What's the viewpoint of the Obama women on how their success might affect other black professionals? I asked them, but the White House was not enthusiastic about administration officials participating in this story. One press secretary told me, “We’re now transitioning out of that phase” to focus on “substantive policy issues.” In my view, the continued existence of the concrete ceiling is, in fact, a substantive issue. But of the 10 or so D.C. women I contacted, only one, EPA chief Lisa P. Jackson, agreed to speak. I read her those dispiriting statistics about black women that had so startled me. “I’m actually surprised as well,” she said. Jackson has always worked in the public sector, and she sees it as historically more welcoming than the private sector to women and minorities. (Her father was a New Orleans postal worker at a time when segregation severely limited the choices of all African-Americans.) The advancement of the Obama women, she says, is “a continuation of a trend, but certainly the largest expansion of it in terms of brilliant women in positions of real authority, [of] leading by example.”
Despite all the obstacles, I’m confident the time will come when the example Jackson and her colleagues are setting will have a ripple effect, when professional-level black women will cease to be seen as unicorns, when we will get the recognition—and visibility—we have earned.
“The Obama administration has given us an image that’s very new today but 20 years from now will be extraordinarily normal,” says Ella LJ Edmondson Bell, associate professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and author of Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity. “This is the first time in our history that we have been able to get a glimpse of what a multiracial workforce looks like, particularly in the White House.
“But this is just coming attractions,” Bell adds. Demographics are on black women’s side, she says: In less than 10 years, 83 percent of the entering workforce will be composed of women, immigrants and people of color.
But 10 years, 20 years . . . that feels like an awfully long wait.
As with so many other groups who’ve struggled for equality, the younger black women reaping the rewards of an older generation’s efforts often have a sunnier outlook on just how much race matters. And social class can reinforce that buppie bubble: If you’re not the first in your family to get through the door, most likely you’ll have a comfort level around white folks that makes it easier to play the corporate game. That’s true for the age group that I call the Hybrids, those of us who were born from 1959 to 1969 and grew up in the post–Civil Rights, pre-hip-hop period. Not coincidentally, many of the Obama women are Hybrids. Riding the cusp between boomers and Gen Xers, post-segregation and allegedly post-racial, we’re comfortable straddling the line between Harvard and the hood. Growing up as we did next to kids of other colors makes for a worldview radically different from that of our parents, many of whom grew up in Jim Crow America.
“I can run up one side of the culture and down the other, and I can do it with ease and authenticity because I’m not fighting the same battles that my mama did,” says Washington Post journalist Lonnae O’Neal Parker, 42, author of I’m Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood, and Work. “I’m taking it for granted that you’re taking my humanity for granted on a basic level.” Her experience is very different from that of Dartmouth’s Ella Bell, 60, who says, “We were the ones who walked in the door, and there wasn’t a welcome mat for us. We had to learn how to survive, how to play the game. We got hurt; we got wounded; we got insulted.”
Not feeling that you have to go in fighting the power is a luxury afforded us Hybrids. And it makes for a very different work experience from that of, say, broadcast pioneer Cathy Hughes, chair and founder of the Radio One and TV One networks, who was born in 1947 and came of age in the Black Is Beautiful era of the 1960s and 1970s. For her generation of black boomers, Hughes says, the mere sight of a black man on a date with a white woman was enough to ignite all sorts of hurt and resentment. “We would confront a white woman in the bathroom, or say something under our breath about the brother,” she recalls. “That certainly translates over into the workplace. There’s that bitterness. My generation was constantly in a defensive posture: ‘Did I not get this promotion because I’m black?’ ”
I can’t help but feel that, conversely, my Hybrid peers and I are sometimes too slow to recognize discrimination, whether it’s based on race, gender or both. “You all might be slow on the uptake, but we were overly paranoid,” Hughes says. “Maybe the next generation will find a happy medium.”
Ah, Generation Next. Thanks to the rap industry, African-Americans like Russell Simmons, P. Diddy, Jay-Z and Damon Dash got seriously rich building businesses that were, to steal a phrase from a hip-hop clothing line, “for us, by us.” And female entertainers such as Beyoncé and the rapper Eve, as well as Simmons’s ex-wife, the model Kimora Lee Simmons, have done the same. The result: a new generation of entrepreneurs. According to Hughes, whose organization conducted a study of black consumers, the hip-hop generation (that is, twenty- and thirty-somethings) doesn’t care so much about making it in corporate America: “They’re saying, ‘Oh, no, I’m going to college so I can work for myself.’ ”
“Maybe we need to redefine what we mean by success,” says Fox’s Andrea Berry. “Who’s defining it as, ‘Woe is me, we don’t have any numbers in corporate America’? Who gives a shit? If they’re not going to give it to us, then we need to create our own.”
