What Is Your Neutrality Protecting?

“I’m apolitical.”

Okay. And what, exactly, am I supposed to admire about that?

You don’t belong to a party? Neither your mind nor your conscience should come with a party’s ownership papers. You don’t trust politicians? Give me reasons. We can have that conversation. But if you mean you will avoid anything that might jeopardize a contract, a role, a position, a book deal, a journalism assignment, or the next opportunity, then say that. You are protecting something. Don’t dress it up as though you have risen above the rest of us.

Being apolitical is a political stance. The decisions keep coming whether you claim them or not. Somebody gets to make them. Somebody gets to live with them. Your announcement does not stop either from happening.

And when you make your living representing our communities, I have considerably less patience for the act.

You want to be a Latino leader when there is a stage, a photograph, a celebration of how far we have come. But when a decision threatens the people whose name you are there under, suddenly it is too political? Our identity is useful for the introduction, inconvenient for the responsibilities afterward. Get the fuck out of here.

We become caricatures, jesters, when we don’t get political. Now you’re just window dressing, the carcass of an identity, exploiting the stereotypes, whether good or bad, while doing nothing to upend belief systems and the systems themselves.

I understand wanting to protect yourself. I understand that access can be lost and that people with power can make you pay for challenging them. An actor can lose a role. A writer can lose a book deal. A journalist can lose an assignment or a position in a newsroom. In film, publishing, journalism, and the rest of the media industry, the opportunity you lose may be the one you spent years trying to earn. That is precisely why courage means something. What I don’t understand is expecting us to celebrate your influence while accepting that using it is out of the question.

If the champagne is flowing and the caviar is lovely, enjoy. But do not ask people struggling outside that room to confuse your comfort with their progress. How much more comfortable do you need to become before the people you represent can expect something from you?

I have written about leadership and responsibility. What troubles me here is the escape clause: accepting the position, the recognition, the authority, then declaring yourself unavailable when any of those things might need to be put to use.

Look at what was being discussed just before someone said, “I don’t get political.” A wage. A school. A person’s ability to get care. Who can stay in a neighborhood and who gets pushed out. Those are people’s lives, not an optional extracurricular you can decline because your calendar is full.

You can choose not to engage. You cannot require everybody else to pretend that choice has no consequences.

Independence from whom?

That’s why I say we need to have tunnel vision with policies and not parties or politicians. I want us to think for ourselves. That means being able to challenge somebody we voted for, reject a sponsor’s demand, or recognize a useful proposal without surrendering our judgment to whoever proposed it. Our people do not belong to a party, and neither do I. Let us treat them as our representatives, not as celebrities above criticism and reproach.

But if your independence disappears whenever the person making the decision can do something for you, what are you independent of? The people who need you?

The argument over neutrality did not begin with me. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the preference for order and waiting while injustice continued. That history belongs in the conversation. So does our habit of admiring people who disturbed the peace once their courage is safely behind us, then demanding restraint from anyone making us uncomfortable today.

Our own history gives us plenty to examine. The families behind Mendez v. Westminster challenged segregated schooling for Mexican American children; their case helped change California’s schools. Parents refused an arrangement their children were expected to endure. Now we can celebrate them. What would we have told them while they were fighting? Be patient? Think of your reputation? Don’t make this political?

It is easy to applaud a struggle when nobody is asking you to risk anything in it.

I am not asking for an endless feed of declarations. A well-placed phone call may accomplish more than another dramatic post. But the absence of a public performance does not entitle anybody to an imaginary record of private bravery, either. What did you do? What changed? Who can tell us whether it helped?

If you control hiring, examine whom your process keeps rejecting. If you approve a budget, account for what it funds and what it leaves out. If you sit on a board, ask the uncomfortable question there, where an answer can matter. Bring the people affected into the decision before you announce what you have graciously decided for them.

And if there is something you cannot do, be specific. We can work with an actual constraint. An all-purpose excuse is another matter.

Here is the danger I want us to recognize: we can spend so long trying to get inside that, once there, keeping our place becomes the entire ambition. The people who helped give that place meaning become a nuisance for expecting us to deliver. We start hearing their needs as an attack on everything we have earned.

That is a hell of a transformation to call success.

So yes, take a position. Investigate it. Be willing to correct it. Ask for an answer and follow up when the first one is evasive. Use the authority you already have, and stop treating the people asking questions as the problem. We should not have to beg our own representatives to remember whom they represent.

You say you are apolitical. I am asking what your neutrality is protecting.

Because if the answer is your position at the expense of our people, that is an answer, too.

What is the point of having a position of power, of influence, if you’re just going to wield it against our bodies and not the columns of the systems that use us as their foundation?