From the Archive: Hidden in Plain Sight

Back by popular demand, with a new foreword

Hidden in Plain Sight

By CC Paschal 

Author’s Note: This essay was originally self-published March 7, 2021 on my former website thechiquitachannel.com. Please note that the text contains references to my friend and colleague Jazmine (JT) Green under her deadname. It is with her consent that we present the original text.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the following piece of writing changed my life. It freed me and countless others from a tyranny of silence around the wildly disproportional emotional and physical labor of Black Femmes in cultural work and the banality of middle management white-collared slave-driving towards prestige for profit.

Enjoy. Maybe drink a glass of water when you’re done.

Know that these words set me free.

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FOREWORD//FORWARD

Last week, my friend and former colleague at Gimlet Media, James T. Green, published a piece which I amplified through my Twitter channel. It’s beautiful, incisive, and heartbreaking. He wrote it after a conversation we had about a draft of this piece you’re about to read. I’ve been working on this piece for months--first in sticky notes through trauma healing sessions, crying in the bathtub, long walks and fits and bursts of clarity throughout a full-time recovery sabbatical. Like many narratives born of trauma, it emerged in fragments which I had to learn how to safely handle. 

|| “Women of color are hidden in plain sight . . . it takes a lot of work to consistently challenge ourselves to be attentive to aspects of power that we don’t ourselves experience.”  --Kimberlé Crenshaw

I invite you to share in the practice I perform each time I engage with this material. Take a deep breath with me. Rest one hand on your heart, one on your abdomen. Surrender and let your head lean back. I’m inviting you to retrace my steps. This was not easy for my body to process, and depending on your embodied experience, it may be hard for you too, so I want to center and ground us in our present safety, whatever that looks like for you. Let’s exhale with a hum, a practice many of our ancestors intuited to settle, attune and regulate the nervous system through adversity. 

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After a decade in radio and podcasting, my resume looks like a beacon of success, especially as a queer, nonbinary Black (and now disabled) femme. Only now, I’m coming to really own this body of excellent work. 

I produced that resume while dragging a backpack full of internalized oppression, unheard needs, and passed-over accomplishments through a gauntlet of toxic work culture, white supremacy, cis-male heirarchy and misogynoir. I created products and workflow processes with little to no public credit and not enough money. I spent time on staff and on contract in major market public media member stations where microaggressions, blatant discrimination, and old school offenses like hair-touching were still in play.

My style of navigating these conditions has been one of leading from behind and managing up. It is a tremendous additional load to carry, but one that has felt necessary to make my work environments safer––more tolerable for me and my peers who are also impacted by the intersections of systemic oppression. 

Even though I experienced a variety of compounding harms at these other institutions, none have proved as damaging long term as the time I spent at Gimlet Media in 2017.

I helped lead Uncivil to the pinnacle of journalistic achievement--a Peabody Award--and wasn’t even acknowledged as a contributor. This brought tremendous pain, and then clarity, about the banality of workplace trauma and the ways that people with intersectional identities are exploited, erased, harmed and betrayed. And it forced me to come to terms with the fact that it is no longer enough or acceptable to continue the invisible labor that supports the status quo of these inequities. 

This realization is what I’ve been mulling and toiling over this past winter, supported by text companions to my somatic healing work like My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem and the expansive tome of wisdom that is The Source of Self Regard by Toni Morrison. When oppressed people internalize the trauma-based values and strategies of their oppressors, it’s what Menakem calls a traumatic retention. These values and strategies, these internalized narratives, must be named, challenged and unlearned, “...not just by the thinking brain, but by the body, through its ongoing relationships with other healing bodies,” teaches Menakem. 

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In 2017, I was hired as an Associate Producer on a race and culture pilot at Gimlet Media. It wasn’t the job I applied for. 

