What If We Stopped Pretending Grinding is a Viable Solution to Oppression!!!
By stacy lee kong
Image: instagram.com/victoriamonet
This summer will mark five years since I left what I thought was going to be my dream job. In 2017, an opportunity came up to do a short-term editing contract at Flare, the long-running fashion mag that had recently ceased print production and pivoted to a digital publication with a wider focus on pop culture and politics. I really liked what Flare was doing, but equally salient was the fact that I’d recently gone freelance after getting laid off from Canadian Living and I liked the idea of having work lined up for a few months. When I actually got there, though? I realized I loved it. For the first time in my career, I could shape an editorial strategy that spoke to women like me and my friends—young, ethnically diverse and as interested in Fenty foundation as in access to abortion. And I got to do that with a group of smart, thoughtful, dedicated journalists who also came from a variety of backgrounds??? Sometimes, I’d look around the boardroom at our editorial meetings and I wouldn’t be able to hold in the smile, as cheesy as that sounds, because I couldn’t believe that we got to do what we were doing. What was supposed to be three months ended up being almost two years, and while it was not a perfect experience, it was a high point in my career. So when I decided to leave in 2019, I was a little bit heartbroken.
When I wrote my ‘please hire me for things’ Twitter thread announcing my departure, I tried to pay tribute to my time at Flare: “Do you know how cool it is to write, edit, commission and otherwise champion stories that take what we like seriously? That take us seriously? I will tell you: It is very cool.”
The thing I didn’t say was I was scared it would never happen again. By 2019, it felt like mainstream Canadian publications’ interest in covering race, gender, sexuality, ability and class in deep, interesting and nuanced ways was already waning, even in the lifestyle space, which in my experience had been the sector of media most amenable to publishing stories on those topics. I couldn’t think of many places that offered the freedom Flare had, much less ones that might hire me in a leadership role. Often when I talk about starting Friday Things, I joking-not-jokingly talk about being motivated by spite; if hiring managers didn’t see me as a leader and didn’t want to give me the chance to run a publication, fine. I’d make one myself. And that’s not untrue. But maybe the more vulnerable admission is that I’ve also been chasing the feeling of sitting in that boardroom, surrounded by brilliant and talented journalists who felt safe and inspired and passionate and supported enough to do their best work.
I say all this because Friday Things turned four a few weeks ago and my career looks nothing like it did in 2019. I’ve written more than 180 newsletters where I get to do the kind of analysis I love and am good at—and see even less of in mainstream outlets. I regularly appear as a culture critic on TV, radio, podcasts and, even more bizarre for 2019 me, in real life at panels, workshops and live events. I’ve been interviewed by the New York Times, which still feels like it means something, even with all of my criticism of the paper. Looking back, leaving Flare was absolutely the right decision. So was believing in myself, and not giving up, and being brave, and all those things motivational TikTok girlies tell you to do before they try to sell you a course of some sort. I don’t really buy into the idea that the universe is always working in your favour, but in this, at least, it feels like things have worked out for the best.
So… tell me why I felt so conflicted over Sunday night’s X/Twitter discourse, especially the parts about Victoria Monét’s long overdue Grammys success and Jay Z’s comments on how important it is to “keep showing up,” even when your industry overlooks you? Because on one hand, yes! That is very, obviously true! But on the other… those tweets sparked some ~feelings~ that I have consequently been thinking about all week long.
Don’t misunderstand me—Victoria Monét deserves
To be clear, I was thrilled to see Monét win three of the seven Grammys she was nominated for (Engineered Album, Non-Classical, R&B Album and Best New Artist). I love her music, but I especially love what those awards represented: appreciation from an industry that has not always been fair to her. And the fact that it happened just months after MTV behaved in an incredibly disrespectful manner was especially satisfying. In case you don’t know the story, back in September, Monét addressed fans who had called for her to perform at the VMAs, tweeting, “I see your advocation for me to have performed tonight and I’m so grateful to you!! Sincerely! My team was told it is ‘too early in my story’ for that opportunity so we will keep working! I’m grateful for YOU, for my tour starting this Friday and for the ability to see some of my favorite people perform tonight and receive the love they so deserve!!! ❤️🙏🏽 For me, it’s part of the story…and in Gods time ✨.” I mean… MTV saying she wasn’t established enough to perform at their awards show, only to be proven wrong by a more established and revered musical institution five months later? Deliciously ironic.
