▸ Column · Modern day; a workplace advice column that has fallen into the hands of a WWII ideologue preserved out of his time
RED SKULL replies.
Replied to by Red Skull, with a rebuttal from Black Panther.
The letter
A colleague reported to our manager that I "dominate" team meetings. Now I replay every meeting of the past six months trying to decide whether she is right. I work in data analytics; when someone misreads a chart I get excited and jump in — not to silence anyone, I tell myself, only out of enthusiasm. So I have begun logging, in my phone, how many speaking turns each person takes. My share never exceeds thirty percent, which strikes me as statistically unremarkable. But my husband says I am "measuring my way out of self-reflection," and I cannot decide whether that is the wisest thing he has ever said or proof he has been quietly irritated with me for years. I can no longer tell whether I am healthily refusing unfair criticism — or whether I have constructed an elaborate spreadsheet to avoid conceding that I am, simply, a lot.
Red Skull replies
Observe the instrument you have built, and what it confesses. A woman is told she takes more than her share, and her response is to construct a ledger — to prove by arithmetic that her dominance falls within tolerance. Thirty percent. You imagine this is rigor. It is the opposite. It is a man who, accused of trespass, produces a tape measure to demonstrate he stood only most of the way onto another's land.
The tally is not analysis, Dummkopf. It is an alibi. You did not build it to learn the answer; you built it because you already suspect the answer and prefer the comfort of a column of numbers to the discomfort of a verdict.
And there is your husband — who, in one sentence, told you precisely what you are, and you reward him by wondering whether to call it "insight." You do not want the truth. You want permission to keep your habit and have it ratified as enthusiasm.
So I will not ratify it. You are a person of some force in a room, surrounded by quieter people, and you have spent six months asking whether you are allowed to be. That is your weakness — not the dominance, but the begging. Decide what you are. Then stop counting.
— Red Skull
Black Panther weighs in
Schmidt is half-right and, as ever, blind in the better half. Yes — set down the spreadsheet; it is armor, not evidence. But he tells you only what you are, never what you owe. Your colleague's complaint may have been clumsy, even unkind; an enemy's mouth can still speak a true thing, and the discipline is to mine it for the grain that is just. Yet the voice I would heed is not hers. It is your husband's — the quiet one, who has watched longest and gains nothing by lying. When someone who loves you names a thing in a single sentence, the honorable answer is not to wonder if he is annoyed. It is to ask him, plainly, and then to listen as though he were a king.
— Black Panther
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