Only the Black Woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.

A Voice From the South, Anna Julia Cooper (1892)

I have had the good fortune of spending the last six months traveling the country and speaking to many in person or on a Zoom convening, presenting my model of Black Women’s Liberatory Leadership (BWLL) Praxis Model. The model is one on which I have worked for years. The impetus. Trying to figure out just exactly what it was that folks were referring to when they referred to the #Magic of Black girls and the reasons they were so eager to #LetBlackWomenLead or better yet, just listen to us.

Through all the celebration I wondered if they knew, seemingly all of a sudden, “why” they were so enthralled with the leadership capacity of Black women. To be clear, it was not all of a sudden. It was a consistent soft hum in the background of things seeming to work well, stay in order when the labor of Black women was holding things together. Holding things together in the background. In the kitchen at a dinner party. In the broom closet of a workplace. In the nursery with the babies.

She brings comfort. When she is there, things seem to just work; seem to just get done the way they always have and are supposed to be. Black women, in the background, bring comfort.

But out front. Winning. Winning when others have designs on the trophy because they have always won, well that’s something else. That disrupts an expected trope. An anticipated natural order that is also very comforting. A signal that the world is right side up. Perhaps. But we must ask, “Right side up for whom?” An order natural for whom?

Undisputed Dignity

There is a point in my keynote when I get to the slide presenting the leadership maneuver, I call Undisputed Dignity, a term borrowed from writer, educator, and activist, Anna Julia Cooper. In her 1892 book, A Voice from the South, she declares:

Only the Black Woman can say when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.

From the BWLL Praxis model, I share the concept of Undisputed Dignity as a leadership maneuver integral to the work of equity-centered leaders in precarious times. I tell them:

Undisputed dignity is the inherent, non-negotiable worth of a person as they move through the world on their own terms; quiet, self-possessed, and requiring no external permission, coercion, or patronage to be real. It is not something cultivated or demonstrated but inhabited: a ground of being that is arrived at prior to, and independent of, any social system that might seek to confirm or deny it. This dignity does not respond to contestation, it forecloses it. It carries the standing of an entire community. It is not personal achievement that secondarily benefits others; the two are inseparable from the start. Dignity is not something earned through performance, composure, or institutional recognition. It begins from worth as a given, not as an outcome.

And I also warn them. Each maneuver and mindset of the BWLL Praxis Model carries a critical consideration, acknowledging the ways leadership and nearly all constructs articulating the humanity of Black women as persistent others can be distorted, contorted into special designs of harm, seeking to undermine her power and authority. The critical consideration for undisputed dignity is that:

Grounding dignity in inherent worth rather than performance or recognition is notable, but risks placing an interior burden on those who are already most harmed by exterior systems. Dignity, while crafted from an inherent and private orientation, is confronted by structural and collective claims as to its worthiness, thus demanding systemic response, not personal endurance.

Enter Coach Dawn.

I am not a sports fan in the sense that I know when particular teams are playing, against whom, or what that means for their positioning on some competitive bracket. The word “bracket” is doing a lot of work here, as I am not entirely sure I am using it correctly, but we’ll push on.

Against UCONN in the Final Four, the USC Gamecocks won, by a 14 point margin. Wow! I believe that is what is called a “decisive win”. I did not watch the game. I do not know what spectacular moves by the star or breakout player made the difference, what collective coordination and team work allowed them to beat out what I understand was the team to beat.

What I do know is that it took the world by surprise. And by the world, I mean the UCONN head coach. I will not name him here. No need. I will not go into the ways that his attempt to correct Coach Staley on what he mistook as her refusal to shake hands at the start of the game, a common show of good sports-personship, actually amplified the poverty of his sport. So much, at least initially of that moment, was about him. A familiar story of how the systems, structures, and people around people like him protect him from his obvious wrong. It is all quite boring at this point. The ways the systems work for whom they are designed.

What does need to be named is Coach Staley’s leadership! Just moments after the uninstigated altercation, she is shown engaging in one of the most graceful pivots as it is clear that she was shaken by the opposing coach’s post game aggression. Just as I did at my talk in a room full of psychologists who study and support leaders, I share the clip below. (Those listening, may pause and watch it for context.)

And as I shared with that group, I share here with you all. She IS Undisputed Dignity. Shaken, but not shattered. Aware, but not distracted. And not because she is unaffected, but because she cannot be. For the sake of the win, the team, the university, and what I imagine ranks as most important for Coach Staley, the young women navigating the complex context of elite women’s sport, still undervalued and underappreciated, some navigating deals… with WNBA teams as well as the endorsements they require to attempt parity with their male counterparts. They cannot afford to have their coach diminish their win by matching the energy of a coach, like all coaches, who lost a game they thought was theirs to lose.

I see Coach Staley holding her personal dignity as a means to carry us with her, when and where she enters, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of her womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole USC women’s basketball team. Then and there leaders of every stripe grappling with the bullies who would otherwise declare by their outbursts, immaturity, and inability to regulate themselves, your lack of legitimacy, deny your right to be where you are, winning as you’ve earned; by grit, by force, with hard work, and with heart. There, with her, she created a space for all of us to enter with her. That’s leadership.

Let’s hope, just as with her dignity, that the Gamecocks continue to be undisputed on the court through the championship and beyond.

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A thawing.

A release from the rigidity of solidity, the cold blockage of movement and flow. The Águas De Março, Waters of March, and just as the song, the slow awakening from a winter slumber flows into an up tempo. It’s the joy in your heart.

What have I seen, noticed, thawing? The freeze on their voice. The speechlessness at the atrocities gracing their screens, the hardened faces in the face of such disregard, such lack of care, concern for others. The back turned on the vulnerability, on pain purposefully caused. The fear that if the conditions of living are made so inhumane for the one designated “other”, what will happen to me, to us, to everyone.

They’d gone quiet. A throat chakra gasping for moisture, caught in a draught with truth. It showed up in the form of, “I wrote a thing, but I know I can’t publish it,” or my daughter, friend, husband, colleague, “Just penned this incredible op-ed, but if it goes public they’ll lose their job”, or some other dire consequence that scares us into silence.

They’d gone quiet because the relentless assault on their humanity, directly and vicariously, was demoralizing in its shock. They were in awe. Wishing away the accounts as mere AI phenomena and not the real, present and dangerous harm that it was. That it is.

I, too, found myself in a similar type of quiet. Waiting to sense my muse. She is always there and yet, with all the things coming at me, and you and us, I was befuddled. She was lurking. Watching me. Too much to say, so much to absorb, nothing came out. Heart drop kerplunk. What are we to do in this? What are we to do with this? The thoughts spiral, trying to make sense of our pain, personal and prescient, and theirs visceral and never-ending.

