Millennial Black

Sophie Williams

• Publisher: HQ
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780008401894
• eBook ISBN: 9780008401900
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

For fans of Slay in Your Lane and Little Black Book, this is the much-needed roadmap for young black women to succeed in the workplace in 2021 and beyond.

From tips on setting boundaries, and avoiding the race pay gap, through advice on building your own ‘lady gang’, establishing your value and being able to negotiate, to tackling the serious issues of workplace sexual harassment and racist abuse, this is a comprehensive guide to building the career you want and being recognised in the workplace.
 
It also offers implementable guidance for employers and business owners who are tackling the essential task of building and retaining inclusive and diverse offices, as well as looking to be effective allies and leaders in the future of inclusive working.
 
Packed with interviews and insight from trailblazers at every stage of their careers, including June Sarpong, Aja Barber, Candice Brathwaite, Naomi Ackie and Munroe Bergdorf, this is the ultimate guide to the workplace for black women.

CHAPTER 1

WHY MILLENNIAL BLACK?

‘There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.’

AUDRE LORDE

I’m aware that both of the words that make up the title of this book will be seen by some as jarring. They’re both words that can make people feel a little uncomfortable, for different reasons. Millennials are a group that have so often been the butt of the joke, parodied and analysed in both pop culture and news, to the extent that even identifying as a Millennial is something that some feel is an association they don’t want to make. Black can be an uncomfortable word too, loaded because of the stigma that has been associated with it for so long, especially for many who have been brought up to try to avoid using it all together as a descriptor of people. We could avoid talking about these words, and why I’ve chosen to put them so very front and centre, or we could dive right in. I’m not one for avoiding a tricky conversation, so off we go! First let’s start with why Black, and then we’ll talk about why Millennial.

Why Black?

If you’re a Black woman, are you Black first, or woman first? All too often in my life, as a Black woman, I’ve felt the push from others to quantify and order myself in those terms. More Black or more woman? Feminist first or Black activist first? White women and men are not asked to tear themselves in two in this way. They don’t have to rip themselves down the middle and then weigh the pieces to see which they were really made of more. Because whiteness is seen as a neutral, their race is seen as the baseline by Western society, and so it’s negligible, unremarkable in a way that Blackness isn’t. It’s a blank canvas.

Black women, like all people with multiple intersections to their identities, are not more one thing or the other. We can’t choose for the world to treat us as just a woman one day, and just Black the next. We’re both, full-time, for all of the good, and all of the bad.

What I would say for Black women is that I think we should never forget that we have such a unique perspective in life, in the sense that we understand gender discrimination, and we understand racial discrimination. And for sure, racial discrimination is way worse. I think if anyone needs that question answered, ask a Black woman. Because only a Black woman can tell you definitively what the two feel like.

– June Sarpong

The feminist movement, which was never built with the advancement of Black women in mind, has nonetheless always relied on support from Black women. In return, they have always asked that we sacrifice our Blackness in favour of our womanness, pushing for the advancement of women overall, which has always seen white women as the primary beneficiaries, with Black women left as little more than an afterthought once the battles that we have fought shoulder to shoulder in have been won. The long tail of this is that all too often, in a business context, ‘diversity’ has meant the advancement of (cis, straight) white women, and movements such as the push for greater representation of women in boardrooms, or the publishing of gender pay gap stats, have failed to take into account the narrowness of the group to benefit from them. This legacy is not lost on Black women today.

I’m in a space right now where I’m kind of reluctant to call myself a feminist, which is crazy because actually, yes I am a feminist, but a lot of the feminists I see have made a constant effort to erase me and my Black sisters and women of colour in general from the conversation – so to loop myself into something that I see so many potholes in, in order to appease the wider audience, doesn’t feel authentic to me. I’m far more of an intersectional feminist, and if anything I’m a Black feminist – because all of our realities are different, and the more we start going under one umbrella and saying, ‘we’re all for all’ without looking at the structure of how power works [the more] we’re always going to uphold that same structure unconsciously.

– Naomi Ackie

We are Black, and we are women, simultaneously and forever. It is our identity, it is how we see ourselves, and – just as importantly – it’s how the world sees and reacts to us.

