Twice as Good

Leadership and Power for Women of Color

Mary J. Wardell

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642796315
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Frauen in Unternehmen

Twice Is Good is a guide for women of color to harness their power to lead across all areas of work life, take a stand on issues that matter to them and leverage their distinctive capacity for building inclusivity and community now.

With the emergence of the #MeToo, #TimesUp, and #BlackLivesMatter movements, as well as the election of the most diverse and female Congress in history, America is experiencing a referendum on what power and leadership looks like. Women of color are the answer to that referendum and uniquely positioned to assume powerful roles in the country. But first, is to be honest about the misogyny and racism that women of color experience at work and in their lives. In Twice as Good, Dr. Mary J. Wardell, an expert on diversity in the workplace and women of color in leadership, writes a stirring call-to-action for women of color who are ready to step into their power. Twice as Good shows women of color:

• Why their work community needs them to be the courageous leader
• The truth about why others fail to recognize the leadership capacity of women of color
• Ways to bring their passion and perspective into work to advance their leadership
• Stories from women of color who successfully aligned their personal power and cultural identity into their leadership
• Practices for taking the necessary steps to becoming a leader

Chapter 1

Race and Gender as Formation

“America is composed of all kinds of people—part of the difficulty in our nation today is due to the fact that we are not utilizing the abilities and the talents of other brown and black peoples and females that have something to bring to the creativity and the rejuvenation and the revitalization of this country.”

– Shirley Chisholm

I lost my mother over the time of writing this book and before it was complete.

She was born in rural Central Arkansas during the Jim Crow segregation in 1934. I am learning more about her early life and where she lived. She grew up in a loving black home and black community and excelled in school. Her father was a Baptist minister. Her mother grew beautiful vegetables. She ran track in high school and was known for being fast. Outside of the state-sanctioned terrorism of Jim Crow which excluded African Americans from fully participating in daily activities and prohibited them from engaging as full citizens in society, her family, church, and community life were great as it was all Black.

However, she also experienced and endured through what we know today as one of the worst periods of American public policy accompanied by public acceptance and opinion that treated African Americans without regard, respect, or dignity as human beings.

This period post-Reconstruction was a political and economic assault and attempt to diminish the collective imagination and ingenuity of a specific population of people in the United States. There was a systemic and structured endeavor to limit and destroy the capacity of African Americans to earn and gain a prosperous livelihood for their family coupled with a social, educational, and spiritual attempt to crush the spirit of a people and their pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

Remnants of this era continue today.

As they became adults and finished their education in segregated high schools, my mother and her siblings began to make their way into the world as young adults; migrants leaving their rural home seeking a better life in other parts of the country. Some of my uncles served in the military. Nearly all of my mother’s brothers went north where a steady flow of Black migration had already begun toward the great industrial cities where good jobs were available for African Americans.

My mother and her sisters decided to go out West to California.

Her migration decision would change everything and set my life on an amazing trajectory as a native California kid, born and raised. Through an act of migration, my parents gave their children the most multicultural, pluralistic community experience imaginable. Everybody on the block and in the neighborhood, was an immigrant and came from someplace else. Most of my friends in the neighborhood were all first-generation Californians. I was immersed in a rich diversity of ethnicities and cultures in school and in the community where people had close ties to their cultural heritage. Multiple languages were spoken, diverse religions were observed and practiced, and ethnic foods and their markets abounded. To illustrate my upbringing, my Latinx friends’ families were mostly from the central states of Mexico like Michoacán, my Filipino friends were nearly all first-generation Americans whose parents had migrated from the Philippines, the Italians and Irish had grandparents who migrated through Ellis Island before coming to the California Central Valley—many due to the pull of the agricultural region. My friends and their families who were Roman Catholics had a common language of Christianity that I understood and through which we bonded.

Most of the African American families like mine had ties to the southern states and nearly all of our parents were the first-generation cohort to reside in California. My black friends were mostly the children of the Great Migration as I was. We were the first group of California born children. Our Chinese neighbors came before most of the other ethnic communities of color and were a combination of recent immigrants and second or third generation Chinese Americans. All of my Japanese American school friends were the children of internment camp survivors. From a religious perspective, we were as diverse as can be. Most of the African Americans were Baptists like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been. The Germans and a few other Europeans were Protestants. The Greeks in the community went to a primarily Greek Orthodox church. And my Japanese and Chinese school friends grew up in Buddhist households. There was a community of Sikhs in town who I knew from school.

