After my presentation on covering and inclusion at the Imaginator Summit in fall of 2022, a political leader shared that they “couldn’t uncover who they were and be in politics.” That statement and the conversations that followed inspired me to reach out to Senator Cynthia Mendes of Rhode Island District 18 to learn about her political journey and the role covering has played in her life.
Covering – downplaying, hiding, or filtering parts of ourselves at work, with different social groups, at school, and with family. Through my work and research done by organizations including Deloitte and UCLA Williams Institute, women of color, straight white men, LGBTQ+ folx and people with disabilities, among others, have all named ways in which they've covered parts of themselves and their identities at work.
“As I have navigated the world, I’ve seen covering as a necessary part of survival,” said Senator Mendes during our conversation over Zoom. She described how covering offered protection at times, “like a soft blanket,” and how at other times, felt suffocating. “It's interesting when I let myself feel all the feelings, recalling covering moments and what it’s looked like within all the places of my life – it’s both,” she said. “Sometimes it was that soft fuzzy blanket I needed at the moment, and sometimes it was the most suffocating feeling in the world.”
Mendes is many things beyond her role as Senator – a mother, a bi-sexual woman, an artist, a community advocate, and the child of Puerto Rican and Cape Verdean parents. She grew up within an organized religion that instilled messages about covering who she was. “I got a lot of messages about what it meant to be a woman that I struggled with. I started challenging and questioning it at a young age,” Senator Mendes explained.
“Growing up in organized religion prepared me for the messages I face being in politics - about my voice, body, and identity.”
In talking to Senator Mendes, her passion for the community she serves is immediately evident. “I had such a sense of community growing up,” she explained. “The nugget I held onto from my upbringing was fighting for those everyone else has forgotten about. I was a single mom and worked two jobs – one in the dental field and a side job cleaning million-dollar mansions in Newport to put myself through school. When I wasn't doing that, I worked in the community - serving folks who were unhoused, working with domestic abuse survivors, youth and people of color, and doing some activism.”
Right before her career in politics began, Mendes was experimenting with sharing her writing at poetry slams. It was an “act of vulnerability,” she said. “Just as I was equipping myself to do that [get to a gritty, raw place], politics landed in my lap.” It was over a 48-hour span that her journey into politics began, starting with coffee with a former Secretary of State. During the visit with her father in his nursing home following that meeting, she asked for a sign of whether or not to jump into the political arena. “I was reading him a book about Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership,” she said. “I thought, ‘I dare you to make it ridiculously clear about what I need to do.” Then, she read the line, “If they believe I can, then I will serve.” It was her sign to forge ahead.
“I won my election with a slate of working class multi-racial queer people getting into office, and that didn’t really fit these strict norms that have been in place for hundreds of years.”
She described how the senate is governed by old archaic written and unwritten rules - norms one must navigate. And one of the first rules they voted on? Dress code. The clothing she stepped into the room wearing “was intentionally subversive. I had on an old man jacket and old man suitcase, a wooden pipe, and heels,” she explained. “I amped up my ability to express myself… it was my way to take up space in this really old and confined space… my makeup and earrings were my war paint.” Beyond the rigid dress code that targets feminine-presenting people even more masculine-presenting ones, “it’s traditionally not safe for women of color to run for office or to be in office,” Mendes explained. “A week into my first office, I had a stalker. A friend that ran for senate was physically assaulted by her GOP opponent.”
As we talked, Senator Mendes detailed how her journey to understand her sexuality intersected with her campaigns. “During my first campaign, when I ran, I was still figuring out who I was (a bi-sexual woman), and I had a really hard time claiming that,” she said. “Running for Lt Governor, I felt like I had to hide and downplay that side of my sexuality. I felt that if I brought it up at this point, people may have thought, ‘she was playing a political game,’ because she wants it to help her campaign. I had to hide a large portion of myself. It became tremendously suffocating. I worry for folks who want to be authentic and vulnerable and how they do that in public office.” That sentiment echoed throughout the conversations after my presentation as well.
“One of the ways I find it suffocating is that there is your public life and your private life,” she said as we talked about the impact covering and politics can have on relationships. “You need to have a separation, and that's where it felt very suffocating. I didn’t know where I could just BE.”
Even as an extrovert, Senator Mendes found herself isolated from others, “which was not healthy at all,” she said. “It left my friends feeling like I was gone. I felt like I was gone. That isolation manifested in this feeling - am I losing touch with who I am? We all covered in our own ways that caused disconnection between us…. Over the past few years, people have expressed isolation, burnout, depression, and anxiety,” she explained. “I heard a phrase this week that really captured what the through line was – we’re asking people to bring themselves into compromised spaces that were not built for us and were not designed for how we present and conduct ourselves in the world.”
Isolation is just one way covering has impacted Senator Mendes. “I've realized there is really no institution that exists right now where I would not have to enter with some level of covering,” she said. “Because they all started without us, without me. I'm a cog in the wheel that they didn't plan for. I understand in talking to friends in academia, medicine, and economics; these are feelings that many of us feel.”
As she reflected on the presence of covering and how she’ll continue to lead as a Senator and uncover parts of who she is, Mendes said, “I’m acknowledging and moving from a place of resentment to a place of acceptance and then to a place of - so, What do I want to do about it?” For her, that has meant “giving people that are entering politics for the first time a listening ear and permission when they feel they need it about who they need to be in that space. I need to do that by example, to live that unapologetic authenticity,” she said. “I’ve found that really rewarding and helpful. Now, I’m on the lookout for people with shared experiences. I have to trust them to take this information [that could be used against me] to liberate themselves in this space. It’s empowered me in some ways.”
I asked, as we wrapped up our conversation, what I often ask when speaking to people about the intersection of covering and their professional lives, “Whose imagination are you working in?” For Senator Mendes, imagination has been top of mind. “One of the other side effects [of covering] is that it stifles imagination,” she said. “Once I'd gone through those stages and got to this liberated space it allowed me to imagine what didn’t exist…. Not only do I have to imagine it, I have to live like it exists, and share community with other people doing that. When you start doing that other people emerge - you emerged - that are authentically doing that and looking for ways to help other people do that. I'm excited to live into that - sharing vulnerably some of my experiences over the past four years.”
As she forges ahead in her role as Senator, Mendes wants to spark people’s imagination by asking, What does living in a care society look like? “Even in political organizing spaces, which are all about moving people to action – we can’t move them to believe without imagination,” she explained.
“Don't tell me how you're going to move them to action until you tell me how you've connected to their imagination.”
You can follow Senator Mendes’ journey on IG, Linkedin, Twitter, & Tiktok.
Click here to delve into past issues of the Uncovering Your Value newsletter.
