I Got My Dream Job and Ended Up Enabling Racism

In an idyllic western town six hours south of the Canadian border, I met President Theodore Roosevelt at the post office. Well, not the actual man, of course—this guy, dressed in an all-white 1900s hiking suit, was one of the many historical interpreters that wandered around town. Guys like him were the reason I’d come here: to manage a tiny theater next to a national park.

In that moment, while setting up a P.O. Box to mail letters to my boyfriend, I envisioned the utopia I’d hoped for, clicking through my mind like projector slides. I’d work a summer in the West among cheerful peers. We’d eat buckets of carbs and take hiking trips together on our days off. I’d see more stars than I’d ever seen before, I’d encounter wild buffalo, I’d go drink for drink with dead presidents. And, at the end of my utopian vision for summer, I’d have been good at my job. Everyone would like me. They’d extend my contract for the fall musical. They’d extend my contract for the Christmas show. They’d extend my contract indefinitely, and I’d become the face of the local theater, and my boyfriend would move out and buy us a cabin and we’d live like cowboys forever.  

Some of the utopia turned out to be true. I spent my nights stargazing. I spent my mornings hiking. I made a couple of friends, and we’d get sloshed at the saloon that dated back to the 1860s. I loved my job for a couple of months. It was my dream job. I sold tickets and greeted guests and wrangled shows into existence. It was the kind of work I’d imagined myself doing since I made my dolls act out plays as a kid. 

And since some of the fantasy was true, it was very easy for me to ignore the rest. It was easy to ignore the all-white exhibits at the company-owned museums. Easy to ignore the way international workers never got promoted to managers. Easy to ignore my rejected request for a pride event, easy to ignore the careless way my peers talked about cities and guns and transit and families. 

Everyone was so nice. We all smiled and said hello to each other when we passed by on the sidewalks. We all behaved as though we were working together towards something greater than the individual. That the stories we were telling about history were true and good.

This visibly pro-white organization seemed to send one message: Our mission was to secure the future of the white race.

The stories we were telling about history were, generally speaking, untrue and foul. The true story of the Wild West is entangled with the stories of Black and Indigenous cowboys innovating the ranching industry and creating a new American culture. The story of my company was that male white ranchers and male white billionaires and male white presidents were the only important people to ever exist. 

It took a while for me to explore my company’s range of museums and performances. We ran multiple shows per day at various venues all over town. There were a handful of historically preserved houses among the museums. If I were a different person I would have immediately recognized the red flags of the first museum I stepped into. I would have looked closer at the exhibits glorifying white expansion into the western United States. I would have thought a bit harder about the musical portrayal of Theodore Roosevelt saving the day at the Battle of San Juan Hill. Instead, I decided to try not to worry about it. 

I have a theater degree. I took four years of script analysis classes. I could not prevent myself from eventually seeing the subtext of the stories I was complicit in producing. And, when I thought about it, I realized there’s something very fishy about insisting that Roosevelt secured America’s freedom during the Spanish American War. I don’t believe that annexing Cuba has anything to do with American freedom. I would suppose that, actually, most historians do not think that the Spanish American War was a major win for the civil liberties of Americans. 

When I looked even deeper into the text of each story, I concluded that the true mission of my company was not to preserve American history. We were surrounded on all sides by Indigenous reservations, but the only thing we could talk about was white heroes from the past. We scattered each story with white-people love songs, white-people gospel music, and of course, plenty of white country tunes. I hate to say it, but white people singing songs about getting married and having lots of babies in the context of a visibly pro-white organization seemed to send one message: Our mission was to secure the future of the white race. 

I thought it was just in my head. And when gossip corroborated my findings, I didn’t take it seriously. It took revisiting each museum, re-watching each musical, and hundreds of conversations about the company’s past. Long-time technicians told me about the countless people who spoke up about microaggressions and never got their contracts renewed. Actors told me they used to write grants until they noticed the company rejected anything that might increase diversity. I wrote a land acknowledgment for my venue and was encouraged by several higher-ranking coworkers not to announce it. 

And then one day, I was sitting behind my desk listening to a local complain about crime in Chicago, a city he’d never been to. I felt like a bad person for choosing to work there. It didn’t matter that the work was fun. I’m sure it’s also fun for the engineers who build nuclear bombs. Working here felt like reorganizing the stockroom at a racism factory. It suddenly felt so goofy and awful. I was not a cartoon villain, I was just the evil front desk receptionist. 

But we were all living in our fantasy worlds. When I’d ask my co-workers, “This place is kind of racist, isn’t it?” I’d be met with a whole lot of sputtering and denial. Even well-meaning liberals like me were too blinded by our career aspirations to notice that we were working for a propaganda organization with oil barons on the board. 

After two months I canceled my contract and sped out of town. I don’t know how to undo my crime of administering racism. I see it now in my city, too. When I go to the opera, I am looking at the happy white faces of every worker, imagining that I am them, imagining that I am unaware forever.