Teen Vogue and the Fallacy of Radical Political Performance

by Jenn M. Jackson, PhD

In August 2017, I received a text message from a dear friend. The text read, “Hey darling, would you be interested in writing a 800 – 1000 word piece about white women’s role in white supremacy for Teen Vogue? They reached out to me about it but I’d rather pass it on to a woman of color.” My friend, a white woman, had become my friend after I critiqued some of her race-centered work online. I argued that, while her voice was important, she was likely taking up valuable space in a conversation on race that many Black women were already having. People were just less likely to listen to us when we did it. 

My friend became my friend, in part, because, rather than taking my critique personally or seeing it as an effort to dispose of her, she understood how her unique privilege and position situated her in closer proximity to power. This closer proximity provided her access in a publishing world that rarely afforded any on-ramps of Black women, or people of color, generally. While she may not have intended to do so, her work in race, justice, and movements was inadvertently co-optive, white-centric, and exclusionary to the very people who were affected most by racism and structural discrimination. 

That text message from my friend in 2017 grew into an incredible working relationship with Teen Vogue and Condé Nast. By 2018, I had my own column called “Speak On it,” and was writing alongside many movement workers, abolitionists, scholars, and thinkers who were at the helm of the Movement for Black Lives, the fight for just wages, reproductive justice, and an end to prisons. For five years, I got to write what I wanted. I capitalized the “B” in Black. I was never asked to water-down my language. My incredible queer and trans editors, though white, centered my voice. 

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When I started at Teen Vogue, the magazine was being revolutionized by Elaine Welteroth, the first Black woman to hold the position and only the second Black person to ever be in that position. I’m grateful to Elaine Welteroth for shifting the focus of the property to politics, rights, and justice. While so many people credit nebulous forces for this change, those of us who were there remember that it was Elaine. Her leadership cultivated a culture at Teen Vogue that made being Black, Brown, queer, trans, disabled, poor and working-class at work normative. It was a newsroom where we all felt like insiders, not outsiders looking in on an industry erecting glass walls to keep us out.

Since Welteroth left Teen Vogue, it hasn’t been the same. While the editorial teams were able to remain largely intact through 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic, attacks on news media by Trump during his first administration, and the increase of “fake news” sources online affected the radicality of newsrooms everywhere. Behind the scenes, those of us who had been writing for Teen Vogue for years were getting fewer of our emails returned, fewer of our pitches accepted, and fewer acknowledgements of the work we had done to change Teen Vogue into the leading news mag for young people seeking community-based, grassroots-informed, leftist reporting and opinion pieces.

In 2020, budgets at Condé Nast froze. The Politics vertical struggled with staffing. My editors were let go from the organization and were never replaced. The infrastructure at the organization started to change. Those of us who were contributors were relegated to freelance pitches without any notice. No formal emails. No conversations. When editors leave, connections to publications are usually just severed. So, those of us who had toiled, risked our careers, pushed back against an authoritarian regime, and trusted Teen Vogue with our words were made into outsiders. A few of us old contributors began texting one another asking, “have you heard anything?” Others were saying, “they haven’t responded to me either.” Even more saying, “I think I have to move my column elsewhere.”

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It stung to stand outside of a room I was once in. Not because I felt entitled to be there. Because it was such an unceremonious break up. Instead of asking me to write anything new, the new staff would repost my old pieces every holiday. On MLK Day, my capstone piece was updated with a new date each year. My inaugural article, the one that brought me to Teen Vogue, was trotted out as if it were brand new. It was the epitome of an organization using our words without paying us or even including us in the process. 

While they were repurposing the articles of Black writers, the media giant was simultaneously publishing pieces about Black people written by white and Asian women. This was the point when I decided to speak up and out. In 2022, I reached out to ask the status of my column. It had been months since my emails were acknowledged. One editor replied. She, a white woman, used terms like “swamped,” “not-very-fun update,” and “reduced capacity” to convey to me that this was a structural issue rather than an intentional one. She encouraged me to pitch her again. I did. Then, she promptly declined it.

My relationship fully shifted with Teen Vogue in 2024 after writing for the magazine for more than five years. I was posting on Threads about my experience with the magazine when the EIC emailed me directly. She never responded to my email from two years prior but found it after my posts were getting traction online. She told me that my email had gone to spam, that my emails came in when she had a baby, that she respects my work and still uses it in her new pieces she publishes. She told me that there had been no changes in diversity of staffing though I witnessed it first-hand. She told me that she had hired Black, Asian, and trans editors. She gaslit me. 

Last year, when Condé Nast decided to shutter Teen Vogue, those same editors all went on social media tours, sharing how awful it was that the publication was being “unceremoniously” shut down. Journalistic outlets bemoaned the “tragic loss” of Teen Vogue. But, honestly, I couldn’t help but laugh. 

This was the same publication that, when budgets got slim, left so many Black, queer, trans, and disabled columnists and writers hanging. This was the publication that lost our emails, forgot about us, and had just been so “swamped” with other writers. This was the publication that reposted our words, co-opted our voices, and then gently ushered us out of the door when the time came to hunker down. We were completely expendable, not even worth a reply or recognition. We made a publication great and we’ll never be acknowledged for it.

There are a few lessons here. The first is that liberal media is not the same as radical media. Liberal ideas often work within existing systems of control. They seldom dismantle and dislodge existing power structures. While they may rely on public proclamations and performances of solidarity to bolster confidence in their legitimacy, liberal performances are frequently tested when resources are slim and a reckoning is nigh. 

The second lesson here is that, no matter how much these mainstream, white-coded publications pretend to support and center our work, they will always be co-optive and exploitative. I’m not sure they know any other way to be. 

Last, I think the most interesting part of this story is how I came to Teen Vogue. When I first encountered them, they were asking white writers to tell Black people’s stories. It was silly of me to ever think they would behave differently.

When these organizations show us who they are, we best believe them. No point in hurting our own feelings, building radical politics on shaky, unfirm foundations.

Jenn M. Jackson, PhD (@jennmjacksonphd) (they/them) is a queer, androgynous Black woman, an abolitionist, a lover of all Black people, and an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science. Jackson’s research is in Black Politics with a focus on Black Feminist movements, racial threat and trauma, gender and sexuality, policing, and political behavior. They are the author of BLACK WOMEN TAUGHT US (Penguin Random House, 2024) and POLICING BLACKNESS (expected in 2027). Jackson has written peer-reviewed articles at Public Culture, Politics, Groups, and Identities, Social Science Quarterly, and the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy. Jackson received their doctoral degree from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 2019 where they also received a graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies.