I’m watching her wince through her knee injury.
She forces her hips and legs to cooperate while she walks gingerly to the couch. It wasn’t always like this. After graduating from Columbia University with a master’s degree in administration, she went directly to an alternative transfer high school to teach students from ages 15 to 21. She quickly rose from English teacher to assistant principal. In her first year as assistant principal, she would basically run the operations of this school, from programming and professional development to waiting for kids in police custody and in emergency rooms. She reversed attacks on her character and named herself the HBIC of the school.
She never shied away from command and never led her shipmates astray.
In her second year, however, she had other aspirations: her first child and a home for her new family. Under a new principal, she worked tirelessly to cross every t and dot every i. Whatever she didn’t know how to do, she learned on the job. While other adults treated their jobs as a list of compliance measures and commands to hold others responsible for, she understood how the students in her care had been passed over and along too often in their educational careers. Not doing her job was not an option.
Over the next decade or so, she maintained her stellar expectations, work ethic, and energy at the direst times. Her school would end up on lists of all the wrong sorts, her students on the wrong end of the news. She had work to do. She’d rattle off the extensive details of what her instructional focus would look like, how individual students needed one set of credits based on the schools they came from, and the alignment between DOE’s policy shifts compared to her own school’s. With her extensive understanding of pedagogy, she would visit classrooms around the school for about five to ten minutes and had solid assessments on every teacher’s pedagogy and every student’s progress. She’d always say she knew what she was doing, which was a daunting list to be sure, never what her principal did.
Nevertheless, she kept working.
Three years ago, a fight broke out between two boys. She tried to break it up. A student ran into her so hard that her head bounced off the floor and her knee and her right shoulder also sustained a blow. Her adrenaline popped her right up, but she couldn’t remember because she had a concussion. She had to fight to get time off from her job. She had to fight to get paid for the time lost. She had to fight higher-ups who wanted to get rid of her for sheer loathing. She had to fight for medical leave. Upon her return, she had to fight for the respect she deserved because another (white male) principal had stepped in and swept the students off their feet. She had to fight through physical therapy and a plethora of appointments and prescriptions to gain her short term memory back.
She remembers all of this now.
She reaggravated her knee recently at school, sidelining her for the last few days. I’m sitting there writing about a Boston College/Hunter/Columbia University graduate who taught across all the content areas and is prepared to run any school on Day 1, not just my wife and the mother to our eight-year-old. While everyone from the students to the chancellor recognizes this, no one has seen fit to let her run a school as principal. They’ve been comfortable with her doing all the work of a principal without the title or the remuneration that the work entails.
LuzMaria Rojas-Vilson’s story, plus the dozens of other stories I hear from women on a regular basis, is what has me in a permanent eye-roll for this entire (s)election season.
After last week’s Super Tuesday result, I was in a bit of a malaise, fully reckoning with what would eventually lead to the suspension of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign. In my heart of hearts, her serious combination of progressive ideals, great governance, and ear for the marginalized made her the best presidential candidate we’d seen since 2008. I had been a fan of Warren’s since she made public spectacles of holding policymakers, CEOs, and other executives accountable for the wrongs they’d committed against the general public. On several occasions, she’d been called the smartest person in any room, capable of researching and drawing from complex ideas and explaining the concepts so her audiences could understand, a skill that’s honed with decades of teaching.
Her campaign told you how she would help fix America with details down to the last penny. She could personally tell you.
Earlier this year, I had endorsed Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy for president. Her unification speech with Secretary Julian Castro in Brooklyn nudged me from a quiet supporter to a critical fan. This resulted in plenty of applause, but also much derision from people (and bots) for siding with a former Republican/white woman who wasn’t left enough for them and who lied about her indigenous/Native American ancestry. While some of the critiques were warranted, others felt like the deification of their own preferred candidates and/or a scourge of humanity that is sexism. Supporters routinely felt that, had she been a man of similar comportment and platform, she would have won this election in a landslide.
We must understand how sexism – along with racism, homophobia, and other oppressions based on identity markers – robs humanity from its own salvation.
In 2016, when Hillary Clinton became the presidential nominee, progressives complained that she was an establishment insider and couldn’t wait to vote for Elizabeth Warren someday. At the time, Kamala Harris was also in the hearts and minds of what we now dub “the Obama coalition.” Fast forward to now and we have a country too unnerved by the events of 2016 to elect a woman candidate, no matter how often a male candidate fails. People critiqued Harris’ prosecutorial record and rightly so. Yet, few had critiques for Amy Klobuchar’s record as a prosecutor or as an abusive boss until well after Harris left. In fact, my wife and I were in shock when Tom Steyer (who stole Harris’ campaign data), Michael Bloomberg (who bought out one of Harris’ campaign aides), and Klobuchar were all allowed to stay in the race while Harris’ position was upended by folks like Pete Buttigieg. The gall.
Some of the same candidates pretended up and down they listened to Black women with little evidence of those conversations in their actual platforms.
So when Super Tuesday came around, my mind told me that America might choose Warren as the unity candidate, but my gut told me that people would run scared of the prospect that either Biden or Sanders would win, so they would vote for either Sanders or Biden with her core fans staying put. It didn’t matter that she eviscerated Bloomberg for us to see and created plenty of blueprints for the truly progressive “New Deals” we wanted to see in the world. It didn’t matter that she was almost every candidate’s second favorite person running based on poll after poll. It mattered that she was a first-time candidate who was a woman.
It’s true that all I have is Warrens around me, too: women who often get dismissed or given positions and platforms well under their preparation, work ethic, and talent. In too many instances, women I know are held to a higher standard by working hard at their jobs and at home with little reflection from their partners. (That’s on us, guys.) America is not a meritocracy and the sooner we as a country come to grips with it, the more we can surface these elements that keep our brightest stars from shining. In these moments, I hope our country can do serious reflections about the games we’ve played with our psyche, our complexes, our complexions, and our ways of being.
Until then, the work isn’t over. Not for me. Not for the women I stand with, and those of us who choose to stand with them. We’ve pledged to commit ourselves to only the righteous fights. For them, we dream big and fight hard. Just like Mrs. Rojas-Vilson did in her first months back after her long-term absence: assisting students, giving the Chancellor a tour of the school, de-escalating situations with parents, and moving the school to the rating of “Good Standing.” Just because it looks effortless doesn’t mean the effort isn’t there.
She persists. So let’s.