Rashida Jones And The Passing Of The Patriarch

Today, it’s December 14, 2020, and the Electoral College will be meeting to make official the results of the presidential election. It feels appropriate, then, as this year, this administration, and—a bit further out—this pandemic draw to a close, that we focus on the future, something I am excited to once again have the opportunity for, particularly after four years where it was impossible to think even a week or two ahead. A calm falls upon us. The lights flicker back on. Bleary-eyed, we emerge from the darkness and face the world with hope once more.

I’m doubly excited to have the opportunity and the pleasure, yet again, to pen an honorific for an exceptional woman ascending to new heights. Just a few weeks ago, it was general manager Kim Ng of the Miami Marlins. Before that, it was our ceiling-smashing Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. And today, it’s Rashida Jones. No, not that Rashida Jones, a titan in her own right. This Rashida Jones, currently a senior vice president at MSNBC, is a longtime news producer and executive who was last week named the next president of MSNBC. She’s startlingly young, too; not even 40 years old. Jones is the first millennial as well as the first Black woman to head a major news organization, a changing of the guard of great significance both symbolic and practical. Her predecessor, Phil Griffin, took the reins 12 years ago at 51. There is, perhaps, nothing more indicative of our progress—and future—than a sexagenarian white man being succeeded by a Black woman twenty-five years his junior; it may only be a rumble in the shifting ground beneath us, but it’s a big one.

The last four years have been momentous in a way few years in our history have been. The social shifts are perhaps best matched by the chaos and violence surrounding the end of segregation, when institutional barriers to Black advancement began—slowly and with great effort—to erode. From the Women’s March to #MeToo to Black Lives Matter to the trans rights movement to the resurgent voting rights movement, there has been a steady push toward social and political equality for marginalized and exploited groups, one which has been just as vociferously opposed. More people than ever are voting to increase minimum wage, strengthen paid family leave, legalize marijuana (including allowing people with past marijuana convictions to petition for expungements), and decriminalize drugs. Barriers are being broken with states electing history-making candidates—Sarah McBride of Delaware became the first transgender state senator and Ritchie Torres and Mondaire Jones became the first openly gay Black members of Congress. Mississippi recently changed its state flag, and Washington, and now Cleveland, have both seen major sports teams drop wildly offensive names. Suddenly, many more of us are very aware of the need for change. 

Jones’s ascent, which comes at the same time as the election of a Black woman to the second highest office in the land, is both a part of this historical moment and certain to be a continued driver of it. I’ve spent so much time talking this year about how the pandemic has cost young people and women (and especially Black women) years if not decades of progress in the workplace, but then something like this happens, and I take heart. What will it mean for a major news organization to be run by someone who represents where the future is headed instead of where we were decades ago? What will it mean to see someone in charge for whom the momentous gains of the 60s and 70s are part of her baseline experience? Rashida Jones grew up in a world beginning to flourish—relatively speaking—with examples of women making gains, with role models rising to positions of power. Her childhood saw the advent of the prototypical Powerful Woman Executive, an icy, slick-backed wrecking ball in shoulder pads always having to prove that she can be “one of the boys.”

So, too, has she seen the rise of a different image of a powerful woman, perhaps best exemplified by Oprah Winfrey: a power built on leadership that doesn't forgo empathy, empowerment, vulnerability, and compassion (nor pastels, bold colors, and sequins). She was around sixteen when The View premiered. Geraldine Ferraro ran for the vice presidency when she was three. Hillary Clinton became the most powerful first lady in the nation’s history when she was still in middle school. She watched as women across the United States donned our classy pantsuits and exercised real power on an institutional level in government and the private sector, if only marginally so, for the first time. 

And now she’s running MSNBC.

We’ve been talking for years, now, about what will happen when millennials start to take power, which has largely, in a public imagination that still imagines them to be teenagers, seemed endlessly far off. But they’re here. They’re pushing forty. They’re raising families. They’re in Congress. There simply isn’t any going back; boomers, and gen x-ers like myself, aren’t going to live forever. Eventually, the patriarch always passes. 

Rashida Jones on top of MSNBC makes me think, especially, of Kamala Harris, who is herself poised to assume not only the vice presidency, but the role of heir-apparent to leadership of the entire Democratic Party and potentially the presidency itself. Biden has indicated that he understands himself as a transitional president, someone to manage the chaos we are now in before handing off (in our most blessed hopes) a stable country to the future. A septuagenarian white man potentially succeeded by a dynamic, ambitious Black woman; eventually, the patriarch always passes. 

There is something momentous to this moment, an electric charge in the air, a crispness like that before the snow. It’s unmistakable, and we all live in anticipation of whatever is going to happen and whatever we will become. We’re teetering on the knife’s edge of an unknowable future from which we cannot return. But it’s a future that will be driven, at the highest levels, by the kinds of people who have never, ever been given that opportunity. More women are in Congress, from both parties, than ever before. Black women have risen, and will continue to do so, to positions of power so high you suspect the air up there is, like that on the edge of space, a little thin. We get to live in a time when women are making history every single day. That gives me a kind of hope for the future that I haven't had since I was beginning my own push through the glass ceiling, hope which comes down to a single, simple fact.

Eventually, the patriarch always passes.