By 1976, I was introduced to my first cohort of Vietnamese, Laotian and Hmong classmates who immigrated to my community. Each year it seemed as though there were more refugee children arriving to our neighborhood and other neighborhoods from Southeast Asia. They would show up to class one day and be there with me and the school age youth. It would take years later for me to fully understand what they had recently experienced in their journey to sit next to me in the classrooms. The dangerous, dark open waters of their exits, leaving all that they knew behind as they fled often in the middle of the night as political and social refugees and freedom seekers, to come to the United States for a better life. Thousands would settle in my hometown. Most Southeast Asian immigrants were Buddhist as my Japanese friends were. Some were Christian. Eventually they would build their own temples, often in unincorporated areas in the outskirts of town.

We all went to school together. We all played sports together. We all hung out together. Without being aware of it at the time, I was learning about humanity through spending time playing with my old and new friends. Due to the steady flow of immigrant children who came to our community, I wondered why they left everything they knew behind and what it was like getting on a boat to travel and live where I lived. The only forms of transportation I knew of was the city bus, the school bus (for field trips), and my dad’s old Ford truck and the new Chevy Impala.

It would be some years later when I made my first known Jewish friends in college. It happened in the dormitory, outside of the classroom learning environment where I was finally able to learn about the Jewish religion and their culture and traditions from peers who were actually Jewish—beyond what I thought I knew from Sunday School class at church.

Everyone had a culture, a language, traditions, and foods that gave them a sense of uniqueness, faith, and pride for a culturally-informed and culturally-grounded American identity. Personally, I had my Black American culture, my Black church, my Black family and all the magic that came with it.

My mother gave me the gift of living in cultural diversity with diverse people and their diverse experiences, no less the stories of people who were different than my own. Coupled with her own courageous migration experience, her siblings and the migration of my father, my sisters and I were fortunate to have early life experiences with race and gender and that introduced different people that were familial, normal, and beautiful.

The racial and gender socialization I experienced went far beyond the limited black and white binary and narrative that we often saw reflected in the media. Even more so, the perspective that the country was either black or white and that everything important was done or led by white people only, was presented to us as children through our curriculum books at school, but that was not a reality where I lived.

There was little, if no, mention of people of color in the school textbooks and for some reason it wasn’t questioned—or at least I didn’t know of anyone who questioned. And when African Americans or Native Americans, specifically, were mentioned, I didn’t see the pride and vibrancy of the multicultural women and men in my community. Everything I learned about the actual achievement or contribution of Black people came from home or at church. In my community, Black people were makers and creative. We were singers and preachers. We danced, wrote, and invented music, and excelled at sports. We taught school, built houses, and worked for the post office. Black people were entrepreneurs and owned and operated businesses like automotive, beauty, and barber shops. We worked for the city government and the school district. We were hardworking, full of life, and talented.

I did not fully understand it at the time, yet our lived experiences as people of color in the neighborhood was not in line with what I saw about myself or others like me from the nightly news or television. What I knew came from direct encounters and experiences with mostly other people of color from diverse parts of the world. We assembled together through a common zip code. We shared essential establishments like the fish and meat market, the hardware and department store, schools, a park, and a library.

Where my mother chose to raise her children informed and impacted everything I know about gender, race, and class in America even through today. The brilliant part of all of this is that while I was immersed in a deeply multicultural, multi-lingual, and intra-faith living and learning environment, she also provided me access to learn my identity and what Blackness meant. My mother was under no false pretense regarding how the country disregards the gifts and talents of African Americans.

Having experienced segregation firsthand, she knew what oppression felt like beyond anything a college textbook or university lecture could communicate or fully capture. She knew about the concept of positionality as a lived experience, knowing full well the places she was invited and the places she could not go when desired.

She made sure we had a strong foundation in our faith, our history, and our cultural identity through raising me within the Black community and the Black Church.

Through my Black identity I know Twice as Good as an inspiration to push beyond the limited goals society had for me; a strategy and perhaps prescription Black parents gave their children for living and potentially thriving in America.

This notion of being excellent was what was available to her and other Black parents in preparing their children for an uneven and unfair playing field. “You’re going to have to work twice as hard, and be twice as good in everything, baby,” she would remind me. “And they’re not going to give you any breaks, especially if they see you are good.”

