Finding Your Place at Work
Winter hits and I immediately become sad.
With the darker days, I realize how much of my energy and self is given to my work. As an introvert, my success throughout the week is determined by the way I manage my energy. But I think even more so, as I’ve transitioned into a formal job championing diversity of representation, inclusive work culture, and equitable systems and practices, I find that there is a greater demand on the energy I need to get through each week. Even when I close my laptop at the end of each day, there’s a piece of the work that carries on and lingers in my mind in a way that didn’t happen in the days before this job; when I could close my laptop in the early afternoon and not think twice about running to the park to bathe in the sun and forget about the struggles of being a Black woman in a white working world. Where I used to only confront my Blackness in ways that were affirming through my social and personal frivolities, the role that I’ve tasked myself with at work is ensuring that my Blackness and that of others will be embraced and celebrated by the work environment that was created to exclude it.
Blackness and the Western world of work simply don’t mix. Corporate structures and even the Western concept of work are built on oppression, second-class citizenry, and enslavement. As diversity, equity, and inclusion professionals, our championing and elevation of these principles in the workplace aren’t meant to undo that exclusion; “diversity work” has never been able to achieve its radical mission to reimagine the way we work alongside one another. Rather, it’s meant to serve as a boy scout’s badge of honor, a meaningless patch proudly displayed to allow whiteness to proceed undetected.
And so what is meant for me? This Black woman, working in an environment that never had me in mind, navigating structures that were built for those with the privilege of expecting that the world bends to their mediocre whims. This Black woman, whose ancestral values of community and care clash molecularly with the white western world’s values of individualism and exploitation. What’s meant to be my end?
As I’ve begun to coach and support more Black and Brown people at my place of work, I hear that resounding echo of “these are not my people.” “They don’t value the same things I do.” “I’m made to feel that my way of being and doing is not welcome.” “I’m made to feel that I do not belong.” “I’m made to feel grateful that I even have a chance to stand in the room, not to mention a seat at the table.” Those sentiments, echoed by my own experiences, lead me to a place of near insanity, where my ancestral duty to create space and connection is at direct odds with my professional responsibility (a so-called loyalty to the company that barely wants me here).
With this newfound insanity, I sought to build my own community of support, with coaches, therapists, friends, and peers, and then eventually to other thought leaders on Black Twitter. In that building, I found this haunting affirmation:
“A woman close to me said: ‘there’s a certain degree of cognitive dissonance women need in order to be able to enjoy most of the rap music and that made me very sad.”
Source.
I heard this alongside the struggles and tensions that I felt at work, affirming what I’d been feeling in my every day: a cognitive dissonance, a multiplicitous consciousness with either side at odds with the other, a lived-in tension between me and who this environment is expecting me to be.
Issa Dee staring her reflection in the bathroom mirror; Season 3 Insecure Trailer.
For Black women, whose womanhood erases her Blackness and whose Blackness erases her womanhood, who sit in a tension that is envious and thieving. I’m reminded of bell hooks’ words in shaping feminist theory, acknowledging Black women’s “unusual position in this society.”
For Black professionals in the nexus of authenticity vs access, burning in the flames of the gaslit seat, at the table and blugeoned by the stones thrown at a weary back by a community waiting for the doors to finally open. I think about Issa Dee’s position in season 5 of Insecure, between elevating authentic Black voices in her community and being told by white gatekeepers that those voices are too loud to be heard. Being told not now, not yet, Being told this one is too much.
For Black people between community and capitalism, eroded by the constant need for more and burdened by the need that ‘we should overcome.’ Our Black billionaires, deciding between the individualism that brought them success and the community that could hungrily devour more than they could ever amass.
What do we do in these tensions that threaten to pull us apart? “A rock and a hard place is what we call Monday.” Finding a space of comfort has been difficult. In past lives, I’ve leaned on the shelter of other Black women, in the forms of mentorship and friendship. Here lately, where the privilege of remote work offers the consequence of creating work that is inescable, those shelters have been harder to find. Standing strong against the current of status quo require dedicate energy and intention. Solace is found in knowing that while feeling alone, we are among countless others who have thrived under the tenuos circumstances, still finding a place for love, joy, honor and hope.
