be the vice president. If I get it, I will be leading three museums, three research centers. My division alone will have more than 100 staffers at this institution whose annual budget challenges the 20 million dollar mark. It's endowed. It's got a centuries long history and I will be the only of two ever African American executives. In fact, I would be the first African American female executive and potentially the youngest executive they have ever hired. All right, so the first gentleman is the would be boss, right? So he is the CEO. If I get the job, the other two gentlemen in the room at the table are, shall we say, critical stakeholders in the work that I will be doing if I am successful at getting the position. And this is what you need to understand about executive interview processes. One, they are very, very long, but the longer you stay in there, the more interested they are in you. Two, if you ever make it to the room with the big dogs, you are in the running. Them's the big dogs. I'm in the running. Let's do this. All right, so it's been a very long day. We are coming to the end of this day, but the energy is still high. The interview has gone really well. The repartee has been good, and I'm already working on my concluding remarks in my head. Okay, so then we begin the dance of the conclusion of the interview. And one of the gentlemen says, you know, thank you, Dr. Matthews. You were so excited to have you in this process. Classic, standard, yada, yada, yada. And we are excited to see that you are also as interested in us as we are in you. Classic, standard, yada, yada, yada. And then he turns to his colleagues and said, but I also want to share with the group that I have done some of my own independent research on Dr. Matthews, and I have found out a few cool new facts about her. Not classic, not standard. Dear God, Google, what have you done? Okay, so I'm wondering where we're going with this. And the gentleman continues. He says, so I have discovered that Dr. Matthews is a poet, one of those performing poets. You know, they call them spoken word artists. So please understand that at this time and period, this is the rise of the era of slam poetry, competition poetry, deaf poetry, jam is on the television. Poets are loud and challenging the status quo in every other verse. This is what he's talking about. And he says, well, but, you know, I mean, I like what she is doing so much better than some of this other stuff that I've been hearing lately. Her work just seems so much more nuanced and intelligent and articulates. And he goes on making it clear that he prefers this. And I'm thinking, you know what? I'm going to let this left turn just wash off my shoulder, get back to practicing my concluding remarks, and then we'll be good to go. But then after he finishes sharing all of this with his colleagues at the table, he turns to me and he says, so, you know, Dr. Mack, given all of this, I was thinking how wonderful it would be. Would you mind closing out our interview today by reciting some of your poetry for us? I have always been good at hearing the question behind the question. It's One of the reasons I'm good at school, it's not just about understanding the material. It's about understanding. Understanding the particular answer that the teacher actually wants. And so I was listening, and I heard the question behind the question. And to my read and my understanding, the question was not, would I recite a poem? The question was, would I perform? Luckily for me, I had figured out my answer to this question about 10 years earlier in a raucous debate about Bill Clinton and black people. I was a freshman at Duke University when Bill Clinton first got elected president. And sometime shortly after the election, I'm wandering through my dorm and I overhear a conversation between two of my classmates. Male classmate, female classmate, both happen to be white. The gentleman is in a complete tizzy because he has decided that since Bill Clinton went onto the Arsenio hall show and played the saxophone, all the black people voted for Bill Clinton. And so now Bill Clinton owes the entire election to black people. And to pay them back, he is going to have to fill the White House and all of his cabinet with a whole bunch of black people. My female classmate thinks this entire premise is absolutely ridiculous. And she says, okay, okay, okay, okay. So let's say that's true. What difference does that make? He can just hire a bunch of qualified black people to fill all those positions, and the country can just keep moving on. To which he replies, no, no, that won't work. There aren't that many qualified black people to fill all those positions. And this is when my female classmate catches me out of the corner of her eye and she said, ah, look, there's Tanya. What about Tanya? We just elected her president of our freshman thing. And even you didn't have a problem with that. He could just fill the White House with people like her without missing a beat. My male classmate says, no, that doesn't make sense. That's not right. Tanya is different. She is not like everyone else. Tonya doesn't count. That, of course, is when I got into the conversation, laced up my tennis shoes and everything. What had happened as I stepped into the conversation was an amalgamation of a lot of things. And as I spent several hours in this debate with these two of my classmates, I went through all the sensations from hurt to anger to guilt to finally, epiphany. See, I was raised with the cultural concept of black excellence. This is excellence with a tinge of responsibility. Black excellence is about understanding that your excellence is not yours alone. It's about understanding why you must be excellent, which is code for you grow up. You do Good. You do well. People will say, see you. They will change their mind about you. And when they change their mind about you, they're going to change their mind about all black people. This. Yeah, right. You too. So if you are a certain kind of kid on a certain kind of trajectory and you have a certain kind of grandma, you have had this conversation a nice little. To whom much is given, much is expected shouted with a dose of heaps of all of the sacrifices that were made to get you to that point. But the sacrifices aren't the point. The impact is. And what had happened when that gentleman told me that, I didn't count a lot of that shattered, right? Because apparently me just showing up and being in his world didn't change the way he thought about all black people. Yes, it changed the way he thought about Tanya. But I had simply become his exception to the rule. And that's when I started to understand the gravity of the situation. That was the moment I decided I was not going to walk away from that or any other conversation. I was raised not to be the exception to the rule. I was raised to change the rule. I was not naive enough to think that I could change his whole worldview. But I do think I managed to sow in a seed or two of doubt into his perspective, just as he had sowed a seed of a new realization into my perspective. See, I was at Duke University living the dreams of my ancestors. I was showing up and showing out every day, all day, on the day, by instinct, right? I was raised to do this. But what I was understanding is you don't change the world by moving through it instinctually. You change the world by moving through it intentionally. And that when I decided to stay standing in that conversation and debate, there was no difference between that decision and when I decided to stay sitting in that conference room chair and recite a poem. The first line of the poem that I recited was, Jesus is a 12 year old black girl with pigtails from Greenmount Avenue. The poem was called Lazarus. It was an extended metaphor about a little black girl trapped inside an urban environment, suffering through the American institutionalizations that would keep her there. And she is working to save her father from death row. The reception to the poem was contemplative. If you are ever asked to perform in an interview and you choose to do so, do so intentionally. It is the only outcome that you can control. Now, arguably, someone who looks like me, that spends time in spaces like that will always be required to do some level of performance. But that is not the point. The point is about how we choose to show up. FYI, I got the job and it turns out that the gentleman who asked the poetry question, well, that was my CEO, and I stayed in conversation with him through all of those years and to the point where to this day, day, we are now the best of colleagues. And he is one of my strongest sponsors in my career as a museum professional. And so it turns out that Black excellence does a lot of things. He even sent me a birthday card a couple days ago. Fun. Final fact, in preparing to tell this story, I was using my AI Assist assistant to read through my drafts. Forgot to say I'm an engineer. Yeah, I love AI. Yeah. So I'm using my AI Assistant to read through the drafts of this story, and the AI doing its own thing, is summarizing the key takeaways. And I kid you not, one of the written out key takeaways was Tanya decides to stand her ground, define herself, and because of this, probably does not get the job. So it's turns out that not only does Black excellence know how to change the rules, it also knows how to break the algorithm.
