Disrespecting Black Women Won't Get You Fired
October 19, 2020
Jessa Ciel
Anita Hill can testify to it.
No one gets fired for disrespecting the Black woman. She takes everything you can’t say to White, Latino, Asian, Indigenous and Black men. No matter how competent, she is considered fair game for the pile on of guilt, blame, anger, and frustration in the company work place. What’s worse is that you know she has to hold her tongue for fear of being fired for disturbing the peace. She has generations to feed. She needs this job.
Notes On Being a Black Woman
Noname said, “I know. The money don’t really make me whole, the magazine covers drenched in gold.” The elusiveness of status and property to the Black American has created both a fixation on and an indifference to material wealth. Some of us are ravenous for the spoils we have been denied for generations. Some of us have schooled ourselves in the satisfaction of intangible outcomes: the joy of giving, the high of love, the pleasure of service. Rarely do we strike a perfect balance, but then again we reflect the priorities of the America we live in. It’s complicated.
There’s a special complexity around this issue for Black women. Black women, caught between the power struggle of race, gender, and class, are compelled to save everything in the world but ourselves. What has been devalued externally becomes internal invalidation. We don’t have the things because we never get the things; we don’t get the things because we are too busy trying to give, give, give. Due to our lack of access to the tools of power, there are no real consequences for disrespecting black women. No one gets fired for fucking us over. We are both the shovelers and the bodies being covered in dirt.
“Black women, caught between the power struggle of race, gender, and class, are compelled to save everything in the world but ourselves.”
Black women learn from a very young age to take deep breaths in the face of abuse, hurled insults, trauma, and hatred. We’ve heard all the ways we are ugly before we turn twelve. We learn how to observe and listen from the pain of being ignored. Those of us raised in white society sit in classrooms with professors who profess the unlikelihood of us making it in our fields of choice. And when we enter the workplace, we’re further indoctrinated in the art of knowing our place. Every mistake we make has five times the consequence. We grip the doorway bareknuckled and straining to get in; even after entering we are always on the precipice of being pushed out.
This isn’t another “and despite all, she triumphed.” I’m tired of triumphant stories at the expense of our emotional and mental health. Black women are not ok; we’ve just learned to endure extraordinary amounts of pain with little change of expression. Worse, we know there’s no sympathy in a world that believes we deserve it.
Faith McKinnie and a Very Specific Example of the Lack of Appreciation of Black Woman Gifts
Faith McKinnie, a Black woman curator in Sacramento, recently wrapped a show for the artist Lin Fei Fei. Faith worked day and night, helping to design and hang the show, curating the artwork, figuring out the language of the expression of the show’s themes with the artist, and selling the work amidst a growing pandemic. When Lin was forced to shut the show down out of concern for the health and safety of visitors, Faith helped her to write a grant for recouping lost funds from the city. She was a friend to Lin, helping to ease fears and helping to re-open the show at half-capacity despite her concerns about having anyone gather indoors. Faith was at the show, selling work, leaving the artist free to create and avoid interaction with the public.
After the show closed, Lin disputed a commission on a piece in the show that she had sold for trade. A trade that cut Faith out of the deal, the only way that she could earn money for the countless hours she spent in a space with strangers, risking her very life for her belief in what this artist could achieve. Refusing to settle the money dispute without resolution, Faith decided that this, this tiny little commission of $400, was something that she could not in good faith concede. She had conceded so much else during the long course of a show that started pre-pandemic, and was still going on deep into the summer months. A show that originally had a run of three months had turned into more than a year’s worth of work that Faith was barely being compensated for.
So Lin sued her. Let me repeat that. Lin Fei Fei sued her. Faith got a call from a lawyer that worked for Lin’s boyfriend. The lawyer let Faith know that she should expect to see Lin in court over her $400 commission. He then conceded that Lin had already spent more on retaining his services than Lin owed for the commission.
While Black Women are Protecting You, Who is Protecting Them?
No one gets fired for disrespecting Black women. Around the world, it is known that of all the people you bully, Black women are fair game. It’s why we’re aggressive. It’s why we fight. We’re the only ones who will prevent our death by a thousand feet stepping on our backs to get closer to the proverbial “top.” We seem to be the only ones to know that this course is not the way to heaven.
Faith spent a year in Lin’s studio, planning and dreaming next to her; working for Lin’s star to reach the sky. The thing she didn’t realize is that she wasn’t invited on the flight. She was a stepping stone to the destination and she was supposed to be grateful for the proximity to the foot driving her deeper into the dirt.
“The penalty for a Black woman’s death is to lose your job. ”
Breonna Taylor was an ER technician who wanted to become a nurse and was instead gunned down by police looking to arrest her ex-boyfriend for drug-dealing. It took an international outcry and months of pressure on local, state, and federal government for her murderers to even go to trial and weeks for a grand jury to not convict them. Sandra Bland was arrested for failing to signal to change lanes and died hanging in her jail cell three days later. A brief investigation concluded her death a suicide. After a national outcry, her arresting officer was fired.
The penalty for a Black woman’s death is to lose your job.
Black, Black, Stop Stepping on our Backs
America expects Black women to save them even when it’s intent on destroying itself. Black women voters in Alabama were heralded for preventing an alleged child predator from winning the Senate seat by a mere 21,000 votes. Black women are the most reliable voters for the Democratic Party. Tarana Burke started the #MeToo hashtag that grew into an international outcry for women who had held their tongues against their sexual assaulters for generations. Black women are the sassy characters in America’s endless stage play who dole out deep wisdom and nestle your children to their bottomless bosoms.
And the worst penalty of our deaths is to lose your job?
The disrespect of Black women is so ingrained into societies around the world that Lin Fei Fei, a woman artist born in China knows that in order to get ahead in the world, one can always step on the back of a Black woman.
Stop digging. Take your hand off of the shovel. Put it down for goddess sake. Take a walk and stop. Look up at the stars. Imagine that the infinite Black is the skin of ancient Negresses, that the stars are their eyes monitoring your treatment of the next Black woman you encounter. Think about it as you encounter others. Think about it as you encounter yourself.