And be so visible doing it, the world will no longer feel compelled to remark upon our uniqueness. If that happens, the black women of Generation Next will not find themselves weeping in front of their TVs just because a smart black woman is having a prime time moment.
Originally published in the October 2009 issue of MORE.
Teresa Wiltz is a senior culture writer for TheRoot.com. She lives in Washington, D.C., and is writing a book about race.
African-American women are a major force in the Obama administration: The New Face of D.C. Power. But how are they faring in other parts of the workplace?
WEB EXTRA: MENTORING AND NETWORKING
Despite our qualifications, black women are still hugely underrepresented in the corporate world and in other centers of power. The reasons are varied—corporations are often ineffective at putting their own diversity policies into practice, or still practice a form of tokenism where one black woman is seen as fulfilling a quota. Another factor holding us back: Us. As Ella LJ Edmondson Bell sees it, we tend to be outspoken and self-sufficient. All good qualities. But, says Bell, an associate professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and author of Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity, “We’ve been taught, ‘Put your nose to the grindstone.’ ‘Why do I need relationships? I’m working as hard as I can.’ But you can’t be a leader if you don’t build relationships.” Building relationships builds buzz, and buzz is what gets you noticed. “For black women, that buzz is lacking . . . Buzz is about performance and relationship. Sometimes we sabotage ourselves . . . Sometimes we leave [a job] too soon. It takes longer for us; we think it’s going to happen overnight. And when you leave too soon, you don’t get the goodies.”
Some of the issues are similar to (if perhaps more intense than) those that have dogged white women’s professional progress: the glass (or, as some African-American women call it, “concrete”) ceiling; the stereotyping (we’re too confrontational, too aggressive, too quick to question authority); the exclusion from informal networking opportunities for those of us who do want to build the buzz.
A key component to breaking through those barriers, experts say, is mentorship, someone to help you navigate the intricacies of work life, whether work means a law firm, a major corporation, academia or an hospital. According to Katherine Giscombe, vice president of women of color research at Catalyst, a New York–based research firm that studies women in business, women of color who had two or more mentors are much more likely to be promoted, and that, generally, “the more diverse the mentors in terms of the type of support they provide, the better.” Better still: Having a sponsor who has got the power to push you forward. “You need a rabbi,” says Bell.
“Those of us who trail-blazed before, we had our mentors, but it wasn’t as obvious at times,” says Judith Jamison, 66, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. “Everybody had everybody’s back, but now it’s really out there. Women are supported in ways that were not obvious before.” Fifteen years ago, Jamison started a women’s initiative for female choreographers of all colors, many of who now have their own dance companies. “Mentorship is important, absolutely,” she says. “It’s key, all the way from my family, through my teachers, through the wisdom you honor and respect. I’m thinking [dancer/choreographers] Carmen de Lavallade, the Mary Hinksons along your way, Sylvia Waters and Agnes de Mille, if that isn’t mentorship, I don’t know what is.”
There are formal networking organizations, like historically black sororities such as the Alpha Kappa Alphas (which celebrated its centennial in 2008) and Delta Sigma Theta (my grandmother’s sorority), and the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, which focuses on promoting leadership development and gender equity for women of color.
But many women, like Andrea Berry, a 48-year-old senior vice president for broadcast operations at Fox Networks, find that they tend to network along more informal lines, getting together for lunches, or unofficially mentoring young talent. “There’s a sisterhood,” Berry says of her fellow African-American vice presidents at Fox. “But whether we can do an organized thing for the betterment of people, I don’t know if we have time for that,” she muses. “We’re all working; we all have husbands; we all have kids. The work-life balance for all women in challenging.” (Berry, who has a mentee herself, notes that many of her peers have decided they want to leave corporate life and start giving back.)
“I’m not a joiner,” says Tanya Chutkan, 47, an attorney who is a partner specializing in litigation and white collar criminal defense at the high-profile Washington, D.C.–based law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. “What’s been helpful to me are other women in the areas in which I’ve practiced who’ve reached out to me. When I was a summer associate, partners in my firm would take us to lunch. Now I make it a habit to take the summer associates out.” D.C. is a small enough city, Chutkan says, so that women lawyers know each other and will pass along cases that they can’t take. Or, if they know someone who’s applying for a judgeship, it’s, “Let’s email the people we know and lobby for them. Informal lobbying and mentoring and reaching out, that’s more effective than a formal organization.”
Whether black women choose formal or informal networking routes, “you open your own doors,” says Judith Jamison. “There is no ceiling. You create your own space.”
“You put your best foot out there in the world, and never forget where you came from, and how far you came,” Jamison adds. “Because you didn’t get there by yourself.”
African-American women are a major force in the Obama administration: The New Face of D.C. Power. But how are they faring in other parts of the workplace?
