To understand my work, my passion, and why I center the experiences of dark skinned African American women & femme employees in workplaces across the USA, one must understand when I accepted the “call to duty” 20 years ago in what I now know is Black August in the USA.
Non-exempt worker, African American single mother of five working for the Federal Government in housekeeping in Washington, DC.
At 48 years young, she had suffered a major medical event that required permanent retirement on disability. With a career that had spanned 23 years in the feds including serving 8 years in the Army, her highest salary of less than $50K in 2003 was quite a feat for a Black woman with a high school diploma who had been born and raised in the dire poverty of the Appalachia of West Virginia.
A savvy fighter, she had risen through the ranks in her Union and demanded the Supervisor role that I retired her from.
One wonders if there had been no delay in the approval of the workplace accommodations she had requested, a month prior to her ruptured brain aneurysm and subsequent heart attack and stroke, what her maximum salary and impact could have been on the Architect of the Capital where she had been made housekeeping supervisor. That we’ll never know…
However, I do know that because of my work on her behalf pushing through her retirement benefits with the OPM, she was able to see her youngest 3 children graduate from high school and she currently lives comfortably off those retirement benefits 20 yrs later. For that, we’re grateful and she is blessed.
While it is true that the USA treats all women racialized as Black as mules in this system, it’s important to acknowledge and shift our focus to the fact that it is dark skinned African American women born at the bottom of the hierarchy of class + race + gender +… who have always felt the brunt of the violence of this nation, by the design of its “founders.”
We must protect Black women and make it intersectional by CLASS. Join me in helping countless women like my mother, and old me, learn the tools they need to fight back on their own behalf and on behalf of their mothers/families overall in workplaces across the USA.
The Future of Work is an educated workforce demanding everything they’re legally entitled to; anything less is status quo violence.
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