UNDIPLOMATIC

Workaday politics meets interpersonal dynamics in this report from the White House trenches.

In 2009, with a “résumé full of unexpected detours,” and somewhat older than her peers, Dyer won an internship with the Obama administration. She excelled, so much so that she was invited to return as a full-time employee, eventually becoming social secretary. Six years in, she writes, she had moved from newbie to insider with a good amount of influence, with access to some very powerful people. In her account of her impressive ascent, there’s a bit too much mundane background (“As I was applying for apartments…I found out that I had bad credit from defaulting on student loans and multiple unpaid credit cards”) and some clunky bits (“I felt my cheeks smile at the thought that I’d just talked to the White House”). However, where Dyer’s account gains traction is when she speaks to the larger issue of women—and particularly Black women—being undervalued, dismissed, and mansplained at every turn. Coupled with the author’s suffering from imposter syndrome, which “will always show up on time for your accomplishments,” this prompts a trenchant denunciation of a system that is a bastion of white privilege in which Dyer was forced to process endless microaggressions and prejudices. “Rarely were my conversations about the matter at hand,” she writes; “instead they involved someone’s feelings about me.” She stuck it out, only to find that once she left the White House and was back on the job market, it was all back to square one: the assumptions of others and that impostor syndrome working at full speed, which leads her to a welcome closing bit of advice and demand for personal justice: “We have to show others how to treat us.”

A revealing look inside the executive branch and its entrenched culture.