The interview process for the posted Producer role was extreme, even by podcast industry standards, with multiple rounds of interviews and several days of unpaid labor on timed edit tests, as well as the creation of original reporting briefs and pitches--including some material that ultimately made it to series. Due to a mix up, I was given half as much time as the other contenders on the timed tape edit. Still, I managed to produce what the hiring managers felt was the best final product.

I called the head of “People Ops”--aka HR––and politely informed her that I thought there had been a mistake, and that they offered me the wrong position and salary in my offer letter. She explained to me that it was on purpose, citing my lack of narrative experience as justification. She assured me this was all standard procedure, and that if I proved myself, I could be eligible for a promotion in as little as six months.

Still, I pressed for a higher salary––the initial offer was about what I was making as a production assistant fresh out of my internship at NPR 5 years prior. 

I was deflated but still hopeful. While I had my heart set on ultimately producing my own narrative show about art––and had even used the pilot of that show as a portfolio example––I knew this was my best option to join the company and gain a mastery of narrative production. Plus, it was a big deal to get a full-time job offer with stock options after perma-temping for 5-6 years, constantly fending off the threat of wage garnishment for my student loan debt. I was sold on the dream that the hard work and sacrifice could pay off; it was the great investment of good faith every early employee made, betting on the company’s success. And I believed in the mission of uncovering the stories of my ancestors’ fights for freedom.

So I took the job, as the sole Black femme on the race and culture pilot. The pilot became Uncivil.

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On my 3rd day of work in late June 2017, my boss asked me to prep research and book train tickets to cover a KKK rally scheduled in Charlottesville in early July. It was supposed to be a solo trip to report on Confederate monuments. My stomach was in knots, but I fixed my face to say yes. I shared my uneasiness with my then long-distance partner and friends, all of whom were furious on my behalf and urged me to reconsider.

The next day I found the one programming executive of color and told him my predicament. He asked me how I felt about the assignment. I said I was uncomfortable. He advised me to tell my boss that. 

Sitting outside the first floor studios, I opened the conversation with a question about security protocol. At first, she dismissed my concern––she pointed out that our Black host had done something similar and was fine. I had to explain that unlike the hosts, I was not a provocateur. I took up space differently in the world and felt more physically vulnerable, not to mention the additional scrutiny I faced as a Black journalist. I pointed out that it would be dangerous for me to even bring a shotgun mic or a pistol grip to a space filled with armed extremists and police. 

Finally, to help her understand how bad an idea this was, I framed my concern through the lens of the story. What purpose would recording a bunch of verbal abuse towards me serve when we could just pull some from the multitudes that already exist in the archive? She quickly backtracked while Slacking the editor, saying that it was a miscommunication. They meant they wanted me to book the trip, not actually go. Whoops.

Over the course of days and weeks following, I swam through slave narratives, settler stories, white supremacist fan pages. Compared to my colleagues, I was assigned disportionately more difficult, open-ended stories where no clear answer existed. What should we do about the monuments? How did slavery become codified? How did the first legal slave end up related to the 44th President?

After the initial “miscommunication,” I ended up at Charlottesville anyway, 3 weeks after the armed klan rally and 3 weeks before extremists from the Right united to take the life of Heather Heyer. Based on my conversations with sources I had cultivated within the community on the ground at Charlottesville, it was clear that the pressure was building towards violence. I was on edge. I brought this up to the hosts and the editor and my boss, but no one felt especially concerned, figuring it was just a spectacle over monuments.

I returned home and worked and reworked the content into storylines. I tried to make sense of 20 hours of tape from our reporting. Those sources on the ground were now inundated with national press and threats. I integrated feedback to soften their stories––edits to reduce, scale back, and “get to the point.” I was digesting this poisoned history daily, often dissociating to override my body’s  growing protests to favor the will of my mind to produce. 

One of the biggest battles I fought within the Uncivil team was the continued erasure of one of the most egregious aspects of antebellum America––the invisibility of Black women. Our foremothers were raped to produce more humans––property investments––so the agricultural south, industrial north and western frontier would profit. And the team refused to touch that fact. 