And then you realize the way forward is actually to write. To loosen the grip of restriction. Write the first words that come to mind. To heart. To fingers. To pen. Thaw the freeze on your spirit. Realizing stopping you, blocking you, was the point. It is purposeful. Tightening and restricting by design to curb your freedom; stop you from dreaming.

Freedom of thought, because all you can think about is the last terror. The last wrong done without consequence. Atrocity becoming mundane. The last affront they deny.

Freedom of movement. “Where are your papers?” “Don’t dance like that?” “You can’t go there, can’t wear your hair like that, can’t look like that, can’t love like that. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t.”

You just can’t.

That’s the fascism playbook. Different levels of living for those that dare to live differently. Those that dare to live boldly. Embodied. Outside of conformity whose lies promise to keep you safe, until you need to be kept safe. They drop you.

Oh, but it is thawing. The ice is melting.

Hearts warming to the thought of coming back home to ourselves, the homes we have abandoned. The homes we have forgotten. The homes that remember they are always our home.

It is thawing. Eyes tearing, melting away hurt, loss, and anger masked in faces of indifference, faces grimaced, muscles tense, anticipating attack.

An opening, an awakening, the waters flowing, the words are coming.

Write them.

Speak them.

Let them flow.

It’s the joy in your heart.

What Happens When Those Who Held Everything Up Let Go?

I have had a bit of writer’s block. To be honest, the onslaught of horrific actions and stories coming from our government withered my spirits. There is not one that was worse than any other; it is all so very terrible, but if I had to name what may have struck me cold, took the air out of me, it was the realization that millions of people—men, women, and children—were being made pawns for political war games. Their hunger weaponized, played with, trivialized for sport.

My heart ached for those who had grown reliant, even felt safe within the arms of a society that understood that the rent was too damn high, the cost of food (without supplement) would crush any household budget, all the while energy costs rose so that we might collectively electrify data farms, increasingly making it difficult for poor and middle-class families to warm their homes as fall breaks and winter beckons.

I found it heartless, and I found myself feeling the blues. It made me think of the Lady who sang them: Billie Holiday.

She goes on to declare that Mama may have and Papa may have, as well, but God bless the child that has her own. Written with Arthur Herzog Jr. in 1939, Lady Day first recorded this most heartwrenching song of desperation and the security one can only find in self-reliance on May 9, 1941. It was released in 1942.

Born Eleanora Harris on April 17, 1915, in Philadelphia, PA, later to have her mother change her name to Eleanora Fagan to take her maternal grandfather’s last name, Billie Holiday had a tough childhood – one where neither her mother nor father had much. The only child born to teenage parents, she was put in the care of her mother’s older sister, her aunt who was married and lived in Baltimore. Young Billie was sexually abused by a cousin, and by age nine was placed in a Catholic reform school to help curb her bad behavior, which the psychologist in me imagines was the logical acting out of a defenseless child trying to refuse the incursions on her person the best way she knew how. Billie ultimately moved to NYC, Harlem, to live with her mother, and after several attempts to secure employment as a maid, found sex work to be the only viable option to provide for herself at age 14.

The lack of opportunity Billie and other Black women and children found themselves in during “The Nadir”—the time period between 1890-1940 characterized as the “lowest point of race relations in the US”—is the backdrop of scholar Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. “Wayward” described the ways the girls and women were characterized at the time. Black women and girls during this period suffered beneath extreme poverty that made them vulnerable to exploitation.

Paradoxically, while surviving through some of the most dire conditions, these children and women were afforded something: choice and possibility. While I do not seek to romanticize the challenges of their lives, it is also true that outside the “protections” of white, patriarchal authority that preserved white womanhood, these women and girls had more room to choose their own lives. As Hartman’s subtitle indicates, these were “Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals.” Their naming feels liberatory, their lives self-defined such that though they lived lives outside of societal privilege, they had the power to freely explore, create, and define lives aligned more with current day progressive and inclusive values and access than their racially and gender-restricted contexts would seemingly allow.

The Nadir, a use of language that feels more like a soothing euphemistic balm to make palatable the torrent of racial violence levied on Black advancement in response to the 12-year period of Black Reconstruction (1865-1877). Within that period, 2,000 Black people held public office, from the local level all the way up to the U.S. Senate, and 16 Black people served in the US Congress, with more than 600 elected to the state legislatures, and hundreds more who held local offices across the South. Black Reconstruction created a context for racial advancement for Black people that is the foundation for racial equity in contemporary US society and the focus of current-day backlash. Advancement in the form of:

• The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which provide the legal basis for Civil Rights:

  • 13th Amendment: Abolished slavery.

  • 14th Amendment: Granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and guaranteed equal protection of the laws.

  • 15th Amendment: Prohibited the denial of the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

• The redefinition of the legal and social status of the approximately four million formerly enslaved Black people following the end of slavery in the US.

• A distinct period of Radical Reconstruction (1867 onwards), in which Congress took a more active role, passing laws like the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, which divided the South into military districts and mandated new state constitutions that included Black male suffrage before readmission.

Advancement of Black people has always been a cause of great consternation for a racial white majority and those whose approximation to whiteness on racialized and gendered scales of hierarchy, whose social esteem and perhaps internal psychology, relied on Black inferiority to feel good about themselves. This is the source of anti-Black racism: a fundamental discontent with Black presence, esteem, joy, and security. It is why Black joy, presence, esteem, and security are indeed revelatory and revolutionary.

For those who need Black sadness, low-downness to know they are doing better, or as James Baldwin decried, I am not your Negro. You created the Negro and you need to understand why you need it.

Subsequently declaring during his interview featured in Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary on Baldwin’s life, I am not your Negro, that the fact that you need one (a Negro) is a reflection of the state of your psychological and spiritual emptiness, not mine. It has very little to do with me, any of us, except when you make us the focus of your ire.

Racial comparison based on the false premise of inferiority is a sad and fickle basis on which one should rest assessment of one’s value. It shakes. It quakes with the slightest slight, the most whimsical of casual indifference to its importance, let alone existence. A reason why, perhaps, Black people with boundaries, completely and totally lovingly occupied with effervescent joy, bring such scourge to the few who need our sadness to find their joy.

This. This is the context in which Billie sang her most desperate and hopeful song. Where she asserted that in this world—the world that crafted her lack of opportunity, created the context for her and everyone of the so-called Wayward to live lives somehow unrestricted by poverty—she (and they) were free to choose how they would be in the world. A threat to the status quo and a delicate possibility; this songbird’s most elegant sound made real, visible, felt.