But MTV’s disrespect was just one example of what Monét has faced while trying to build her singing career. As she said in her acceptance speech for Best New Artist, “this award was a 15-year pursuit. I moved to LA in 2009 and I like to liken myself to a plant, who was planted and you can look at the music industry as soil. It can be looked at as dirty or it can be looked at as a source of nutrients and water. My roots have been growing underneath ground, unseen for so long. I feel like today, I’m sprouting, finally above ground.”
She went on to explain that she was overlooked by music execs for years, which is why she spent more than a decade writing songs for other people, including Blackpink, Brandy, Chloe x Halle, Fifth Harmony, Nas and Ariana Grande (you know what I think about that lady, but “Monopoly” remains a bop), even though she would have rather been building her own singing career. She’s also been candid about feeling like she had to hide her bisexuality because of how it might affect her career—as she said in a recent Variety cover profile, “I thought that conforming would make me go further. Being picturesque, straight… It almost felt like you didn’t want to add any more weights to your ankles trying to win a race. It’s like, you’re already a woman, you’re already Black—you’d better pick a struggle.” And while things are finally taking off, two years after the birth of her daughter, Hazel, it sounds like at least some people were not very encouraging when she got pregnant. “I feel like having it all with Hazel is the best part of it. There was a lot of fear projected on me when I told everyone I was pregnant, just about career things. It was hard,” she told Variety. “So I think to round it all off with me not only being nominated—but also the child that I was pregnant with at the time, during the scariest time in my life? I couldn’t write it any better.”
It is a great story. The idea that success will come in God/the universe’s timing is both comforting and satisfying from a narrative perspective; in that telling, the setbacks are reframed as rising action instead of the hundredth indignity to make you cry in a given week. But there’s something weird about how often social media relied on that type of story when describing Black women’s success at this year’s Grammys. It’s exactly the same framing that was applied to actor and first-time nominee Coco Jones. A former Disney star who started working at nine, Jones has been candid about how colourism and anti-Blackness derailed her career for years. In fact, it wasn’t until she began speaking out about her experiences in 2020 that she began booking major gigs, including Bel-Air, and signed a new record deal with High Standardz and Def Jam Recordings. It’s also the type of story that is sometimes told about SZA, who was nominated for nine Grammys and took home two (Pop Duo/Group Performance and Urban Contemporary Album, though notably not Album of the Year).
I think it’s worth asking ourselves why we’re so comfortable with positioning Black women specifically, and marginalized people more generally, as underdogs, and what we’re missing when we frame their eventual success in this way. Because, sure ‘overnight success’ is definitely a myth and it’s important to acknowledge that. But… is it God’s timing is always right? Or is it that racism, colourism, homophobia, unconscious bias and other intersecting forms of oppression cause unnecessary setbacks and delays? I’d argue the latter. It’s not that Monét, Jones and SZA had to ‘put in the time’ to earn career success; success was deliberately withheld from them by individuals working within a white supremacist, patriarchal system. Which is why turning the recognition these women received on Sunday night into something akin to inspiration porn about staying on your grind and never giving up felt… weird to me.
And that was especially the case when it was inaccurate, btw. Some people have tried to characterize Tracy Chapman as an underdog finally receiving mainstream recognition in the wake of Luke Combs’ super-popular cover of “Fast Car” and their beautiful performance at the Grammys, but Chapman was recognized, critically and commercially, from the beginning of her career. As Xtra’s Tara-Michelle Ziniuk pointed out this week, “The woman was nominated for six Grammys for her debut album. She’s had five hit singles chart on Billboard’s Hot 100. She has four platinum albums. She was on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1988! This is not me saying, ‘lesbians love her and have for decades’—it’s awards, media, charts—objective commercial success.”
