ONE
My Black Fatigue
I was hard-pressed to name it. It is an underlying syndrome of sorts that permeates my very being. It operates like a dull droning sound that is always present but most of the time is drowned out by the higher pitches of my optimism and hope. I now know it to be Black fatigue.
In sharing my story, I relate experiences of individual racism that do not explicitly uncover the systems that undergird such examples and make them possible. Racism operates at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels. It is often systemic racism that creates the day-to-day personal experiences that I share here and throughout the book.
The Early Years
My Black fatigue started when I was five years old. Of course, I did not know it then, but I now recognize how that incident affected me and the way I would interact with the world from then on. I was in kindergarten in 1956, just two years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision banning segregated schools.1 I was oblivious to all of that because I lived in the small town of Niagara Falls, New York, where the population was about 100,000 at that time and the Black population was probably no more than 10 percent. My school therefore was predominantly white. As a matter of fact, Karen (not her real name) and I were the only two Black children in the class. The ugliness of racism did not escape us.
One day Bobby (not his real name), a freckle-face white boy, called Karen and me the “n” word. We were not exactly sure what it meant, but we knew it was not nice, so we started crying. The teacher came to our rescue and inquired as to why we were crying. After we told her, she called Bobby into the coatroom and told him that his red hair was ugly, and his freckles were too. While I am not sure a child psychologist would have concurred with the teacher’s approach, it worked for us because Bobby was crying now too.
This was the first time I really knew that I was different and that somebody would be mean to me because of it. Consider the impressionable minds of five-year-old children and the realization that skin color made Karen and me the subject of disdain. My parents tried to explain what the word meant and how it was used to denigrate “Negroes.” (Yes, I am old enough that we were still referred to as Negroes.)
On that day, I changed from a carefree little girl to a cautious and insecure one, not being sure when somebody might be mean to me again because of the color of my skin. The realization that I might not be accepted by everyone—having to think about it and consider it—was and is stressful and contributes to Black fatigue.
It is not unusual for Black children to have life-transforming, aha! moments such as my kindergarten experience. Sometimes in our diversity learning sessions we ask the question, When was the first time you knew that you were different, and what did it feel like? It is not uncommon to hear from Black and other people of color that it was during participants’ formative years (ages 5–10). Research shows that babies as young as six months old demonstrate a preference for their own race.2
It was not so much the specific name-calling as it was the realization that I was Black, different, not considered as good as, that was indelibly planted in my mind and that my parents could not make me feel better about. I think I knew I was Black; I just did not know the implications. You see, my parents were Canadians, and not that they did not have their stories of racist situations, but they did not have the US southern racial experience. Both of my parents’ ancestors used the Underground Railroad to settle in Canada, and my mother loved her homeland much more than the United States, to the extent that she proudly carried her green card until the day she died at age 57. If she had lived, my parents were planning to go back to Canada after my father’s retirement.
My dad did not talk much about race, but my mother told me that the reason they did not graduate from high school was that “colored” children were only expected to matriculate to grade 9. My dad was born in the United States and was raised by an uncle in Niagara Falls, Ontario, because his parents had died within months of each other from tuberculosis. He served in World War II in a segregated troop, married, and moved to the American side of the falls and worked as a laborer for DuPont for over 40 years.
My stark awareness of my race just continued to escalate after my kindergarten experience. My mother had cousins who lived in Baltimore, Maryland. We drove to visit them from time to time. Every time we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, my mother would turn to me in the back seat and say, “Now you have to be good. Be quiet and sit still.” This was even before the police stopped us, which happened several times. They apparently saw the New York State license plates and a Black man behind the wheel and wondered what we were doing out of state. They always asked my dad, a very law-abiding, nondrinking, nonsmoking, pious Christian, “Where are you going?” I was so scared by these incidents that one time I even wet my pants. (I discuss the effects of race-based stress on children in chapter 8.) From the time I was five, being Black meant being on guard. As I read accounts from other authors who are writing about their early experiences with race, I find they are very similar to mine. So many Black and Brown people learned early that the color of our skin rather than their skin mattered in ways that frightened us not them and caused fear and stress.
Most of our vacations were spent in Canada with my mother’s family. She wanted to visit as much as she could, so we spent most holidays and summer vacations in Owen Sound, Ontario, about 110 miles north of Toronto. My aunt Frances (after whom I am named) was quite an activist, fighting for civil rights for the Saugeen First Nation of Indians to reclaim their land. I did not understand it all then, but during our visits to Canada, she was often consumed with marches and developing petitions and other legal documents. There were plenty of discussions about racism in Canada at the dinner table with Aunt Frances, my parents, and my uncles.
Other than the informal family discussions, I really knew very little about Black history in grades K–7. There were only cursory mentions in elementary school books, if any. In middle school, my best friend, Alnita, wrote an essay on Sojourner Truth. Alnita was brilliant and a great writer. She had a way with words even in the seventh grade. She read her essay in class and even the teacher was speechless. Most students at that age would write about a famous person in a very sterile, biographical fashion, but Alnita’s essay helped you to feel the pain and suffering, as well as the determination and audacity of Sojourner Truth. It was life changing for me for two reasons. First, I had never heard of Sojourner Truth, and second, I could not have conceived that there was a Black woman in the 1800s who challenged slavery and was an advocate for women’s rights in such a fervent and visible way.
Alnita spurred my love of writing and my interest in Black history. I learned that the NAACP had its roots in Niagara Falls. The Niagara Movement was a civil rights group founded in 1905 in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois gathered with a small group of supporters on the Canadian side because they could not stay in hotels on the American side. The purpose of this meeting was to form an organization dedicated to social and political change for Black people in the United States. The group put together demands that included an end to segregation and discrimination in unions, the courts, and public accommodations, as well as equality of economic and educational opportunity. While the Niagara Movement had little impact on legislative action, it led to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.3 Learning this bit of history about my region was truly exciting and motivated me to keep digging.
In high school, I was the editor of the school newspaper. This was the late 1960s and the civil rights movement was in full swing. I was writing about Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X (that piece was banned because of the widespread negative perception of him at that time), women’s rights, the Vietnam War, and other social issues of the day. More times than not, my pieces were edited by the teacher who oversaw the newspaper because she thought them to be too controversial. It was frustrating and fatiguing to be censured.
In my senior year of high school, after I was accepted to the University of Rochester, my guidance counselor suggested that perhaps that school was too lofty a goal for someone like me. Sorry, my bags were packed. I was going and I was going to show her (another stressor, feeling I needed to prove myself). When I arrived at the university, there were 69 Black students (the previous year there were only 10) out of a student body of about 5,000 undergraduates. There was a two-tier set of admissions criteria for students of color—Equal Opportunity Program and “regular admits.” I was a regular admit, meaning I did not have to attend the summer program designed to acclimate students of color to the university, but I was painfully aware that all of my professors assumed I was a part of the Equal Opportunity Program, and there were clear biases and signals that I/we did not belong. Regardless of my admission status, I know that it was because of affirmative action that I received a full scholarship to the university. My parents surely would not have been able to afford the tuition. I am proud to proclaim that I benefited from affirmative action. Without it, I know that I would not be where I am today.
The president of the university at the time said something to the effect that he thought most Black students would do better at the community college. The Black Student Union took over the administration building, demanding a retraction. I was a part of that takeover. As a matter of fact, we held many demonstrations and late-night meetings to bring light to the discriminatory behaviors that we were constantly subjected to, such as security officers questioning whether the students of color were really enrolled at the university. Sound familiar? In 2018 a white student called the police to report that a Black female was sleeping in a common area of a dorm at Yale University. The white student was concerned that she did not belong there, and it made her uncomfortable.4 It was fatiguing to have to justify one’s existence while attempting to concentrate on schoolwork.