And yet this is also the time of incredible retrenchment. Racial opposition and backlash were administered by the rise of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, which used racial terror in the form of lynchings. Reports suggest approximately 3,500 lynchings were committed during the time of The Nadir. Scholar Koritha Mitchell (2020) asserts racial terror was a form of “know-your-place-aggression” meant to stifle and reel in too much advancement such that Black people might remember their place. Not get too uppity. The public felt this. It inspired the career of journalist Ida B. Wells, a leading anti-lynching crusader who used investigative journalism to expose the racial violence and terror of lynchings throughout the US. It also inspired Billie Holiday’s performance of Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit,” a song amplifying the fact of racial terror through the lynching of Black people, sometimes whole families; pregnant women cut wide open, their babies expelled; Black men with their genitals sliced away; children, elders—it did not matter— all publicly murdered because they had the audacity to live and thrive despite the circumstances suggesting they ought not.

Billie Holiday traveled the country. When she performed the songs that allowed others to be seduced away from the reality of Black racial horror, the permission to hurt and harm Black people just for being Black, she was fine. But when she endeavored to remind the good folks enjoying a night out what their society, their siblings, cousins, and friends did when they became jealous of advancement of a Black person in particular, or Black folks in general, getting too big for their britches—well, that was a bridge too far, and lynchings as racial terror was used to put them back in their place, again.

Much like now. Rather than the public murder by lynching (though we did see it in the uptick of state-sanctioned violence against unarmed Black people following the election of the first Black man to be president of the US, and most notably in the public murder of George Floyd), it is in the public occupation, search, and detention of folks accused of the non-crime of being an immigrant or an American citizen, naturalized or born, living in too close proximity to those made superfluous, excess, no longer of need or interest, and thus tossed away.

It is in the social-cultural-economic assault that those who until now were doing just fine—maybe too fine, too much advancement—needed to be put back in their place. Those super shiny and coiffed Black women, hydrated and moisturized, just not acting right and rubbing it in people’s faces on their Instagram feeds. Those horrible, horrible Black women over there demanding respect at work and in their relationships, no longer succumbing to overwork, mistreatment, no longer accepting that “it is what it is” because they had choice.

There is nothing more dangerous than a woman, and for all clarity and specificity, there is nothing more dangerous for the US than a Black woman with choices. But, and if I can just put a finer point on it, there may be nothing more important for a declining world power than to have the one who has led from the rear and held up the whole thing let it fall.

For she is the child that, no matter the context, has her own. As those of you who joined me for this conversation I have begun on the Substack platform know, I have been overwhelmingly preoccupied with the over 300,000 Black women who lost their jobs – first, because of the negative economic impact on them and their families, but also because of the power now available to them, to us, when we direct our interest toward cultivating our own. We are the child that has her own, for unlike many others, we have always had to know that there was always a willingness of this great nation to drop us. Without warning, without care, but for cause. The cause being that we knew and understood our worth and could, if needed or just because we chose, galvanize our gifts, talents, know-how, and resources to grow our own. It may have felt like the power play of plays to put Black women out of work. But the true play of power is in what we build from the crumbles of an empire already in hospice, gasping for relevance, clinging for significance for a time and a reason long gone.

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What concerns me is that beneath the wholesale pushout of Black women from their Black woman jobs—the care, coddling, and cleaning work that descend from the labor of our enslaved ancestors—is a more nefarious worry.

What happens to the excess people? What happens when people no longer serve a role in society? What does society deign to do with them or not do with them? Where do they go? What is that life?

History provides a view into what happens when one is deemed to no longer have a vital, necessary role in society. American historian Heather Cox Richardson, in a recent interview, suggested that though many are looking to Germany as an example of how to contextualize the current American political moment, they may save themselves the miles and look closer to home. I do both.

In her tome, The Origins of Totalitarianism, scholar Hannah Arendt (1951) chronicles the social, psychological, and political landscape that led to the dehumanization of Jewish people in the march up to Nazi Germany and its extermination of approximately 160,000 to 180,000 German Jews, and approximately six million Jewish people murdered throughout Eastern Europe. One of the means of ridding the world of Jewish people sounds eerily similar to the immigration policies we hear tell of now. Mass deportations were combined with accelerated persecution and mass murder in internment camps.

But why? Arendt surmised that it was because Jewish people were deemed superfluous. With the growth of the nation-state in Europe, concepts like nationality were used to describe who was included and not. Those, like Jewish people who lived across Europe, who did not belong to any particular nation, were increasingly vulnerable when whether or not one belonged to a nation was coupled with the unscientific human categorization of race. Those whose race did not fit did not belong, and therefore they were deemed superfluous—an extra burden on the nation to provide for, especially when economies falter and the elite seek to siphon the wealth of the nation to the few hoarders at the top. Lacking a rootedness in a nation meant they had no political stake in the countries they lived in, and this made them vulnerable.

It is my whole hope that we are collectively wise enough to learn from what happened to Jewish people, but to be quite honest, I am not very optimistic. As we witness the legal wrangling over whether the US will allow a place euphemistically called "Alligator Alcatraz" to exist on American soil, I am mindful of what happens to those who find themselves rootless in this nation. Namely, my ancestors.

Brought to the shores of the US in 1619 to address a common gap in expansionist endeavors like imperialism, European discoverers of the world "new" to them, needed help. They needed labor. They stole my ancestors, trafficked and raped them to provide a perpetual subclass of laborers to build the wealth of the US that makes it a leading force of empire to this day. The labor was stolen from unfree people through the exploitative economic practice of chattel slavery. It occurred on land, also stolen, from the human beings indigenous to what is now known as the Americas.

While enslaved Africans worked for free, requiring little overhead as the conditions in which they lived were of such low quality and in some instances no better than that provided to animals, the return on investment (ROI) for white enslavers was quite substantial, building the wealth of this nation. The enslavement of African people from 1619 to 1865 created wealth in the amount of trillions of dollars in today's money for the United States. Quite a boon, and for those not doing the work, I am sure it was fun while it lasted. However, all things, thank goodness, must come to an end, and when they do, what happens? What happens to the people brought here as non-citizens who no longer had a "place," a functional role in society? Violence and exploitation happen.

After the release from slavery, a gradual process as the final communiqué reached Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865 (nearly two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed), formerly enslaved Black people became the new superfluous humans for a nation that had run out of use for them. No longer in a position to contribute to the wealth of the white propertied class, many now in the only land they'd ever known were "free" with limits. Some fled the south, others stayed back and continued to do the work they'd always done, but as free people though in deeply exploitative conditions that resembled enslavement. Newly freed Black people were a threat to the racial bribe the wealthy, propertied white elite made with poor whites. If Blacks were free, what differentiated them from any other white man, woman, or child?