The historical separation of our families and gender dynamics are some of the most challenging inherited traumas within Black family structures. And I was living proof.

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||  No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place” - Maya Angelou ||

Ever since the shame-inducing family tree projects of elementary school, I longed to know the history of my family. While I deeply immersed myself in the horror of Black trauma for quotes and interview ideas, I also gained insights into my own Black femme embodiment. These were insights my grandmother who raised me couldn’t find when she reached back into the family’s fragmented and forgotten stories. In the absence of access to my own family's history, I yearned to learn as much as I could from the stories that reminded me of the notions I had about those who survived before me. 

One day at work, I was deep in research on the Melungeon “Black Irish” families of North Carolina whose African ancestry in America goes back to Jamestown. A Black junior colleague I sat next to peered over at my screen and back to me. “You kind of look like them,” he noted. I felt a flutter of hope in my stomach looking into the faces in the Black and white archival photo. A year later, I met my biological father who mentioned that his mother was a Wilkins-Pettiford—Free People of Color I recognized from this exact research.

__

Uncivil was a moral beacon for the company and the kinds of important stories it could tell––one of the first people to introduce themselves in my first days at the company was Mogul host Reggie Ossé. He immediately remarked on how special and important my presence was, especially as a Black woman, and reflected on his experience raising Black kids, including the pain he experienced as a father educating his youngest daughter about the reality of racial inequality. 

I needed that strength when mid-September 2017 rolled around. A week out from the show launch, my grandmother fell and broke her neck back home in Philadelphia. Outside her room in the ICU after the surgery to stabilize her neck, the doctor told me she likely had cancer, too. Our family structure––gutted by incarceration, addiction, and generational poverty––left the caretaking responsibilities on my shoulders. I may have been on the bottom salary rung of Gimlet, but I was one of the highest earners in my family’s history, and in this moment I had to provide. 

I started commuting from New York to Philly on the weekends and conducting my grandmother’s business. Or as I would say to Black audio friends, “executive producing The Family Crisis.” I took over her power of attorney, made her living will, translated her doctor’s orders, and advocated for her when medical staff dismissed her pain and discomfort or was too physically rough with her fragile body. Meanwhile, the weekend commuting costs and double household expenses were adding up. I quickly learned from a few calls to nursing and elder care agencies, that I was nowhere near the tax bracket required for sourcing external domestic help.

A month before launch, Uncivil’s editor announced he was leaving to return to Radiolab. Before he left, he pushed for a live show. I protested the idea, since I was the only person on the team with live show experience and I knew how much work went into it. I was worried that it would divert resources, time, and attention away from unfinished episodes. I was overruled and assigned to direct the show, adding a considerable amount of work to my already overflowing plate in the days leading up to my grandma’s accident. The show was scheduled for my first day back in the office, and we pulled it off, with nary a slide or lighting cue out of place.

I shifted sharply between compartments in my brain––between caretaking and work, feeling trapped because I knew that I was breaking in the process––yet I couldn’t afford to take unpaid leave because the non-compete clause in the company’s employment agreement prevented me from sourcing side work to supplement my new wave of expenses. 

My manager was initially very supportive. But that changed abruptly once the head of New Show Development returned from maternity leave and took over as Uncivil’s editor. Suddenly, with no clear reason given, I was placed on workplace probation. No one in power could articulate the expectations of my job, but management ruthlessly penalized me for not meeting these unknown expectations.

“The body responds to the repeated discovery of betrayal and the very real fear of future betrayals by keeping the threat response system activated. Essentially, they are responding to the initial trauma while also managing the chronic fear of re-experiencing future trauma. This creates profound emotional dysregulation.” - Complex Betrayal Trauma 

From there, my work experience crumbled further. In addition to my personal responsibilities, my overwhelming workload, trauma around the reporting itself, and being left out of crucial training opportunities made it more difficult to complete work on the rapidly inflexible schedule. My manager rebuffed my requests to participate in the edit processes that would train me through the gaps in my narrative skill set, and soon stopped approving my requests for hourly or overnight deadline extensions.

Sitting through All Staff meetings that could’ve been emails, I painfully faked-laughed along to the mantra that Gimlet “is the place for over-achieving nerds with low self esteem.” 

As part of the company’s ongoing interest in diversity, the CEO held open hours to pick the brains of  POC staff about their previous work experiences and what Gimlet could do to be better. I shared candidly about my observations based on my study of organizational dynamics and executive leadership training as a public media research analyst. The CEO took notes for an hour. 

At the end he asked if I had any questions: I did. My ultimate goal was career advancement towards becoming an editor, but I noted that the process was incredibly opaque. People, mostly white, always just seemed to advance by magic or fate. What were the qualifications? What is the path? He paused and put down his notepad, genuinely stumped. “I don’t know,” he said.

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Six months into the show, I met with the head of New Show Development--now our show’s editor--in a studio for a meeting to discuss my performance. She told me I “wasn’t qualified to be a producer.” My stomach plummeted and I broke, for a brief second. I shook silently and then slammed my hands on the table in the tiny studio. Seeing her jump out of the corner of my eye, I knew it wasn’t safe to express the inexplicable anger I felt erupting inside myself, but I heard my voice rise to a raw and piercing pitch, screaming that I literally could not give any more than I was already. I returned to my desk and stared hard into my 14 track Pro Tools session, occasionally wiping away the steady stream of tears clouding my vision. 

Everyone pretended the walls weren’t paper thin. We didn’t have energy for anything else, anyway.

It was a work culture of self-destruction in pursuit of perfection. We lived on extremely limited sleep, caffeine and nicotine. I relapsed after quitting smoking in college - escaping for “secret” smoke break laps around the block, trying to avoid the eyes of colleagues buried in coats while seeking anonymity to avoid acknowledging our collective reality and personal degradation. 

Hidden in stairwells or cramped and musty voice booths, I talked to doctors and nurses. They explained to me my grandmother’s cancer diagnosis. I learned the difference between PET scans and CAT scans; I coordinated appointments, scheduled groceries and medical supply deliveries. I directed my cousin, who took on my grandma’s day-to-day home care during the week. 

On the train to and from home, I wrote booking emails, scribbled research notes, listened to episode edits, and orchestrated an outside editorial board to make sure our show’s storytelling was sensitive and equitable, especially around gender. I wrote feedback in scripts between loads of laundry. Then it was back to more hyperventilating as deadlines closed in. At home, I ignored my boyfriend when he came to visit from Boston, and had panic attacks on the three block walk from the subway to the office.  

Desperate for support, I reached back out to the only programming executive of color, who had counseled me before going to Charlottesville. We took a coffee walk down to the Gowanus canal. Wisps of the sulfuric essence of the waterway wafted into our faces between coffee sips. He listened and offered some words in a compassionate tone about time management and letting go of perfectionism. Which of course, is very hard to do as an overachieving nerd with low self-esteem. 

When I began to strain under the pressure of working around the clock and caretaking, the director of People Ops––who now mediated all conversation between me and my boss––tried to reassure me. She said: “Some people have had to choose between this job and their family obligations.” 

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In the end, I quit in the sweatpants section of Target. I stopped browsing mid-rack to the ding of a Google Docs notification. At the top of a script for an episode--a script I had worked on for months that I had turned in on time, several days prior--was a note from the head of New Show Development: “This is not a story.” 

I began writing my resignation letter in the Notes app. It was clear that I was not permitted to succeed, and it was no longer worth the asking price. 

I copied the text into an email to the head of People Ops and hit send as I stepped off the bus on my way home. Then, I immediately got to work, determined to turn around this episode I had worked so hard on. Now that I wasn’t fighting for my job, I had the clarity I needed to actually do my job. The episode that was “not a story” became “The Sentence.” It was a story of how generations of free people of color had to gaslight themselves by collectively denying their true identities in order to avoid slavery. It was the story of my family. It was my story, and I was determined, if nothing else, to give it the justice it deserved.

