Musical chairs – Photo: kidsparties.com
I took part in the most interesting, and edifying of Twitter conversations yesterday evening. Black and multi-cultural women all over the Twittersphere came forward and bravely acknowledged that they sometimes did not feel it in themselves to support other successful sisters. That seeing another professionally successful Black woman did not always inspire pride, admiration or a sense of unity. Rather, some of the feelings that would surface would be more along the lines of angered pride, resentment, maybe jealousy?
And I could not help but grasp a clear reflection of myself in these tweet-testimonies. Faced with the success of our counterparts in an otherwise limited and limiting professional and corporate space, we often err on the side of disunion as opposed to unity…And we’re certainly not all to blame for it…
It’s like playing musical chairs: for one sister to find a solid corporate seat, another sister has to lose hers. Or such is the comparison that is very often drawn upon when it comes to Black women in most professional spaces…And then ensues the stereotypical, and largely inaccurate, perception that we are not supportive of each other…
It’s not until I started my own corporate journey, and noted the real and disheartening absence of corporate sisters, along with the scarcity of opportunity for women in general, and Black women in particular, that I started to understand better…Professional black women networks were not easy to find then, and still are not today, especially for some of us who don’t live in a big city like New York, Boston, or Atlanta…Mentorship for Black women professionals is hard to find, to the point of being almost non-existent. I mean, just finding a peer sister in the workplace that can understand some of the same concerns, struggles or achievements we share is as rare as can be…
When and if there’s not enough room at the top, or in the middle, or even closer to the bottom of the corporate food chain for that matter, we as humans turn to protecting the little we have. It’s not social science, it’s just survival. And to make matters even worse, many, if not most of us, are the breadwinners or main providers for our close and extended families. That’s survival times 10. In some cases, scarcity brings people together; yet when scarcity is endemic, economic and psychological, it’s a whole other story…
So what do we make of these too few chairs? Do we keep watching some sisters being left out while others struggle to stay in? Since the music is not going to stop playing for long, we may just need to reach out to each other and share a chair…Or even better yet, we need to learn to make new chairs so more of us can sit at the table and enjoy the music…
Do you think we need to create more corporate chairs?
The Corporate Sister