Black Codes did. Black Codes were the special laws that prohibited the movement, work, and personal lives of Black people. These laws limited Black people's experience of freedom, providing their poor white counterparts a sort of freedom premium when compared to Blacks. And in case any Black person stepped out of line or any white person wanted to ensure they were at least better off compared to any Black person, there was the violence and terror. The advent of the Klan aligned with Black people's access to freedom. A lynching, a cross-burning—these were all racial terror tactics meant to remind Black people to stay in their place. It also reminded every white person of the primary differentiator between them and Black people: they had the privilege of not being subjected to those codes. Their citizenship came with a premium.

Just as the 1% of Jewish people who became the target of the Nazi movement, formerly enslaved Africans represented a minority (14-15%) of the US population during Reconstruction, the 12-year period of Black advancement following the end of slavery. And just like Jewish people in Eastern Europe, Black people in America became superfluous. Untethered from the means of production due to their new citizenship status after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, they were no longer useful for advancing white wealth in America because their labor was not free. Black people became superfluous.

What happens to those deemed extra, superfluous? And what does this have to do with the over 300,000 Black women who are out of work in the US?

I like Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism. I imagine she processed the tragedy of her own flight from Nazi Germany, ultimately landing in the US, writing from one of her New York apartments about the varied uses of racism as justification for murdering Jewish people.

I picture her writing what she learned of powerful strongmen pursuing wealth at the cost of their humanity against the backdrop of Black folks in the aftermath of the Harlem Renaissance and lead-up to the Civil Rights Movement, also grappling with the same device—racism—to craft their demise.

What Arendt brings to the fore in her work is an awareness that a society and its governing entities will operate within or outside of stated norms of honoring human dignity to justify greed. When a nation determines that a group of people no longer contribute to the accumulation of wealth and power by a select few, racism serves as a convenient instrument to identify who is expendable. Racism is a core variable in a logic for the removal of human beings whose lives are deemed to no longer matter.

In a capitalist society, our ability to participate in the economy makes us legible to the political landscape. For poor and working-class people, being a worker provides visibility. And for Black people in the US, save for a few free Blacks, since our entrée into the Americas, our labor has been the primary lens through which our worth is made visible. First as slaves, then as freedmen and women, then as citizens, and finally as workers for wages. Arendt understood the role of work to give the poor and non-elite a functional role in society that could protect them from being deemed superfluous.

Retrieved Instagram post from @vintageaaeverything posted on April 21, 2025

She wrote:

While rootlessness as a conscious aim was based primarily on hatred of a world that had no place for "superfluous" men so that its destruction could become a supreme political goal, the rootlessness of the Boers was a natural result of early emancipation from work and complete lack of a human built world.. (Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 196-197, 1951)

The Boers, a group of South African white laborers who resented working for The Crown in the wake of British imperialism, thought it better that Black South Africans do the work—and they did. Unfortunately, for the former white laborers, doing so placed them outside of society, whilst the Black laborers became increasingly visible to Britain as their labor contributed to building British wealth. Society had a role for the worker. That made sense. Those working contributed to the expansion of the British empire and thus warranted their care, protection, etc. It makes sense to protect your investment. But not working—that was not in the plan. Stepping outside of the imperialist ecosystem without a functional role, the Boers were of no consequence. They became vulnerable.

If one's primary role is that of a worker, to be put out of work makes her/them vulnerable.

Enter Black women, and the many more that will soon find themselves outside the inclusion of the working masses as the economy tumbles. With the nearly guaranteed inflation and recession due to tariff and immigration policy of the current administration, job loss and/or inability to make ends meet due to increasing costs is no longer a matter of if but when the threat of being superfluous will arise.

As we face a nation in its next iteration of fascistic movement (this is not the first time), we can certainly lean on the Black Antifascist Tradition that provides a legacy for American and global movements for social justice. We simply are not facing anything new; we just did not call what happened to Black people in America fascistic, and we should interrogate why that is.

But more importantly, Black women's pushout from the workforce is also not new. The desire to render one of the most educated and skilled demographics in the US workforce—real talent—jobless begs the question: why? What is accomplished by leaving a large group of highly educated and skilled people who need to work without meaningful work to do? Why would we advance policy and practice that would disallow them the ability to contribute to the care of their home, community, and society through economic participation?

What is achieved by making Black women superfluous?

Well, here's a thought: Just as the nation has not mustered enough interest to find and return home or close the cases on the over 97,000 missing Black women and girls (first reported in 2022), the release of the over 300,000 Black women from their jobs in less than 6 months has also not been a cause for our collective uproar. We know that when things happen to Black people, the world is slow to act, and even slower when it happens to Black women and girls.

When Black women are made superfluous, the assumption is that the collective will not care, will not come looking for us, nor the justice and remediation we deserve. The assumption is that you will not think that Black pain, the pain borne by Black women, applies to you. And you would be wrong about that.

Do we really think it stops with Black people, Black women?

The complicity of so many of us who were comfortable with the pain others would experience under the current regime in US politics is disappointing. Full stop. The attacks on Black women workers is an attack on The Worker in a service economy like the US, where we do things for others rather than make things for them to use. US workforce reductions have begun and will continue in retail, technology, and government, and while healthcare experiences an initial boon, recent policy unraveling the US healthcare infrastructure will reverse those interim gains.

This is not just about Black women; we are mere canaries singing a song from the belly of a mine, trying yet again to warn you. But will you listen? History tells us over and again the hubris of the silly person who believes that somehow the evil facing out to the world will simply not touch them. Somehow, in the face of immense inhumanity, their humanity will be seen. If only we were that special. It reminds me of the unremarkableness of that mistake—a mistake we make when we believe the fiction of racism, the declaration that some group, different for whatever reason, deserves less, is less because they are who they are. And with that, I leave you with the wisdom of Pastor Martin :

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

The warning remains urgent. But so does the possibility of a different ending.

We find ourselves in the not-yet future with the power to choose one another.

We can refuse to let anyone be rendered superfluous. We can speak out and declare that their lives do matter.

We can investigate, organize, resist, and build a future that has a place for each of us to be well and to belong.

Black women, perpetually disregarded and discounted, have always understood what it means to sit in the precarity of other people’s choices about us. This is why we don’t ever leave anyone behind.

The question for us now is: Will we speak out for one another now?

How and in what ways can your voice be leveraged on behalf of those that have been deemed extra, a burden, superfluous by design?

In a 2023 keynote address to the American Psychological Association (APA), I highlighted the historical and ongoing national dependence on Black women's engagement in the workforce, specifically addressing their experiences with refusal and recovery.

Black women bear a significant financial load, serving as primary wage earners for 81% of households and communities, and providing both immediate and extended support. This is particularly notable given that over 86% of Black women and girls aged 16-64 are active participants in the workforce. Be it for her own biological family or the network of fictive kin that create the Black community, these women, also known as Black breadwinner moms because they head over 51% of Black households, face a harsh economic reality. As the solid base for the much celebrated village that raises our children and actualizes mutual aid, just as our aunties and othermothers did before, Black women leverage their pocket books in the form of contemporary mobile payment services like Venmo, Zelle, or CashApp to “help out” those coming up short. But what happens when she comes up short?

