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THE ONLY BLACK GUY IN THE OFFICE
I Learned That My Co-Worker Is Full MAGA, and Now I Can’t Unsee It
That awkward moment when office politics takes a turn for the worse
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
“Yooooooo!”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about text-based communication, it’s that whatever follows an elongated “Yo!” greeting never disappoints. So when I saw one in a Slack DM notification from one of my co-workers a couple months ago, I was sure to swallow my mint tea before opening the message.
This time, the message actually did disappoint. What followed was a screenshot from the Instagram page of our VP of marketing (let’s just call her Alice) pictured standing next to Donald Trump. “You peep this?” my colleague wrote. Trying to seem unfazed, I responded with a simple “Nah.” But since that day, I haven’t been able to unsee that photo of Alice, smiling like a fangirl, alongside Trump, smiling like the ugly racist he is.
Go figure, I just have this thing where I don’t like White supremacists or the people who support them.
Trump has been trash for decades. You knew that back in 1989, when he purchased a full-page ad in The New York Times advocating for the death penalty of five Black and Latino young men who were wrongly convicted of the rape and assault of a jogger. I won’t waste space here on dude’s substantial portfolio of racism and xenophobia before and since that well-documented situation, but my feelings on 45 are perhaps best summed up by YG and Nipsey Hussle’s timeless anthem “FDT.” Go figure, I just have this thing where I don’t like White supremacists or the people who support them.
Before Trump became president, I could at least show grace to folks who watched The Apprentice. I didn’t care for it, but didn’t see a reason to knock those who did. That all stopped when he took over Barack Obama’s spot in the Oval Office and polarized the country in a way we hadn’t seen since the O.J. Simpson trial. Politics became the third rail of workplace conversation. Very few weren’t…
