Whose Link Is It, Anyway?

I’ve noticed quite a few posts on LinkedIn lately about content deemed totally inappropriate for this platform. More and more members are lamenting the inclusion of topics related to politics or posts written by people who aren’t considered experts, or anything that isn’t strictly about business, the journey to a new career or how to keep the one you have. After all, this space was created to focus on all things professional, e.g. mentoring, networking, career re-invention and the like.

So, what if you’re re-inventing yourself to be a know-nothing lib-tard monkey in front of a keyboard who wants to start a race war?

Or let me re-phrase that. After 30 years of being a journalist and journalism mentor who was expected to have no opinion about the issues she covered and to not be actively vocal about them, what if you’ve decided to create a new career for yourself by thinking deeply about issues that matter to you and then sharing what you’ve concluded with the world?

In other words, I’ve decided to transform myself into an occasional commentator and analyst. Clearly, my relatively paltry LinkedIn output to date indicates that I won’t exactly be inundating the platform with posts. But participating on this site is literally the culmination of the dream that began forming in my brain 47 years ago, when I sat in the back of the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Cairo, Illinois. I was about 8 years old when I decided that instead of rejecting “The World,” I was going to travel the world. I refused to move through life like a misty apparition whose sole purpose was knocking on doors and offering people the opportunity to be in the world but not of the world, all in the name of saving souls and earning a seat at the table in the Afterlife.

So instead of listening to the elders droning on about “The Truth,” I spent those hours at the Kingdom Hall creating my own truth. I wrote fanciful biblical epics, and drafted my own opinions about the life I wanted to live one day. The more I wrote, the more I started to convince myself that I had a voice. A few years down the line, I began to believe it was good enough for other people to hear, too.

I’ll admit that when LinkedIn began offering the self-publishing function, I totally disregarded the “professional networking” aspect and began to use it as more of a portal for whatever sentiment I was feeling at the moment. The act of pushing the button and possibly having it seen by thousands of people was slightly exhilarating. But that wasn’t why I did it. I was just re-building the writing muscle. It was only after I wrote about the death of Ben Bradlee and the impact he’d had on my life that I began to realize the enormous potential to create empathy and support or to polarize and invoke wrath.

But when I commented on Megyn Kelly’s “colorblind” compliment to Oprah Winfrey, a different reality sank in. You have to understand that I wrote both of those columns while still living in Nairobi, so it took awhile to reconnect with the enormous reservoir of racial sensitivity, animus and downright vitriol that exists in American society. It was instructive, but just got filed away in the back of my mind.

Now that I’m back in America, in search of employment, meaning and a “brand,” it’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that the thing I began mastering at age 8 may be the way forward for me. But how to withstand the withering critiques that the kind of topics I care about are not appropriate for LinkedIn, and that I should head on over to Facebook for my shallow, uninformed, “racist” rants?

Well, here’s the thing. I don’t really qualify for Facebook because I don’t have kids, there’s nobody from my high school years I want to spark a late-life romance with, and I have no desire to publicly expose the restaurant server who wrote “black chick with weird hair” on my receipt.  I could re-launch the personal blog I began before I left for East Africa, “Notes from a Native Daughter,” and there’s a good chance I will.

But why shouldn’t I take advantage of the LinkedIn publishing function to share my observations as a writer with cogent opinions about race, gender, Africa, global development--and every now and then politics? That’s my brand. It doesn’t pay much at the moment--okay, it doesn’t pay anything. But that’s who I am. It’s who I’ve always been. It’s my profession. It’s clear that a lot of people don’t like what I have to say and how I’m saying it….the response to my analysis of the Hamilton/Mike Pence controversy unleashed a torrent of bile that almost jarred me by its intensity at first. But then I remembered the incredibly useful aspect of allowing people to empty their spleen about something you’ve written, and to call you malicious names and to completely misinterpret and misrepresent who you are. It means you have to power to evoke deep emotions, from people who don’t even know you. There’s currency in that.

Besides, an equal number of people commented that they liked what I wrote and agreed with my observations. That’s even more awesome, of course. Lastly, for all the LinkedIn members outside the US who may still be scratching their heads about what happened here on November 8th, if I can continue yanking the blanket off the poison that’s stunting our journey by eliciting certain responses to something I’ve written, I believe that’s a fairly noble endeavor.

So keep debating what’s appropriate for LinkedIn and what isn’t. It’s a healthy dialogue that can only improve the content. And keep praising or attacking whatever errant thought I may choose to post here. But don’t obsess about people like me burping up the occasional rant. You’ll always have the ability to either skip it, condemn it or like it. It’s what free speech in America is all about.

Isn’t it?