Black women are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. Many may believe themselves insulated from the impact of recent political and economic policies, particularly as their distinct intersectional racial and gender impact on Black women has garnered significant media attention. However, the reality is clear: "America, you're in danger, girl."

The initial vulnerability experienced by Black women serves as an early indicator of impending economic challenges. These challenges are anticipated due to the effects of tariffs on commonly used goods and services, alongside a projected surge in financial restrictions in 2026. This period immediately follows their potential influence on the outcomes of the US post-midterm elections.

Furthermore, a significant shift is occurring in global economic and geopolitical partnerships. Former global partners, who once contributed to stabilizing the world economy, are now forming new alliances. This shift is a response to the self-inflicted volatility within US markets, thereby further diminishing the US's strategic advantage on what Zbigniew Brzezinski (2016) termed the "grand chessboard."

For now, Black women are bearing a disproportionate burden of our unraveling economy, but the realities of these ebony canaries are coming to pink slips, grocery stores, education settings, student loan caps and repayment restrictions, and reneged voting rights near you.Tweet. Tweet.

Gender economists, Katica Roy’s work lays out with precision what many have witnessed in our networks and in our own lives.The advent of a new administration opposed to the federal workforce, especially in positions historically filled by Black women such as in the fields of education, health and human services, or what I have coined the “care, coddling, and cleaning” work Black women have typically engaged, has meant those employed in these contexts have been let go. Add to that the wholesale rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, initially implemented to balance opportunity in all facets of life, with a particular focus on education, voting rights, the workforce, health care, and scientific inquiry, have severely undermined Black women’s workforce participation.

Economists’ birdsongs are harmonizing alongside Black women. Notably, Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics, has indicated that we could be on the brink of a recession citing key factors such as “payroll employment, employment levels, and

job decline consistency”, all of which have already hit Black women, as key indicators that a recession is looming. He’s noted a key reason for a potential downturn are federal policy on tariffs and immigration causing slowdowns in investment and hiring.

The industries where Black women are overrepresented have been hit first due to the animosity of culture wars. This has led to the removal of Black women from the labor market, which is projected to result in a loss of $37 billion from our gross domestic product alone.

It is obvious that the quick shift in social sentiment and policy change have abruptly halted Black women’s economic boon. The job loss and policy challenges send a double whammy to the economic and educational advancement of Black women in the last 30 years. Black women have the highest college completion rates for bachelors and masters degrees with this number more than doubling between 1999 and 2020. Further, because educational attainment translates into human capital and overall economic growth, a 2021 study found that Black women’s educational achievement added $507 billion to the US gross domestic product despite persistent inequities. As education has long been a prophylactic against the racism and sexism that legitimized claims of Black women’s lack of experience, preparedness, or the ability to exclude us from opportunity, the outright attacks on higher education and funding seek to diminish the gains of this generation. For Black women, and those who have followed our lead, higher education has been a veritable underground railroad to elude exclusion from full participation in society. This most recent move of the goal post simply requires innovation of the sort our ancestors exhibited, as these manipulations to access are just a later chapter in the same book entitled, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

The question for us now is, how will we innovate beyond persistent inequity, this time?

While Black women are acutely experiencing job losses, other groups are also affected. Unemployment among Black men has reached 7.7%, its highest point this year. Latinas' employment has remained relatively stable; however, their underrepresentation in sectors like corporate settings continues to pose barriers to high-yield salaries. For Latino men, unemployment is also relatively stable and typically lower than for Latina women, though it remains characteristically higher than for White and Asian men, but lower than for Black men. Asian men and women have seen minimal change, with Asian women being the only group to have lower unemployment rates. Finally, the unemployment rate for White men has risen (though still lower than other groups), while remaining relatively stable for White women. It's important to note, however, that a significant number of White women have exited the workforce. Resulting in a whopping over 800,000 layoffs in the job market. So that while Black women made up nearly half of the losses, we all are affected.

The political rope a dope that has so distinctly affected Black women signals we are in fact already in a recession. And, true to form, the ebony canaries are singing. You can hear them.

Black women with bold, pronounced voices and presence are ringing the alarm. A few notable examples of these ebony canaries lifting their voices come to mind.

• After her release from detention, activist Afeni (@factsandfire on Instagram), known for speaking out against the excessive surveillance of adolescent Black boys in D.C. during the militaristic takeover by federal law enforcement, was recently assaulted in an incident captured on video. She championed young people who, under the current administration, might have faced a similar fate to the Central Park Five. Just as in that era, fueled by a particular individual's rage, young Black and Brown boys and men, along with those holding immigrant or visa status, are the targets.

  Say her name! Comment below other Ebony Canaries lifting their voices!

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• Another canary, Jolanda Jones, Representative of the Texas District 147, is speaking up. She and several other Democratic lawmakers fled the state in an effort to protest gerrymandering that disenfranchises the Black and Latino vote in that state.

• Texas Representative Nicole Collier (District 95, Fort Worth) wore a bonnet and eye mask as she prepared to sleep on the Texas House floor after declining a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) escort. This escort was reportedly assigned to "ensure she would return to work." Collier further demonstrated her refusal by filing a lawsuit against the Texas GOP, alleging "illegal confinement." She has since been joined by her colleagues who ripped their permission slips in solidarity to amplify the impact of such practices across the country.

Sing, unbowed, sing!

Black women live in the coal mine that is the United States of America. For over four centuries since our forced arrival in the Americas, Black women’s vulnerability has stemmed from embodying what others strive to distance themselves from. While attempting to gain a semblance of humanity by distinguishing themselves from Black women (and Black people, generally), those who found safety on the middle rungs of the social strata are now exposed to the reality that the system never viewed them as anything other than dispensable.

And though it is painful to be left behind, to be another’s cautionary tale, while they climb over us – their feet and knees nestled on our backs and in the crooks of our necks, the fact is they are still down here with us. We, the canaries in the American coal mine, have breathed the dark, dank polluted air of inequity, and cared for each other and others we found relegated to the conditions we are not able to escape.

This bad air is where we took our first breaths. Our lungs are perpetually blackened by the disease of intersectional oppression at the crossroads of racism, sexism, and classism. Our lungs are mutated to accommodate these conditions.

We live here. Cultivated a praxis for life and leadership in conditions others have only had nightmares about.

We survived here. Found joy and a sense of purpose where others could only identify despair.

We thrive here. Conditioned by perpetual neglect and inequity, we craft lives of triumph out of tragedy never losing our integrity, never losing our capacity to love.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, we can breathe here.