Mogul host Reggie Ossé passed right before my last day. It was a devastating loss for all who knew him. He regularly sought me out before or after the All Staff meetings and we’d chat about the things I uncovered in my reporting. He took great interest in my legal research around the roots of slavery and was never without an encouraging word and full eye contact, affirming me and my contributions each time we spoke. Unfortunately, I was too numb, overwhelmed and dissociated to process his death. 

On my last day of work, my senior producer told me, “I’m sorry, I feel like I failed you.”

She did. As an inexperienced manager in her first supervisory role on Uncivil, and she led the way she had experienced leadership in the toxic culture of her previous workplace, On The Media at WNYC, both the show and the station are known throughout the industry for the unsafe environments they have upheld in the past. In fact, many of Gimlet’s early employees, including the key people on Reply All, came from there.  Our initial editor came from Radiolab, and brought along the boys-club attitude that allowed sexism to thrive within our team as well.

After reading countless narratives and records from and about enslaved people, including Harriet Tubman--star of the award-winning episode––whose values diminished in the eyes of their white masters after their bodies were broken from their work––I realized bringing my nonbinary femme and Black body to the team was not enough to counteract the toxicity. Instead, my body was the sponge––trying to sop up the worst of the mess as we pushed content out to the public. 

Before leaving Uncivil, colleagues tried to soothe me, encouraging me that I could get a job anywhere with Gimlet’s prestige offering on my resume. I heard from them that my job not working out “couldn’t be helped” and “was no one’s fault.” It was simply “just growing pains of management learning.” Out of respect, I kept my departure email short, omitting the reason I was leaving, just providing a bland line or two and my email address. My boss called it “graceful.”

The next day I tried to slip away and depart the office unnoticed, leaving at noon, a dark Cinderella, rushing to get one last doctor appointment before my insurance ran out at midnight. Two Black interns, including the person I hired at Uncivil, chased behind me half a block to give me a bottle of wine with a sweet note thanking me for my support and wishing me well. 

At the doctor’s office, my blood pressure was so high they had to check it more than once, asking lots of follow-up questions with furrowed brows. I breezily informed the doctor that I had just quit my job, trying to focus on the immediate relief and not the long-term uncertainty. My mind may have dissociated from the trauma of it all, but it would take my body much longer to forget. 

I drank the entire bottle of wine from my colleagues as soon as I got home.

|| “Indeed in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a Black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife” - Ta-Nehisi Coates ||

Uncivil, a show birthed in panic attacks between frantic visits to help fight for my grandmother’s life, was nominated for a Peabody that same year and won the award the following spring, on my 30th birthday.

As friends and former work friends flooded my messages and DMs with congratulatory gifs and emojis, I double-checked my email to see if anyone from management had sent a note to the whole team or to me personally. My excitement was doused with uneasiness, tempered with embarrassment. I quit a few months earlier, so was I going to be included in this win? 

At the awards ceremony, several team members represented the show and Gimlet as a whole. During the acceptance speech, the host thanked his ancestors, listed everyone on our team, including a researcher who didn’t even work at Gimlet. I was not mentioned during the speech.

The host continued, “You know, now more than ever to recover untold histories, we need to recover the histories of Black people, indigenous people, Brown people, queer people, feminists who are participating in an ongoing resistance. In other words, we need to see history for what it is: a fight for the future.”

I kept waiting for some sort of acknowledgment from management or even my former boss or the hosts, but it never came. I got a two-source confirmation and fact-checked Peabody's website to make sure my name was actually listed before I acknowledged it publicly. Unsure if I had actually won anything, I tried to orient myself to this new level of prestige gaslighting. 

|| ‘Gaslighting:’ [is]  getting people to override their own experience and perceptions by repeating a lie over and then ‘proving’ it with still more lies, denials, and misdirection.” Resmaa Menakem 

The award became a thing that precedes me in reputation. But for me, it is a painful reminder of the trauma I endured and its lasting effects:  the deeply internalized message that my work didn’t matter. I felt shame. Shame that I wasn’t good enough to be recognized––even privately. After the win, friends would brag on my behalf at parties while introducing me, while I would stare at the floor and force a smile, flush with humiliation cloaked as humility, before cracking a joke and changing the subject. 

