Unknowingly Inviting a Beast to Dinner

All seats at the table were taken

AI-Generated Image: Three Black women and one White woman sitting in a meeting. They are all professionally dressed in business or business casual attire, smiling, and looking directly at the camera.

The first meeting is supposed to be the icebreaker . . .

Not the moment you realize your new supervisor (Operations Manager for this position is the actual term for my company) could be a living, breathing, card-carrying racist. The first meeting is for getting to know one another, chiming in when sentences need completion, and kee-keeing like you’ve reunited with your long-lost best friend from junior high. Our first meeting, however, was nothing like this.

We were introduced to our new Operations Manager the week before, on Friday, March 07, 2025, as a hand-off introductory call from our previous supervisor to this new one. Our other co-worker was still in training and not on this particular call. From jumpstreet, something felt off. The tension was thicker than extra crunchy peanut butter, and my co-worker and I noticed it at the same time. Questioning looks thrown from her to me and from me to her signaled, “Are we supposed to be here?”

The handoff did not seem to be going as planned because our new Operations Manager channeled “I don’t need any of this, I’ll be just fine with them” vibes, and “awkward” as a description for that moment is an understatement. We knew we were in for a rude awakening. But what occurred the next week, we couldn’t have imagined—not even if we tried.

They say ignorance is bliss, but is it?

On Thursday, March 13, 2025, our first official meeting with our new Operations Manager took place promptly at 1:00 PM. I should preface this by saying we had never met her in person before this date. She was simply a person we’d seen on screen just as we have with many others, who was about to be a part of our work-life with or without our consent. No harm, no foul. Right? Wrong.

There are now three of us. We are all Black women who have been working in the medical field for over 5 years. I have been in this field for 22 years. I am well aware of how to conduct myself in medical facilities and can most certainly tout the dress code and informative snippets in the handbook effortlessly. What I, along with my co-workers, did not need was someone who had never met us or witnessed how we conduct ourselves while at our testing sites, coming in and “reminding us” how to be “professional.”

And we definitely did not need it in the form and fashion our new Ops Manager shared it. As we were informed to not have “unprofessional hairstyles” with “crazy colors or dyes”, “fake nails” at a length deemed a safety hazard for work, “to not secure our cell phones in our bras,” and to be aware of cell phone usage and to not have them out “where patients can see them or be disturbed by them”, we all looked at each other from our respective squares on the screen like an eerily deranged person from The Twilight Zone stepped inside the building and sat down by each of us. Is she for real?!

A sense of connectedness to my co-workers is what got us through that meeting. Our shared race is what assisted us as we bonded a bit more after the meeting. For me, I couldn’t believe someone who had never laid eyes on me, shook my hand, or came to my testing site to see how orderly both my flow and business operations were — had so much to say in such a discriminatory tone. She automatically assumed the three women as her current subordinates needed reminding of what professionalism is.

We didn’t. And to this day, we still don’t.

spinning from hatred
reports filed for one’s own good
human resources
a department that brings calm
or can disrupt peacefulness

Settling into the madness of this world at work

That day opened our eyes to just how close to home our current political climate and all things white supremacy is. We sat with our feelings from that meeting for a few days. We let them fester. We talked to each other—held each other up. We became pillars for burdened shoulders that needed something on which to lean.

Each day that has passed is a reminder of justice unserved, murdered Black boys in the park or alleyways or on the stoop of their homes, Women of Color beaten until their last breath is uttered, and so many instances that flooded the news outlets several years ago and today.

We are standing our ground while being mindful of the Angry Black Woman narrative, and refusing to walk on eggshells. Rest assured, they know we are there. They have felt our presence in a deeper way since March 13th. We had no idea a beast was invited to dinner.

After allowing what we felt to stew for a few days, I, along with another co-worker, took our report of said events to Human Resources.

And here is where we find ourselves at a crossroads.

Because “safe spaces” aren’t always safe.