What resonates with you about this metaphor? Have you experienced being dismissed only to be proven right later? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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Our love for teaching and learning took over, and we entered academia anyway. We shouldn't be ashamed of that choice—it's a vocation that deserves commendation. To enter educational contexts is a noble endeavor you should always feel proud of.

And yet, I fear many of us feel it's just not all it was cracked up to be.

Let's reconnect with why you stay.

The passion that drew you to education is still there, even when the system feels overwhelming. The impact you make on students' lives, the moments of breakthrough in learning, the community you build—these matter more than ever.

At The Well for Academic Leaders, we'll create space to rediscover your purpose, process the challenges, and find renewed strength and strategy in community with others who understand your journey.

📅 Join us: August 21, 4:00-5:15 PM EST

Before you return to campus, reconnect with fellow educators who share your commitment and challenges. Rediscover your "why" and return to your academic community with renewed purpose and support.

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I’ve often said I was best suited to be a professor because I loved to learn—and honestly, the life of a professor mirrored many aspects of what I cherished about being a student.

But with time and ascension, particularly through the upper levels of higher education leadership, I came to grips with a hard truth:

Though I am the realization of my ancestors’ wildest dreams, the latent and overt aggressions toward women and BIPOC professionals in higher ed have made the path far more difficult than it needs to be.

Not insurmountable—I’m tough, but why should I have to be "tough" at work?

The work is made unnecessarily hard due to a persistent socio-cultural resistance to equity and full inclusion—of women, gender-expansive individuals, people of color, and those with diverse abilities.

Today, as cultural backlash grows louder, the “quiet part” is being said out loud. But for many of us, it was never all that quiet. We knew our labor was essential, even required—yet our voices and leadership were often undermined.

We worked through it.

🤔 But for what?

❓ As the real impact of hostile work environments becomes clearer—even in the most “progressive” of spaces—we must ask ourselves: Is it worth it?

Mid-career, these experiences shaped my scholarship. Now, as I ascend to my zenith, I want to use those experiences to reduce harm and support others navigating similarly complex spaces.

As a psychologist and educator whose lived experience informs my perspective, I offer insights and guidance on how to lead with clarity and care—while sustaining your health, purpose, and integrity.

We must #BeWell to #LeadWell.

I’m honored to share the Black Women’s Liberatory Leadership (#BWLL) Praxis with those who are leading, healing, and—when necessary—exiting with intention and strategy.

✨ Learn more about The Exit Strategy Master Class at

🔗drwendiwilliams.com

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Wanting the best from those you work with requires you are the best person they could ever hope to work with.

Compassionate, honest, fair, rigorous, engaged. Lit up with the joy of life and tethered to an unwavering sense of purpose.

Our teams need us to be at our best to deliver theirs. So, I ask, do you show up mentally, emotionally, spiritually, behaviorally, as you would hope, even expect, others will do for you?

Leadership is in the decisions you make, the big and small choices that have an impact on the lives of others.

But it is also the micro moments. Genuine pause and reflection with connection. Eye-contact, engagement, containment.

You want enthusiasm for your vision?

Be enthusiastic for the vision.

True engagement and passion, coupled with care and commitment, is infectious.

Midweek reminder:

Having vision is important.

Investing in the leadership of your team to reach beyond your wildest imaginings is visionary.

#HumpDayMeditations #TheWellWithDrWendi #LeadWellBeWell #MidweekWisdom #BlackWomeLiberatoryLeadership #BWLL

They get to be reminded of that which gets taken, distorted, manipulated. Robbed of its innocence, our calling to the work, whatever the work we feel called to do is, is the worst of crimes.

For all the discussion of wellness and work, dysfunctional and toxic labor dynamics, and long histories of the same tired practices undermining the humanity and divinity of people deemed less than or unworthy, we lose the fact that they are special. Their life and their talents are a gift and if as a society we poured into and supported them, we would all benefit.

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With the days news cycles, remembering the beauty of each of us may feel like a luxury. But really, it is resistance. Really it is our commitment to refusal of that which is not meant for, that which is a reflection of another's short-sightedness.

But just because they look upon with you with the distortion does not mean you must accept it.

On this day, about which I cannot euphemize the concept of independence, I want to name what so many of us feel: the weight.

The weight of carrying a load that only takes, never gives, that receives with little thought of what it might offer back. We, parched and panting, while it drinks until beyond satiated, belly full, bloated. Greedy.

There is no freedom for the carrier nor for the carried and thus we are all dropped. We put you down. You may rest on your own laurels and we will determine how best to direct ourselves.

Celebrating freedom while navigating systems and people that actively legislate your pain is appalling. Take your rest.

No matter the big and beautiful lipstick language slathered across, it is but yet, a pig. More than political theater, they are signposts of un-belonging, disregard. They say the not so quiet part out loud. To them, WE DO NOT MATTER.

And yet, words have power. And there is an incredible power in naming a thing. A thing we must name. We claim freedom in the land of the unfree. Peace in the discontent of the perpetually bothered, spiritually empty. Liberation in the eyes of the divine. It, the thing we name, is in fact, quite BIG, and immensely, BEAUTIFUL.

We are the midwives and the builders, the organizers and the seers. We have vision that guides the deeds of our hearts and hands. We manifest a freedom, an independence, no petty man can wrap his small hands around to take. It is in you!

We do this work from a permission structure beyond a congress, a gathered body of people who do not read to avoid accountability for their choices. We take responsibility for our actions. We acknowledge our mistakes. We make a commitment to learn. We are not afraid to have the opportunity to know better in order to do better. We lead– well.

We lead while, holding grief, holding disappointment, holding rage, and holding hands. We lead, while dreaming tomorrows, wrestling back our rights, and crafting new hacks to bigger, better, more beautiful future freedoms. We come from the people who make multiple ways out of the no way, small ways of others with a grace and fortitude that seems otherworldly, because it is. That is the magic. And we do it, live it, breathe it, and love ALL of it with joy. Always, with joy.

This is BWLL (Black Women’s Liberatory Leadership Praxis). We do not need to learn it, we need to be it. We need only remember. It is in you!

There is power in naming ‘a thing’ and today the thing I name is the big, beautiful magic that is you!

Be well,

—Dr. Wendi
🧡 The Well

We knew that we had to give everything we had to prevent the kinds of harm political playbooks warned us would devastate our communities. We were not simply in it for the representational identity politics of someone who looks like us in the White House, though that would have been nice. We were fighting for healthcare, education, housing, access to nutritious food and clean water, and protection from fraud and data breaches. We knew—we ALL knew—that the systems we have been living within were long overdue for the significant reimagining and revamping they required to properly serve us all. We briefly told ourselves the truth Arundhati Roy called us to in her April 2020 Financial Times article when she declared The Pandemic is a Portal. We knew that very few people were actually prepared for that type of work. We knew that if anyone would do it, we would. It’s how we have been socialized. Black women and girls know no one is coming to save us. We must save ourselves.