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Listening back to the episode that won, I did in fact contribute. I produced the whole opening. I offered notes throughout. I am the invisible hand holding the mic under the blazing midday sun, with the hot metal zipper on the back of my dress searing the nape of my neck as I stood there for almost an hour, prompting their ad libbed critique at the Freedman’s memorial where a formerly enslaved person kneels at Abe Lincoln’s feet in thanks.

When I reflect on my time at Uncivil, I can now see how I pushed my own values to the limit. I worked to do the “good” journalist’s impossible task of withholding my own story and hiding my own body to avoid undermining the stories we told. I did that at the encouragement of my team, under pressure from supervisors, at the expense of my integrity, health, and sense of self. And looking back, it’s all too clear. 

I participated in what Kimberlé Crenshaw calls “collective forgetting,” ignoring the way my body was silently enlisted as a vehicle for racist values and structures. And just like I had tried to point out for the show, the series did not include any narratives on how Black women’s bodies were forced to literally expand the enterprise of slavery. I was forced to internalize the research, and reproduce the slave-profit agenda in the ways that best served white audiences. And in that process, I lost my body––my Black femme laborer body, while attempting to survive the commodification of the liberation narratives of my own people. 

And I thought I lost my mind as well. In some ways, I did. 

I was diagnosed with C-PTSD in 2019. The ACEs studies would say I was predisposed to it, anyway. And considering the fact that I’m Black, epigenetic research would say I likely inherited some of it. And you might know this too, but chronic stress has been shown to actually physiologically, chemically, and structurally alter our brains. I for one can say I know that’s true through experience. 

|| “Sometimes you don’t get through whole. Sometimes you survive, in part.” -Toni Morrison 

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My experience at and departure from Gimlet is the pinnacle of my work trauma, yet also the roots of my origin story as an independent editor and the source of my fierce defense of humane working conditions. This is not a takedown of individuals, but rather a sketch of the dynamics that played out between identities of varying privilege functioning within a cis-white, patriarchal profit-seeking company. I’ve agonized so long between deciding to never publish a piece of my story and wanting to spill it all that I’ve made myself sick. 

And I’m still sick. I am in the process of accounting for the toll of workplace trauma on my life and career, and the toll is one I’ll be recovering from long after the contents of the backpack are sorted. 

I want to be clear. I am not writing this now because it’s easy, because it’s flowing, because it’s all neat and tied up. I writing this now because you––reader who might see yourself in my queer, Black, now disabled, femme experience––you deserve to hear it. I deserve to hear it. And I’ve had to re-face every single ugly piece of internalized oppression and imposter syndrome and grind culture and misogynoir in that backpack to get through this. I’m walking another block with this backpack because I want you to see a piece of what’s in there. Let this become part of the vital toolkit within your backpack: a dictionary, a map, a mirror, a permission slip, a systemic diagnosis, a vial of medicine. 

The company’s perception of progress––and the many modeled in its likeness––relied heavily on our silence. As I gain soft power, I can no longer be complicit. Narratives matter: Who are we questioning, and why? All stories are stories of power. My story necessarily complicates, but doesn’t invalidate the dozens of meaningful and important stories we told through Uncivil. 

The power of the narratives of formerly enslaved was the agency of having their own voice. And I thank them for leaving behind this vital and life-affirming legacy. We finally have the power to define ourselves. We have the power to shed our former identities shaped within abusive oppression. I learned from their stories that they were so much more than the trauma of their enslavement. Those whose voices broke through were not content to be a footnote in a white man’s ledger.