I never wanted to be a writer. I was an information designer. Becoming a columnist, like so many things in my career, was a bit of a fluke.
As I end this column, I’d like to share the strange way that it began.
After many years in The Times’s newsroom as a graphics editor and later the graphics director, then a short stint at National Geographic, I came back to The Times: I had met the executive editor for lunch. He convinced me to return to the paper. I told him that I would like to produce charts for Opinion.
When I met with Andy Rosenthal, then the editorial page editor and head of Opinion, he suggested that I write 400-word introductions for the charts, even though I wasn’t a writer. He demurred on the title I proposed, Op-Chartist, as too complicated, and told me I would just be called a columnist.
My heart began to race. When I stepped out of the building, I braced my back against it to keep from collapsing. I was hyperventilating.
Not only had I been given a title far greater than my aspirations, in that moment I had also gone from being a private citizen, which I liked and thought I would remain for the rest of my life, to being a public figure.
That was complicated for me. I was a bisexual man who had always assumed that the only disclosures I needed to make were to the people with whom I was involved. That idea was obliterated.
I knew from a life in news that if you told your own story, it would, to some degree, continue to belong to you, but that if others uncovered your story, it became theirs, and that they had no obligation to be gracious to you in its telling.
By accepting this job, I was committing to coming out.
From the beginning, many readers didn’t seem to view what I was doing the way we had conceived it: as a chart-centered feature with brief written intros. Instead, they often asked: Why is this column so short — too short to develop its arguments — and why is so much of its space being taken up by charts?
So, early on, it became clear that the focus would be on what I wrote rather than the data I presented. I had to force myself to become a better, more thoughtful writer. Rosenthal would occasionally nudge me to write more and chart less. People want to know what you think, he’d say.
I liked to tell people that mine was one of the highest level on-the-job-training assignments in journalism.
When I was fresh out of college, my boss at The Detroit News once said of people and transcendent talent that some people can just hear the music, and others can’t. I knew that I could hear the music as a data analyst and information designer. But I didn’t hear the music as a writer, not yet, and feared that I never would.
That was until 2009, when I wrote about two 11-year-old boys, one in Massachusetts, the other in Georgia, who had hanged themselves just 10 days apart after both had endured homophobic bullying.
I knew what it was like to be a little boy suffering through that kind of bullying. I knew how it felt to consider suicide as a way out, with a small hand clutching a bottle of pills. I knew the darkness and the loneliness.
I had thought about those feelings for so many years that the words I used to describe them had been compacted into poetry.
In writing about those boys I found my voice. It was rooted in writing about the things I knew most intimately. I had to stop writing to sound as if I belonged on the page — a form of mimicry that for me was artificial — and start writing from soul memories and life experience, from the point of view of the vulnerable, the poor, the lost, the other.
It was my Neo in “The Matrix” moment. I could now see the rhythm of the words. They appeared to me as waveforms.
From then on, I would lean into my genuine voice, the one that echoed the voices I heard from the elderly Black folks of my youth. Their vocabularies weren’t expansive, but their command of the language, the way they could play with its rhythms, their eye for detail and their flair for drama were extraordinary.
Then, after Bob Herbert’s departure, I became Opinion’s sole Black columnist, and columnist of color, for most of the Obama era, the rise of the movement for Black lives and the first election of Donald Trump, which I considered a racial event.
That shifted the mission of the column for me. I was now writing for the record. I committed myself to bearing witness to and recording this remarkable moment in the nation’s history, particularly as a Black writer.
Growing into myself as a writer — and doing it in front of and for all of you — has been one of the great honors of my life. I heard the music, and I hope that you could occasionally hear it through me. Farewell.
