Who Breaks the Cycle?

Aug 25

6 min read

There is a conversation America continues to avoid: the complicated relationship between Black women and white women, and the ways racism can be learned, normalized, protected, and carried from one institution into another.

The disrespect does not suddenly appear when women enter the workplace. Bias can begin much earlier—in homes, communities, schools, friendships, and social circles where stereotypes about Black women are repeated or simply left unchallenged. A young white girl who learns, directly or indirectly, that Black women are less deserving of empathy, credibility, protection, or respect can carry those assumptions into adulthood unless something intentionally disrupts them.

Racism is learned behavior.

No child enters this world believing that another child is intellectually inferior, threatening, aggressive, less beautiful, or less deserving because she is Black. Those ideas are taught. Sometimes the lesson is explicit. Other times, it comes from what children observe: who their families socialize with, what is said behind closed doors, whose neighborhood is considered “good,” whose anger is feared, whose mistakes are forgiven, and who automatically receives the benefit of the doubt.

College should be one of the places where those assumptions are challenged. But college can also reinforce divisions rather than dismantle them. Historically white institutions and predominantly white social organizations including some sorority environments can reproduce racial and class hierarchies when traditions, networks, stereotypes, and ideas about who belongs are never critically examined.

This is not an indictment of every white woman or every sorority member. It is a challenge to institutions and individuals to recognize that sisterhood cannot stop at the color line. Education should interrupt prejudice, not give it a professional vocabulary and a powerful network through which it can travel. And then these young women graduate. They become supervisors, HR professionals, executives, professors, healthcare professionals, hiring managers, educators, attorneys, colleagues and decision-makers. The racial assumptions that may once have existed around a dinner table or within a social circle now encounter institutional power.

This is where bias becomes dangerous.

The stereotype of the “angry Black woman” can transform confidence into “aggression,” advocacy into “insubordination,” passion into “intimidation,” and an ordinary disagreement into a question of whether a Black woman is a “good fit. ”When those perceptions influence evaluations, discipline, promotions, compensation or termination, racism is no longer simply an offensive interaction. It has acquired economic power. And when a Black woman loses income, the consequences do not necessarily stop with her. They can reach her children, aging parents, housing, education, healthcare, retirement savings and extended family. They can interrupt the building of generational wealth.

This is why the conversation cannot end with whether someone intended to be racist. We also have to examine what racial prejudice does. And the numbers tell us that Black women are not imagining the disparities. Pew Research Center found that 53% of employed Black women reported experiencing at least one form of gender discrimination at work, compared with 40% of white women. Black women were also nearly three times as likely as white women to report being passed over for important assignments because of gender 22% compared with 8%.

The racial disparity is also striking. In Pew's 2023 research, 41% of Black workers said they had experienced discrimination or unfair treatment by an employer in hiring, pay or promotions because of their race or ethnicity, compared with only 8% of white workers. Then look at advancement.

And this is where the statistics become personal for me.

I know what it feels like to enter corporate spaces wondering whether I have the freedom to simply show up as my authentic self. There can be an exhausting process of readjustment before a Black woman ever speaks: How direct is too direct? How confident is too confident? Will passion be interpreted as aggression? Will advocating for myself suddenly make me “difficult”?

Those calculations never appear on a résumé.

But they can become part of the invisible price Black women pay for navigating environments where stereotypes existed long before we entered the room.

I have experienced enough professionally to understand that statistics about racial inequality are not abstractions. Behind those percentages are careers, reputations, opportunities, incomes and families. There are parts of my own story that I will tell more fully at the appropriate time.

For now, I will say this: we have to stop treating every Black woman's experience as an isolated event while the data continue showing us a pattern.

The numbers don't lie, and neither do the consequences.

But there is something else corporate America often misses.

A Black woman's lived experience is not a deficiency that needs to be edited out of her before she enters the conference room. It is knowledge.

You cannot data-extract it. You cannot manufacture it through a training module. You cannot duplicate it with an algorithm. What I bring into a room comes from education and professional experience, yes—but also from navigating uncertainty, solving problems when resources were limited, understanding communities organizations struggle to reach, and learning how to keep moving when circumstances become difficult.

My perspective is an organizational advantage.

Trying to hide who you are is next to impossible because every person brings a lifetime into the room. Black women should not have to become smaller, quieter, less accomplished, less assertive or more “palatable” to make other people comfortable.

Authenticity is not the problem.

Difference is not the problem.

The problem begins when someone's difference is interpreted as deficiency—and institutional power turns that stereotype into consequences.

We also need to talk honestly about what happens between women themselves.

Black women and white women can occupy profoundly different positions within the very same workplace. White women can experience sexism while simultaneously benefiting from racial privilege. Both realities can exist at the same time. Recognizing one does not erase the other.

That is why I keep returning to an intentionally uncomfortable question:

When will white women stop nurturing the racism they inherited?

Nurturing racism does not always look like screaming a racial slur.

Sometimes it is believing the stereotype before believing the Black woman. It is labeling her assertiveness “aggressive.” It is questioning her competence more intensely. It is excluding her from informal relationships where opportunities are exchanged. It is remaining silent when another white woman mistreats her. And sometimes it is exercising institutional authority without ever questioning whether racial bias influenced the perception that preceded the decision.

Pew found another extraordinary divide: 51% of Black workers said being Black makes it harder to succeed where they work. Only 18% of white workers said being Black makes workplace success harder.

Think about that difference.

Black and white employees can walk into the same American workplace and perceive the racial barriers inside it profoundly differently.

We cannot dismantle something we refuse to see.

And then we see disturbing incidents involving young people such as the recent video circulating from LSU involving a Black baby doll and we have to ask a deeper question: