Kamala Harris Would Be A DEI President — And That's A Good Thing For America

I guess I fit the part.

I was given an abusive client because leadership assumed I had “the personality and resilience” to deal with it. I don’t know if it was the mammification stereotype of the strong Black woman that people love to eat up, but throughout my life I’ve been expected to perform like Superwoman to be considered average. In one instance (of many) in my career, I was asked to rebuild the entire partnership and infrastructure of a nationwide project with an extremely difficult client no one else wanted to work with, with little training, management or team support. Given I had been pushed to be excellent to be considered average my entire life, I overcame the challenge and helped scale up the campaign with this client to 250,000 participants and 1 million clothing donations, thus saving a sinking partnership all while being harassed on calls and receiving racist emails.

And, after all of this, a white teammate, who consistently made big mistakes on projects and hadn’t run a successful campaign, was given a promotion and a raise. I was told “Good job” but given nothing else for the hard work I put in. Failing upward is often a result of white supremacy while marginalized individuals are expected to over-perform to just keep their jobs. This is why many of us feel the ancestors’ refrain of “working twice as hard for half the results or pay or both” is real.

Before I ran my own leadership development and behavior change training company as a business owner, I worked across four industries and saw this double standard over and over again. It’s why when Vice President Kamala Harris announced her bid to run for president on the heels of the news that President Joe Biden was exiting his reelection race, the term