Dear women of color and gender-expansive people of color in the workplace,
We see you.
We see you out there in the workplace being amazing and brilliant.
We see how much you care about the organizations that you lead or are part of, and how your knowledge, talents, skills and experience mean that you can see where things are working and where things aren’t. As women of color, you’ve had to see the things that others can’t or don’t have to.
We know you have a vision for how things could be different, yet it is exhausting trying to be seen and heard for the value and vision that you bring.
We see the constant calculations you have to make about when to speak up and how, trying to hit the impossibly thin line where you are speaking loudly enough to be heard but not so loudly as to be characterized as angry or divisive and therefore targeted, undermined or dismissed.
And we know how often you are tokenized - showcased so your organization can assuage their guilt and pat themselves on the back for being “one of the good ones” without actually providing you with the support you need to be successful.
We know what it is like to be hired to do a job and then punished for doing it, somehow labelled as the “problem”.
We know what it’s like to have to operate within an environment of lip service - and it’s not even that an organization doesn’t mean what it says. Often the intentions are sincere but the actions and results aren’t aligned. The gaslighting is systemic... and then we end up doing it to ourselves, which in many ways is the worst part. It feels like screaming into the wind because we can’t even hear ourselves any more.
We know that you’re exhausted from the invisible work, the unpaid emotional labor, the caretaking, the “behind the scenes” heavy lifting, and the lack of credit or recognition. Or compensation.
We know you are worth so much more, and could have so much more of an impact at so much less of a cost to you if you only had a chance.
We know you. We see you. We are you.
We’ve been there and we are here for all of our healing because we know the world will be better for it.