Incongruous in a World That’s Not:
A Guide For Letting Ideology Spoil Good Advice
Last night, I read a book by Jennifer Romolini called Weird in a World That’s Not: A Career Guide for Misfits, F*ckups, and Failures. I picked it up in the back of a Barnes & Noble under the “Job Hunting” section. Safe to say that my search was for career advice. I read the jacket, Romolini’s bio, and the first two pages. I surmised that she was close to my field of interest and that she had a good sense of humor about the situation of weirdos in the workplace.
As I read, I was not disappointed. I related to Romolini’s life. I found that for all of our many differences, I understood her and I felt like she had been where I have been and still am in life. Finally, I thought, someone who just gets it. Well, except when she doesn’t.
Before I lay into the problems I had with her work, I want to share what I think is her best passage in the book:
She writes, “Even if there were no overt expectations for my life…there was an unspoken assumption that…I’d stick close to home and to what I knew…And here is where destiny and more important, our innermost dreams get tricky for us misfits: we often fight against them. We don’t want to be weird…Which means that for many of us, discovering our dreams…feels less like an obvious meant-to-be golden road laid out before us and more like an excavation of fear” (34–35).
This paragraph is perhaps Romolini’s single most important stroke of genius that applies to everyone because of how common this problem is. Familial or community expectations of the individual can be debilitating for the misfits and the dreamers who are just a little too unsure to be the go-getters they should be, no matter their circumstances. It’s a refrain from other experts shelling out advice books for money, but unlike the bulk of them, Romolini is coming from an honest place, a place of experience and for me, a familiar place of hurt. In fact, the best part of this book is its authenticity, its sincerity. So, where did she go wrong?
It’s not all that surprising that a successful editor living in Los Angeles who started her career in New York is a liberal. And honestly, it wouldn’t matter to me at all if it didn’t degrade the quality of her work. Romolini is someone I would happily chat politics with at a bar. I doubt I ever will, but if I did, I would ask her to explain the following passage:
“Most profoundly, my getting interviews was a testament to my privilege as a white person…I was a white girl with a white-sounding name entering into a profession of mostly white people. I didn’t have a pedigree, I didn’t have connections, I had not attended a school starting with an H or a Y. I was awkward, rough around the edges, unrefined; but still — and this cannot be underestimated — I was straight, white, cis, able-bodied, and on those terms alone, I passed. Things were not easy for me, but my bootstrap story would have been infinitely harder without this privilege, in ways I can’t pretend to understand” (Romolini, 51).
(More unnecessary and totally contrived political correctness. Hooray!)
I bring this up, not out of lack of sensitivity for social issues, but because of my sensitivity towards them. I identify as LGBT and with the values of liberalism for one thing, but for another, we are living in a time of heightened social tensions. In my opinion, things have gotten worse in the past couple years despite the incredible — occasionally generational — shifts that have occurred in the past 6 decades. And they have only now degraded because of the identity politics rhetoric on the left (which sparked a reactionary movement on the right) and all the false perceptions that come with that on both sides. It’s not because people have suddenly changed their minds and gotten more racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, etc.
And honestly, in this context, Romolini’s appeal to her privilege as the additional God-send that pulled her up out of her loser life is not only completely incongruous to the rest of this “bootstrap” story, but comes off as totally disingenuous. It’s the kind of virtue signaling on the left that centrists and conservatives have been complaining about for a few years now. Maybe she has evidence that hasn’t been debunked or explained on this topic, but I doubt it, so there must be another reason for her to do this.
Maybe she doesn’t want to be accused of being racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc. by her own political coalition, which isn’t hard to believe considering that the Left frequently feasts on itself (just consider Evergreen State College).
Maybe she’s a true believer, which would then demonstrate the hypocrisy of so many professionals in the Democratic Party. They get married before having kids, are often hard working, industrious and individualist — sans evangelical Christianity, they live the way centrists and conservatives think people ought to and of course, they do quite well. Yet, they cry about their white guilt and rich guilt to the death of the party and to the help of no one but themselves.
Maybe she just doesn’t want to come off as a pretentious know-it-all because she’s white, which ironically, she does anyway because she’s liberal.
But isn’t it a ridiculous standard to have to account for the fact that you were born a certain way and therefore, maybe your path and what you learned from your experience won’t apply to everyone? Isn’t that already obvious? Or do we really need to cover even the most basic pieces of text with a disclaimer that says “written by a white person, results may vary,”? I think if you really need that kind of disclaimer, you’re probably a dishonest person looking to see the evil in people around you. But I also think that we lose something important — authenticity, honesty, emotional connection — by forcing writers to inject identity politics ideology and political correctness into everything we read, including advice books in the back of the B&N.