Now exactly who the “they” were that she spoke of, and how I would try to figure out what she really meant in her wisdom and advice would take years to decode and understand.

Disrupting “Twice as Good”

In college, the humanities curriculum gave me a language to further make sense of what was going on with the experiences of women and people of color. Through history, sociology, and literature, I was able to better articulate why I had always felt there was something wrong with having to work harder than everyone else.

I could finally put my finger on what really bothered me. I learned that racism and sexism were not only realities that occur on the individual level, from one person to another, but were part of an intentional social and economic structure that determined how and where people start in life. Even how fast and how far they progress was informed by structural inequity and supported by public policy and laws.

The racism and sexism we experience today was constructed by certain individuals and could have been avoided. What an epiphany that was for me as a young person.

I realized how much of my experience was engineered by people. By leaders appointed to improve society. The interests of groups of businessmen, politicians, and law makers—individuals and groups homogenous and similar to one another. Personal economic interests, mainly on the basis of sustaining class through capital, had a profound impact in creating the modern-day disparities we recognize along race, gender, and class. I sensed that individual effort alone could never ameliorate the engineered reality of structural inequity.

This is why “You’re going to have to be twice as good and work twice as hard” had become my mantra. Being both black and female in the United States would have some challenging days ahead. Ok, I had been prepared for this by the loving adults in my life. They had warned me in advance. They believed my best defense against racism was an offense of personal excellence. That was my play. It was on me to fix things by being and doing better against the odds.

Revelation and Resistance

I came to the revelation that the history of Black and other people of color revealed an attempt and successful effort to systemically prioritize and protect the interest of an elite class of males and their families. The comfort and prosperity of a class of white people came at the expense of people of color and other marginalized groups. This was normal and practiced on a daily basis.

As time progressed, to prioritize and protect those interests would mean to attempt to diminish the fullness of Black joy and Black prosperity. Even more so, white supremacy was much more than outrageous clans of individuals who were outliers in society lurking in wait to harm people of color as we were taught in school. White supremacy existed to prioritize the comfort and prosperity of white people at the expense of all people of color and was as American as apple pie. White supremacy was not a fringe group of bad individuals, yet rather an ideology of supremacy that provided for and allowed unearned advantage in all areas of society to persist for some without them even being aware of their participation and enjoyment in it.

Leadership behavior in the workforce, then, was an evolved expression of white supremacist thinking in organizations. A byproduct of white supremacy that had become perfected and disguised as management practice in the American workplace. That explained to me why expressions of misogyny and racism were actually normal, expected behaviors considering who led organizations. It would take social justice movements including labor rights, civil rights, women’s rights through court battles with enacted legislation to begin to course correct the centuries of repression and exclusion.

Twice as Good instructed me to look at others as the measure of what success looks like—others who were white and mostly male as the standard of how successful is behaviorally coded, who decides, and how success is determined.

My graduate level social justice education provided social and economic analysis and applied research skills to deconstruct how problematic and damaging Twice as Good is for Black and brown children. The Twice as Good standard left large segments of children behind as they started life with disparities in outcomes and this would continue through their childhood into adulthood. They had invisible yet real barriers in their lives. Every important facet of American life had life-altering remnants for children in education, healthcare, and socioeconomic outcomes. Was this their fault? And was it all on them to overcome?

I maintained an optimism in spite of this that had come from my family and community. All I knew for sure was that an individual Black girl had to keep moving and stepping forward to get things done for herself. I finally understood why this African American proverb (Twice as Good) never felt 100% right to me, even while I was doing it.

As an educator, I would wonder what would happen if organizations, businesses, and institutions used their platforms to do something about inequality for women and people of color. Could corporate values of diversity and inclusion permeate society beyond the walls of a major organization? Would institution leaders and trustees embrace their role to influence the lives of people like me? Does any major institution or corporate entity exist that truly cares about the freedom and liberty of women of color?

Over time, I would discover how the workplace became an active environment for Twice as Good to thrive and that it was a problematic reality. Twice as Good is a preemptive gesture or defense, if you will, to enacted organizational expression to unconsciously and consciously diminish (and at times destruct) the beauty and possibility of what it means to be a woman of color in the workplace. I knew this could not continue to be the only means available people of color for their success. I chose to persist, with what I knew from my upbringing and experiences, in spite of the injustice.

Movement and Migration

My mother and her siblings were part of what is called the Great Migration where six million African Americans exited the southern region of the country, becoming the ...