We were open because we were desperate. We were willing because we had nothing else to distract us away from what our lives, at home with the choices we made, were telling us about the world we created—or at least had condoned. I sat on virtual calls with educators and psychologists, industry leaders, and community members, imagining and reimagining schools, healthcare, and technology; picking apart our efforts up to that point in the social transformation and our complicity in not fully actualizing diversity, equity, and inclusion. We acknowledged it had become commodified, corporatized, and made digestible to human resources departments—protective of progressives’ feelings so much so they maintained the status quo and were easily wiped away in shifting political winds.

What I felt, and many Black women around me stated, is that our colleagues and society were finally being honest. We knew from our positionality as the token representation of diversity on office DEI committees and leadership teams that whatever we did was not meeting our grandmothers’ definitions of social transformation. The sense that our simply being there should have been good enough. Or that we should even be grateful that we were at least having an opportunity to see ourselves be seated at unwelcome tables. The Obama, but not the Kamala. What more did we want now? Hadn’t we gotten enough?

Now, finally, we were witnessing some of our colleagues finally telling the truth without expecting to be congratulated for being more aware and socially just than their peers. The reality—that though we had pushed toward the limits of their comfort, we had not yet pushed through the threshold of transformative justice. In that time, and especially following the racial reckoning sparked by the public murder of George Floyd, we were of one accord, online, in the streets, and in the media. We agreed that was what was required of us now. An awareness and activation informed by the wisdom of Fannie Lou Hamer:

We were ready. Or so it seemed. And then, we backed off. It got eerily quiet. Social media virtue signals went black, and we were no longer speaking about the change that needed to happen—as if our protesting and posting had meant that it happened. It hadn’t.

We seemed to be searching for a previously relied-upon indicator that change was afoot. The ephemera of a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the election of a “skinny kid with a funny name” who happened to be Black to the presidency of the U.S. No indicator showed itself. The change—the big signifier of it—was nowhere to be found.

But the change back, well, that happened. And it hurt. November 6, 2024, the day after the election, lives in infamy for many people—and especially Black women. It was the day we learned just how much we are despised and disliked. That no matter what we do—including getting nearly 100% of ourselves to vote not only for the first Black woman to be president, but for everyone to have access to healthy food, clean water, first-time home buying assistance, financial help for caregiving to ill and aging family, and the list goes on—it would never be enough. We were mad, we were tired, but more than anything we were hurt. And we deserved to feel our feelings.

In fact, having our feelings is a feature of humanity we do not always get to have. By now, many have become aware of the Strong Black Woman Schema, a cultural ideal and a race-gendered coping strategy that expects Black women to be resilient, self-reliant, and self-sacrificing while suppressing our emotions. Though Black women, myself included at times, take pride in being seen as a source of strength, disproportionately carrying the mantle of strength can negatively impact one’s mental health by promoting emotional repression, self-silencing, and neglecting self-care. When we are expected to be strong, we may not have space made for us to express how we feel, causing our experiences of mental health challenges, like depression, to be underdiagnosed and consequently undertreated. In fact, researchers at the NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing reported that rather than reporting typical symptoms of depression like “depressed mood,” Black women participants in their study expressed depression as sleep disturbances, self-criticism, and irritability.

While we often hear snazzy expressions of Black women rejecting overwork or engagement with people and contexts that stress us, like: “She’s unbothered”; “Nope, not today”; or my personal favorite T-shirt art, “We Out,” fictitiously signed by Harriet Tubman, the truth is we are bothered, it does happen on any given day, and unfortunately, we are so embedded in systems and structures that cause us harm that it is not as easy as getting up and leaving. Sometimes the pain lands. In fact, in the Spring 2025 Poll of Black Women Voters conducted by The Highland Project and brilliant corners Research and Strategies, 45% Black women reported worsening mental health compared to a year ago with the state of the country and economy as primary concerns, and 67% reported retreat from news coverage to protect their mental health (among a subgroup of moms and younger women, 75% reported disengagement). The pain has landed.

And then arrives the artistic expression of Naví Robins. As a best-selling and award-winning author, illustrator, and graphic designer, Robins was able to capture a deep-seated, complex feeling. In his Sometimes I Told You So Just Ain’t Enough, Robins captures what we are now seeing are some folks’ worst fear. What if Black people—specifically Black women—sit this one out? Trevor Noah, in his closing remarks as he ended his stint on The Daily Show, made very clear that while people are enamored by his brilliance, it is the Black women in his life and those who have graced the stage on the show with him that have been his teachers. In his words, “Black women cannot afford to f_ck around and find out… Black women know what shit is” (December 8, 2022).

With an endorsement like that, the worry and frustration, sheer angst, and wonder about the absence of Black people putting their lives on the line during 2025 protests is curious. If Black people’s—especially Black women’s—moral authority has the power to make a movement for justice and humanity credible, why is it ignored and not trusted as we collectively make choices that put all of us at risk? The same unwillingness to listen to the person (Black women) who, as Noah suggests, knows the best, most equitable way to do a thing (anything!), in a high-stakes moment, like a national election that could irreversibly shape the geopolitical landscape, is the same disregard shown for Black women’s leadership in times of supposed peace and comfort. It is hubris on overdrive. It is wasteful. And it is disrespectful. Because try as we might, we always try to tell you, try to warn you, and you still do not listen.

For here is the thing. For Black women, there is no peace. We are chronically uncomfortable. Most recently, talk show host Whoopi Goldberg attempted to convey this sentiment: that in the U.S., Black people experience perpetual angst about what may happen to us, our children, our neighbors, and friends because we are Black. Not to falsely equivocate, but simply to articulate the tale of at least two realities in this country.

And we are really in danger. We did not just want to see ourselves reflected in the Oval Office, though it would have been nice. We wanted to avoid executive orders and Supreme Court decisions and appeals that would designate some of us a little less human, a little too different to make our own choices about our bodies. Believe it or not, we know a little something about being considered less than 100% a person—try three-fifths. We wanted to prevent and continue to protect against ICE crackdowns, workplace immigration raids, and nursing babies being torn away from their mothers. The disregard of Black mother-child bonds during enslavement is eerily similar to the torturous displays of callous disregard for these families. And we wanted everyone to eat well, have access to shelter, and maybe save a little money—a hope that seems so quaint in the midst of shockingly toxic economic uncertainty.

