Note: This blog post was originally posted in 2018; I don’t write a lot of “miscellaneous thoughts” posts here anymore but I’m keeping this on the site because the questions it raises (about visibility, criticism, and how women of color sustain meaningful public work) are ones I’m still thinking about, and they still shape how I write today.
In 2017 wrote an op-ed that was published in The Baltimore Sun, on the travel ban, sharing my perspective. I got the usual mix of responses: polite emails of disagreement (some of which led to genuinely good conversations), and some less-than-polite messages on Twitter (including some obscenities, because, you know… internet).
A few things I’ve come to think about that experience:
Respectful disagreement isn’t the problem. When people emailed thoughtfully, I responded thoughtfully, and in some cases we ended up in real conversation. That’s what public writing is for.
Hostile messages are easier to absorb when you understand they’re not actually about you. The person yelling at a stranger online is rarely responding to the substance of what that stranger wrote but to a projection in their own head. Even the occasional *%#& you! or similar hate message isn’t always that offensive because it isn’t really about you, and so it’s easier not to internalize. Recognizing that doesn’t make the messages disappear obviously but it does change their impact.
I also think it’s true that women of color writing publicly are not navigating the same conditions as everyone else. Obviously, men with polarizing stances are attacked too, but women, and especially women of color, face a disproportionate volume of personal, identity-based hostility.
Which brings me to the question I keep returning to: how do public-facing women, particularly women of color, sustain meaningful work in the face of that reality?
The most useful answer I’ve found is this: sustained focus on the work itself, not the noise around it, is the most effective response to criticism.
Engagement with hostility is not usually productive, right? But continuing to focus on what you want to say, in spite of the noise directed towards you, is actually useful.
Public writing inevitably creates visibility, and visibility often invites projection, disagreement, and criticism. Over time, I’ve become more interested in the question of how people continue meaningful work despite that reality, particularly women and people of color navigating public-facing spaces online.
Update in 2026: It’s funny to go back and look at this post, because when I originally wrote it I remember really feeling frustrated about what it feels like to put your voice out there… and then fast forward to nearly a decade later; my novel The River’s Daughter is, in many ways, a novel about exactly this: a young woman living in a world that prefers for her to be silent, and choosing to reclaim her agency anyway. It’s funny how the same themes keep re-emerging in both our lives and our work.
P.S. – Here’s the original link to the op-ed (paywall) in The Baltimore Sun, and here’s an archive.is link. Here’s another post that made people mad (about Apu from The Simpsons).