I know a light-skinned, mixed-race woman might not be the person you’d imagined writing this book, or occupying this space. Honestly, I know. I know that being mixed-race gives me the privilege of proximity to whiteness, and I know that my experiences aren’t always going to be representative of all other Black women’s experiences. No one can, or should, try to represent a whole group. All too often Black women are treated as a monolith, denied individuality or nuance, denied texture and shade; we must be as one – we must feel all of the same joys, and our bodies must ache and crack in all of the same ways. Because we are one, one voice can represent us all, since we only have one story to tell, and so to understand one of us is to understand us all. That’s simply not true, we are as varied and colourful and beautifully individual as any other group, and we need to be celebrated for our individuality, rather than being forced into the same broad-stroked, wide-lens view that has been our lot up until now.

A lot of people talk about oppression Olympics. When you bring up the subject of women’s rights as an issue in itself, everyone wants to be seen as a supporter of them. But the moment you mention Black people’s rights, that’s the moment you’re told to hush down. [I’m a woman,] I am also a Black person, and those two things, for me, aren’t separate. I come as a whole package. So, I’m looking for those networks that tell me it’s OK to be Black, and it’s OK to be a Black woman.

[I once] had someone tell me that they don’t see colour, and my automatic response, ‘Well, then you don’t see me.’

– Lopè Ariyo

I am Black. I see myself as Black, I identify as Black, and the first thing that the world sees about me is my Blackness. I will admit I had a choice in this, whilst many – most – don’t. For years I had relaxed hair, and that, combined with my light skin and eyes, meant that I could move through the world easily. More easily at least. People would think I was ‘interesting’ or ‘exotic’ – appealing in some way, rather than treating me with the disdain or dismissal that is so common in Black women’s daily interactions. As I reached my mid-twenties I realised that this wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want an easy ride at the expense of other people. If I had this advantage of proximity to whiteness and white privilege, I wanted to use it, and use my voice to lift the voices of those who are too often overlooked and undervalued in conversations where they have the most skin in the game. So, I made the conscious choice to stop putting any distance between myself and Blackness. I stopped changing the texture of my hair, I stopped staying quiet, or trying to make myself smaller, and I started demanding more.

I want to use my privilege, my access and my voice to tell the stories of individual people, and to treat them as individuals.

I hope that in reading this, Black women find a place where they feel seen, safe and supported. I should be clear that when I say Black women I am referring to anyone who self-identifies as such, I am not here to judge your Blackness or womanness, and neither should anybody else.

The second part of ‘Why Black?’ is more specifically ‘Why Not All Racially Marginalised People?’ and my answer to that is – because we are not the same. Yes, all non-white groups in Western countries are marginalised, and all suffer, in one way or another, from white supremacy. And, in fact, quite a lot of the ways that we suffer are the same. But there are some important nuances in the societal expectations of us, and our lived experiences, that are lost when we lump people into large, opaque groups. Millennial Black is deliberately focused on the professional working experiences of Black women. It will be the case that many of the themes and issues are more widely applicable, but Blackness and womanness (as defined by those who identify as much) are at the book’s very core.

There are (a lot of) instances where research about Black women as a standalone group is lacking. There is a lot of research about women, but often when we dig into the details we can see that the researchers are using the word women to mean only white, cis women. Similarly, there is a lot of research about Black people, but again when we dig into it we can see that it’s really Black men who have been the focus of their studies. In this way not much has changed since 1982 when the first edition of the seminal feminist anthology in Black women’s studies, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, co-edited by Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott and Barbara Smith, was published. In the instance where academic research about Black women as a specific, singular, standalone group is missing I have used research about the ‘BAME’ female experience overall (using the language that is used in the study, whether that is ‘BAME’, ‘BIPOC’, or ‘people/women of colour’), and where possible bolstered with testimonials and interviews from Black women about their personal stories and experiences.

The UK is far behind the US in terms of available research that focuses on Black women, with research instead nearly exclusively being focused solely on white cohorts, or all ‘BAME’ women, which ignores the difference in both history and lived experience between, for example, a Bangladeshi woman, a Chinese woman, and a Black woman. Where I have encountered these shortfalls I have opted to most often use US figures that are about Black women as an individual group, as UK stats don’t offer the same granularity.

Why Millennial?