Jay Z’s acceptance speech also plays into this idea
I thought Jay Z’s speech was fascinating for a lot of reasons (did he bring Blue on stage with him and make his wife his focus as a corrective to the fact the award he received was named after a serial abuser? It probably played into his decision-making!), but I was especially struck by the way he, too, embraced the narrative of individual behaviour as a corrective for systemic inequality. On one hand, I loved that he took The Recording Academy’s decision to recognize him with the Dr. Dre Global Impact Award as an opportunity to call the organization out for its general disrespect of Black artists and its specific disrespect of his wife. I’m also very here for his shady insinuation that ~some people~ have received Album of the Year awards that they don’t deserve, which… yes. (Sorry, Tay Tay.) But it all kind of fell apart at the end with his exhortation for Black artists to persevere and bide their time.
“We gotta keep showing up,” he said. “And forget the Grammys for a second, just in life. You've got to keep showing up. Keep showing up. Until they give you all those accolades you feel you deserve. Until they call you chairman. Until they call you a genius. Until they call you the greatest of all time.”
Here’s the thing though: They won’t. And Jay Z acknowledged as much in his speech. There is plenty to criticize Beyoncé for, but I don’t think anyone can argue her impact. She single-handedly changed the day new music drops. She popularized the visual album and, even for artists who didn’t commit to a full slate of music videos, she helped revive music videos as an artform. She also popularized the surprise album. She is widely credited with inventing the rap-singing style. She was instrumental in the mainstreaming of intersectional feminism. And yet that lady doesn’t have a single Album of the Year award? What, exactly, would she need to do to earn one? But that’s a rhetorical question, obviously, because if her creative output, cultural impact and commercial success until this point has not been enough to earn the Academy’s validation, nothing more would.
That’s why, as Sidney Madden explained on NPR, Jay’s speech “was a pulled punch, a compromise masking a stronger critique, just like boycotting the ceremony but still watching it on TV. This is the root of why disrespect of Black artists at the awards is an annually recurring conversation: It's a search for validation in places where it does not exist. Achievement at a Grammys-level height comes from excellence matched with politicking, not all-out rejection. It requires a buying in to the promise of what these awards claim to represent—prestige, artistry, recognition on a neutral playing field by a cross-genre body of your creative peers.”
It's just, the Academy, and every other award-granting entertainment institution, has yet to make good on that promise—and frankly, they never will, as Refinery29’s Kathleen Newman-Bremang convincingly argued this week.
And… I don’t have a tidy ending. I agree that it’s annoying to constantly have to point out anti-Blackness, racism and discrimination at award shows, but I think it would be irresponsible to stop talking about how creative industries treat their racialized members. I also can’t see a practical way for marginalized people to divest from the award-show ecosystem. Artists like Drake or The Weeknd can decide they’re never going to submit their work or attend the Grammys again; they are megastars. But award shows—which are a proxy for industry recognition in general—directly lead to both creative validation and professional and economic opportunities, which smaller artists need and deserve.
I do think at the very least we can explicitly name what is happening, though, and to be clear, it is not achieving success because you ‘kept showing up.’ It is achieving success despite structural barriers that are being maintained by actual people. To bring it back to those feelings that I talked about at the beginning of the newsletter, I’m really happy with my career and proud of what I’m doing. But I don’t want to tell a story that glosses over the very real ways that racism and sexism have caused delays and setbacks for me. There isn’t a story that makes that kind of unfair treatment okay.
Thirst Talks, Vol. 3: Power Couples
I’ll be back with my favourite Thirst Experts on Feb. 13—yes, this is the perfect Galentine’s Day hang—to talk celebrity power couples and why we love them. (Please note, we will absolutely be addressing Taylor and Travis, Bennifer and like, 37 other celeb couples.)
The details:
When: Tuesday, Feb. 13 at 6:30 p.m.
Where: Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, 506 Bloor St. W., Toronto
How Much: $15 (But Friday Things readers can get 50% off the ticket price with the code POWERC50!) Get your tickets at HotDocs.ca
And Did You Hear About…
This damning analysis of Israel’s Operation Iron Swords.
The unmasking of Enty from blind item blog Crazy Days and Nights.
Wired’s infuriating feature about how feminist indie outlet The Hairpin has been revived as an AI clickbait farm.
This excellent essay by broadcaster and writer Amanda Parris about making a documentary exploring the Black maternal health crisis while also experiencing it. (Her new series, For the Culture with Amanda Parris, is also very worth the watch.)
Vox’s Rebecca Jennings on the random, weirdly specific phrases that are exploding on TikTok—and the content creators who are coining them for clout.
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