Black Girl, “White” Voice (Part 1)

Author’s note: This post is inspired by the epic nature of the movies Sorry to Bother You, and BlacKKKlansman, which give some incredible takes on the art–and advantages–of code switching.

My sophomore year of college, I got an on-campus job working as a student caller at Michigan Telefund. I was essentially a telemarketer for my university, calling up alums; parents of students; and recent grads, to request donations. The working conditions were less than ideal, to say the least, in part because Telefund was operated by an outside entity (it has since been taken over by the university).

To this day, I marvel at the fact that I never got stuck in the elevator we had to take to the top floor to get to work; the slow, scraping trip was always anxiety-inducing, as was the 6-8 second pause before the doors would open.

There is no way the inspection papers in that thing weren’t forged.

The “office” was more like a repurposed computer lab. Rows of tables filled the room, each with only 3 or 4 seats for student callers; bulky, late-90s computers tend to limit available space. From 9am-9pm, in a building we shared with a pizza joint, a delicatessen, and a popular bar/nightclub, headset-clad student callers would engage in socially acceptable forms of begging.

I hated it.

But I was making $9.25/hour–which I thought made me rich, ok–so I didn’t really care. Furthermore, my first campus job was washing dishes in my all-female dorm for minimum wage (a bit under $6 then), with a bunch of coworkers who apparently did zero housework before coming to college. I’m an uppity girl, but they were next-level obnoxious. It was only a matter of time before I broke a plate over somebody’s head instead of putting it in the drying rack, so I was happy to be able to quit.

Unfortunately, I had not yet learned the life lesson that you will likely hate–even if only a little bit–at least one thing about any job you have. Ever. Consequently, my exuberance over abandoning dish duty, was short-lived. Things might have been easier if I was a student manager rather than a caller. Usually upperclassmen or graduate students, the managers had the honor of swooping in–beckoned by incessant snapping, which was required–to finalize a successfully solicited donation. They also were tasked with screening our calls to make sure we didn’t skip . . . The Ladder.

The Ladder is part of why many alums of Telefund refer to it as Telehell. Like many fundraising and telemarketing folks, we’d start with some ridiculously high ask–usually a donation of $500–and gradually work our way down to the groveling request of “Ok, can you give us anything, though? Even a penny makes a difference.” Let’s say The Ladder was meant to go 500, 250, 100, 50, 25, any amount. No matter what was said to you out the gate, you were required to go through each ask until you either got a donation; got 6 “No” responses; or most likely–got hung up on. Getting caught skipping The Ladder resulted in a write-up, or being cut from the rest of your shift. Getting caught doing it too many times was grounds for termination.

We would hear it all: People had recently gone bankrupt; been diagnosed with terminal illnesses; finalized divorces; lost jobs; the list goes on and on. And each time, we were required to stick to the script, offering shallow condolences or expressions of empathy before requesting the amount the next rung down The Ladder. Eventually, I acquired a toolbox of standard responses to the most frequently expressed reasons for not donating, and even found some success in convincing folks to give, despite initially declining. There was nothing in my toolbox, though, for Angry Old White Lady. I’ll refer to her henceforth as Ms. Owl, for obvious acronym-based reasons.

Before you go calling me a race-baiter (which, ffs, could we please retire that?), the ~*race card*~ is critical here, for two reasons:

1. Most of Telefund’s student callers were POC, and most of those POC were Black. It continues to be a trend at UM that that is the case with campus jobs, in part due to embarrassingly large disparities in SES background. Most of the white folks working there were doing it because they wanted to; most of the POC were working because they had to.   
2. At the time, we were heading into an election season, and there was a measure on the ballot which would make affirmative action illegal (spoiler alert: it passed). Our University President at the time, Mary Sue Coleman, was very vocally in opposition to the measure, and even went so far as to state that she essentially would work to find loopholes to use, if it passed.

As fate would have it, Ms. Owl was on a list of folks that I was tasked with calling during my shift. They were UM graduates from the early 1950s.

I’m sure you know where this is going.

To be continued…