Like millions of others, being a Millennial is part of my identity – who I am, and what I have experienced in my life to date. When I first started working on this book, I had a lot of discussions around the title. Was ‘Millennial’ a negative word? Would people self-identify with it in a positive enough way to want to buy the book, or had it been co-opted by news articles and think pieces about us being lazy and selfish beyond redemption?

In short, had a word that describes a cohort born between 1981–1996 (ish – depending on who you ask) been weaponised in such a way that no one wanted to associate themselves with it?

Personally, I think not. And here’s why.

The Millennial part of Millennial Black is important. It’s important that we recognise that not only do Millennials have different aspirations for their working lives than previous generations, and a different idea of what ‘success’ might look like – less corner office, more flexible working? Less a job for life, more hybrid skillsets and social purpose? – but that the challenges they (we) face are also very different.

Millennials came into the start of their working lives in what was at that time the worst economic recession there had been seen since the Great Depression. I graduated in 2008 – just as that recession truly bit, stepping out into my working life in an economy no one had any idea what to do with, or how to navigate. Now, in the middle of a global pandemic, Gen Z are experiencing something very similar – stepping out into a world that’s unpredictable and unrecognisable.

For those of us who started our working lives around that time, all of our expectations about climbing a professional ladder that resembled our parents’ were gone before they even started. And so, we had to adapt. We had to change what we wanted and how we were going to get it. And along the way we found some really great things – remote working, work-life balance, mission-driven enterprises, caring about our mental health. So now the old way of working needs to catch back up with us. Because we changed the game.

I think that Millennials in particular are doing really well at reframing what ‘effort’ is. It’s like, ‘Hold on, it’s so much more than hopping on a packed tube and sitting at a desk and lamenting your job.’ It’s so much more than that, it’s like, ‘What am I leaving behind to go to this job? If I’ve got kids, how am I making childcare work? How is my work-life balance?’ There’s just so much to consider now. And when you really break it down, more often than not, you’re not being paid fairly, if at all. You’re barely making ends meet if you really slice it down. But because, especially being Black and female, I know that my nan or a great-aunt would be like, ‘Oh, you should just hold on to that job – just be happy to be there, be happy to be employed. Don’t you go making no noise, don’t you go making a fuss. You know the rent or mortgage is due at that first of the month, so you put your head down, and you do a good job.’ And it’s like – no. People of my age are completely ripping up that rule book, because you are constantly reminded of how it could all just change in a blink, and I don’t want to be stuck working for someone who doesn’t respect me, or who doesn’t pay me well. And I know that those older than us have got into the habit of calling Millennials uptight or greedy – and it’s like, ‘Babe, you’re throwing these words around from your house where the mortgage has been paid off, because you bought it for what today wouldn’t even be a deposit.’ It doesn’t make sense, and I think those who don’t want to admit it doesn’t make sense just don’t want to admit that perhaps they’ve been looking at it wrong. It’s not like it was twenty–thirty years ago, it just isn’t now.

– Candice Brathwaite

The accusations most commonly levelled at Millennials are that we’re flighty, selfish and entitled. We expect the world handed to us but aren’t willing to do the work, so we just get bored and churn out of jobs. We have no stick-with-it-ness. This is simply not true; in fact, Millennials are just as likely to stick in a job, and with their employers, as their Gen X counterparts were when they were the same age. According to insights from Pew Research Center, a US-based organisation, 70 per cent of American Millennials interviewed in 2018, and 69 per cent of Gen X interviewed when they were the same age in 2002, said that they had worked for their employer for at least thirteen months, and 30 per cent of both groups had been with them for at least five years.¹ In fact, college-educated Millennials actually stick with their employers for longer than their Gen X counterparts did at the same age.² The image of Millennials as flighty seems to be little more than intergenerational projection, which we see every time one generation looks at the one coming u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Why Millennial Black?
• 2. Twice as Hard for Half as Much
• 3. The ‘Problem Minority’
• 4. The Strong Black Woman
• 5. The Angry Black Woman
• 6. The Overly Sexualised Black Woman – Dehumanised and Objectified
• 7. The Concrete Ceiling
• 8. Is One Enough?
• 9. Is Diversity the Same as Inclusion?
• 10. The Glass Cliff
• 11. Welcome to the Lady Gang
• 12. Be a Good Ancestor
• Wrapping Up
• Contributors
• Endnotes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Publisher