We really tried to tell you. And we exhausted ourselves attempting to do so. You did not listen, and now that we all are in the “finding out” part of the story, you want us to rush in and “fix it.” You want us to stop what we are doing—our line dancing, brunching, napping, and rewatching the two Michael B. Jordans in Sinners—without reckoning with the fact that you ignored us, that you devalue us, and that you do not respect us. We see it. You see it. We know it. You know it. So, now what?

We know that we will get up and get to it. It is in us. In fact, 55% of us reported in the Spring 2025 Poll of Black Women Voters that we KNOW it is NOT the time to retreat, but rather to protect our rights and build a collective future. That is more than half of us, and yet the utterance by any of us that we might rest and wait until we are ready has inspired some of the most apoplectic responses from “allies”, nonetheless. Why is that?

Despite the outburst, we get to have our feelings. We get to take the time to think about how and in what ways we will engage in the collective good of others—even though they despise us. Don’t like us. Don’t think we belong. Are maybe even kind of glad the whole DEI thing is over so we can all stop pretending and Black women don’t get to be in charge anymore. Well, how’s that working out for you? For us?

We know we have to be the “bigger” people. Because for all the wondering about where we are and what we are doing, and why we are not helping, we have not heard an apology. There has been no accountability. No reckoning.

That is the lever that needs to be pulled.

We need to reconcile the relationship. Because as much as you need us, we need you. For as powerful and mighty, as strong and beautiful as Black women are, democracy and uplifting the common good is a coalition project. We are merely 7% of the U.S. population. And yes, while we will lead, our collective win is contingent upon the willingness of those who need us—who rely on us—to listen, to follow, and be thankful we don’t treat you like you treat us.

Dear Black Women, you are not alone, nor are you exaggerating to feel that there is a target on your back. You felt it in the office, around the water coolers and coffee machines dispensing tepid fluid during a screen break. You knew it—not only through your own stories recounting the many and varied microaggressions with macro impact on your health—but through the stories, the “am I crazy?” checks during after-work “unhappy” hours, overthinking and recounting, attempting to diagnose that “thing.”

You know. That thing. That thing that did not quite seem to be “about” you or them, with no clear or direct line of cause and effect to explain why a look, a word, an email (copied to all or adding new recipients), or a lack of recognition occurred. A behavior aimed directly at you —meant to quiet, silence, or contain you—yet never endeavored to understand you. Why did it happen? Was it racism? Was it sexism? Both? Yes, and more. (Black Women at Work: On Refusal and Recovery, 2023)

Thoughts like these keep us up at night. 3 in the morning, can’t get back to sleep, running through not only what happened, but how your response—or how you might respond—might be perceived. There are rarely more than two options. You can either be the Angry Black Woman or the Doormat Mammy.

For Black women, the Sunday Scaries—the sense of angst and dread many feel as they prepare for Monday—take on a whole other color. Pun intended. Aptly associated with a Jordan Peele–level of racial horror, the inability to fully rest away from work due to worry about expectations and aggressive behavior from work colleagues, peers, subordinates, and superiors during the workweek is given an extra toxicity boost for Black women (and colleagues from other minoritized backgrounds). We play back—and forward—the potential impact of our actions and behaviors, in response to or in anticipation of the wide-ranging, intersectional, racist assaults on our humanity.

Holding in natural, human responses to being affronted by ill-intentioned colleagues—whom you are implored to “give the benefit of the doubt”—while your professionalism, intelligence, and capacity are, in fact, doubted. Attorney Leah Goodridge’s 2022 UCLA Law Review article, Professionalism as a Racial Construct, lays out the context and impact of walking this emotional tightrope.

Dear Black woman, you are not alone or exaggerating in experiencing the 106K loss as punishment. Who were we to think we could celebrate in their face—donning moisturized and satiated bougie-ness at classy restaurants our ancestors could only dream of working in, having the nerve to have wellness and spa retreats in Napa Valley while they toiled—or worse, thought that at least you did not get to have those experiences?

Just who did we think we were—holding authority, roles, and know-how born of having to be stronger, faster, and smarter, not because we wanted that burden, but because it was, and is, the price of our entry? Just who do you think you are?

Dear Black women, this is not new—and we know that. Scholar Koritha Mitchell’s From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture makes all too clear the source of the poison at the end of the spear aimed at us. She coined the term know-your-place aggression to describe the unique hatred that inspired the scourge of lynchings in response to Reconstruction and the period immediately following—known as the Redemption Era or the Gilded Age.

This was a time characterized by the re-establishment of white supremacy and a backlash against the gains of Reconstruction in the South, marked by the rise of Jim Crow laws and the disenfranchisement of Black voters. With the advent of several recent executive orders pushing back on 50 years of civil rights advancements—inspired by Black people but benefiting all—one might say we are in a second-wave Redemption Era. One that again eats away at the advances that held so much promise for an evolved, more inclusive democracy.

But oh dear sisters, this note is not about our pain or our loss. Pain and loss are expected footnotes in Black women’s lived reality—an inheritance that brings comfort to those who fear we may have gotten too big for our britches. Best to put us back in our places.

No, this is not that.

As my dear friend, Attorney Lurie Daniel Favors concludes in Episode 32 of her podcast Lurie Breaks It Down (which she does very well—so you should give it a listen), this is quite possibly an opportunity. An opportunity to innovate, create, and live well while making a living. To stop trying to have your gifts appreciated by those who refuse to see you—and instead, to bring those gifts into a context that can. For yourself. For all of us.

For those low on hope, welcome. I am glad you have us. And by us, I mean the many who have long been sending up flares—early warning signs about the toll of toxic work environments on the careers and health of Black women.

In my book, Black Women at Work: On Refusal and Recovery, I write about how the legacy of enslavement—and the particular labor extraction from Black women—provides a template for present-day work environments and the violence we continue to endure. In my work with clients, we trace those connections so that we do not blame ourselves for the ways are being treated, but rather, as we would with anyone on the receiving end of abuse, recognize the systemic and structural patterns of harm, understand its context, and develop strategies—grounded in that context—to survive and to thrive.

Others are also doing this work—recognizing the support and guidance Black women need to cope with or abandon the tables that are no longer serving them.

Ngozi Cadmus founded HappiWorkers, a mental health safety net catching Black women across the globe grappling with workplace racial microaggressions. Kimani Norrington-Sands runs Lifting As We Climb Consulting, a firm that centers workplace wellness and offers guidance for leaving toxic environments.

And these are just a few.

I encourage you to look us up and get connected. A search on LinkedIn or other social media platforms will easily guide you to rich content and actual communities—like The Well, a restorative and wellness-centered community I created as a safe space for reflection, for restoration, and for harnessing our collective brilliance. The Well advances a new vision of leadership—one that is soulful, strategic, and deeply rooted in the liberatory wisdom of Black women.

All are welcome.

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