DEI.

Inner circle.

I walk into the room and they don’t know what to make of me. They know I am not from their circle. They know without even asking because no one who looks like me runs in their circles. The Director nonetheless approaches me, curiosity getting the best of him. I embark on a mission to put him at ease.

I say where I went to college. The prestige! I name drop a wardrobe supervisor I ran into up in Connecticut who said she was good colleagues with him. He is shocked. But by the time he’s introducing me to the next person who approaches, he begins with, “Anna and I have a mutual friend.” 

I learn that out of everyone sitting at the table, I am the only one the Director didn’t have a direct hand in picking himself. Because of that, I am the only one at the long table who is not white, who is not a man, and who is under thirty-five years of age. Nonetheless, he’s shocked when he learns I am thirty.

“You look like you’re barely eighteen!” he says.

Like a few times before, I wonder how many grants this place now qualifies for because they hired a black woman on a temporary contract. 

The scrutiny is immense. A glance at a spreadsheet that was very much a work in progress gets seen by one person, who laughs about it with another person, who calls another person, who vents about it to the Director, who notifies the Producer, who texts the person who sits next to me and says, “Uh, I’ve been told to tell you that your spreadsheet is wrong.” But by now, the spreadsheet is complete. I send it out. Nothing is wrong. So nobody responds. 

The Producer calls a meeting with me where he attempts to be as gentle and non-confrontational as possible. He brings his dog with him, not knowing and also not caring once he does quickly find out that I don’t like dogs. 

“You must be feeling a lot of scrutiny and I apologize for that,” he says a week in. “People just don’t know what to make of you. Of course you’re qualified! You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. But… you know how it is.” 

“It’s fine,” I say. 

They assign a white woman working remotely to keep showing me the ropes of the organization. She emits a constant nervous energy. After our phone calls end, I become aware that she immediately turns around and talks to the Producer about it. She’s confused by my tone and mistakes my calmness for lack of understanding. She passes along my ideas to make fun of them, but after a few days of festering in the subconscious of the Producer, he pitches the same idea at the long table as his own. Everyone who up until this point has gone out of their way to tell me that they have a tried and true system that will never change, celebrates the sudden stroke of innovation that has overcome their leader. 

After much preparation, it is time for me to speak to the artists. I know that if the meeting does not go well, it will give the higher ups an out to fire me. The Director has already brought in two of his friends to continue looking over my shoulders, nitpicking everything from my emails to my paperwork to the reverence with which I should be speaking to or about other people. 

“Anna will lead this meeting,” the Producer says, “but we’ll be here to interject as needed.” He gestures to my row of overseers. I face the cast, put on a smile, and start by introducing myself. 

“I heard the meeting went well last night,” the Director says. It’s the first time he has approached me since day one. “The cast was positively glowing about you all morning.”

“Okay,” I say. 

With the first big test cleared, I am soon after told that my overseers will now be accompanying me the entire first week of the show’s run. 

“Okay,” I say. 

Late in the evening, I scroll through the various feminist corners of the internet I frequent. Just like in the headlines of newspapers, they speak angrily about DEI, about all these unqualified people are coming in and downgrading the quality of everything under the sun.

But this scrutiny is nothing new. The creation of and backlash to DEI is just its most recent iteration. I know, just like my mother knew, just like her mother knew, that it is simply the way of things that it is unusual to see people like us in certain places. And no matter the reason we were put there, it will always be the assumption that we took something from someone more deserving. Someone with connections to the inner circle.

And what is the reward for eventually, somewhere down the line, being trusted by the inner circle? I can tell you that. It has happened to me many times before after surviving the scrutiny. 

“No, no, no!” they’ll reassure me over drinks. “You’re different from the other blacks.”