Adding to my Black history acumen, upon arrival at the University of Rochester, I learned that Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman had run abolitionist movement activities in Rochester, New York. Douglass printed his North Star newspaper in the city, and Rochester was a part of the Underground Railroad. Douglass is buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery, which is adjacent to the campus.5 One Halloween a group of students decided to try to find his marker. I cannot even describe the feeling of knowing that these great freedom fighters walked the same ground as me.
While my undergraduate days were fun, the racism was truly exhausting and affected my ability to always be attentive to my classes.
Fifteen years after obtaining my bachelor’s degree and MBA from the university, I was elected as the first African American female trustee. During my time as a voting trustee, it was fatiguing to be the only Black person at many meetings and to continually point out the lack of diversity at all levels of the university and watch my concerns be minimized or dismissed. This is not meant as an indictment of the university; I am sharing my experience. It is the history of many universities in this country. The higher-education system has not changed since my days as a student or a trustee. Chapter 3 provides a then-and-now portrait of diversity in a number of aspects of society. The lack of progress is fatiguing.
The Work World
I started my work career in 1973, and affirmative action helped to jump-start it. The Eastman Kodak Company, along with most Fortune 100 companies at the time, was scrambling to comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Executive Order 11246, which was signed into law in 1965 and required not only nondiscrimination in employment but also affirmative action. I was hired into a management rotational program and landed in the affirmative action department. My job was to defend the company against discrimination complaints. Working with outside attorneys, I wrote “position papers.” Fresh out of undergraduate school with degrees in psychology and English, I felt woefully underqualified for the task. However, I was the token Black person that the company could showcase. There was really no one else of color at a higher level to take on this role. It was stressful and fatiguing because of the learning curve and feeling out of my element but also because I did not always believe that the company had not discriminated against the individual, or individuals in the case of class action suits.
A few years later I was one of four “high-potential” employees selected for the executive MBA program at the University of Rochester. The three others were white men who were all promoted to vice president roles after graduation. I, on the other hand, was asked what I wanted to do. I immediately selected a high-level role, since my classmates had been appointed to such positions. I was told by the head of HR that no such role was contemplated for me at that time. I was assigned to competitive intelligence in marketing. It was a new department (Kodak did not formalize a competitive process until the mid-1980s), and they thought it would be a good move for me. I was assigned to study Fuji, Kodak’s archrival. It was before the advent of the World Wide Web, so I had to do my research the old-fashioned way—library and LexisNexis.
I worked for six months on the Fuji presentation for the executive team. Proud of my super sleuthing skills and confident that this presentation would be my ticket to a management position, I made my presentation. I basically told leadership that Fuji would be a formidable competitor. It had plans to penetrate the US market. I was asked to leave after my presentation while my boss stayed behind (I did not rank high enough to hear the after-discussion). When he returned to the office, he did not look happy. He said that he had to fight for me to keep my job. The executive team did not believe my findings. They did not think Fuji was such a threat—they believed that I had sensationalized the presentation. I was shocked. Well, not to brag, but I was right. The Fuji blimp appeared in US skies the next year, Kodak lost the advertising bid for the Olympics to Fuji, and the rest, shall we say, is history. I do not know for sure why my assessment was not deemed credible; I can only assume that who I was contributed to their reaction. It was stressful and fatiguing.
The whole time I was in the corporate world, I did not know how to be. I had bosses who told me I was too aggressive and others who told me I was not aggressive enough. While sporting a short Afro hair style, I was asked whether my hair would grow. When I said yes, I was told that I should let it because the Afro was not professional. (Black women’s natural hair is still an issue today, as discussed in chapter 6.) The stress of not knowing who to be or how to show up so that I would be accepted led me to leave the corporate world to start my own business.
It was fatiguing to be tokenized, be discredited, and not be allowed to bring even half of myself into the workplace. The microaggressions (I will elaborate on them in chapter 6) were so common that I think I became hardened to them. I was miserable and often went home and cried about these experiences in the arms of my very supportive late husband, Joe, whom I talk about later in the chapter. The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back for me was when I had a blatant sexual harassment experience. I remained silent, but I could no longer stay in that environment. I was fatigued.
While my experiences in the corporate world happened over 30 years ago, I continue to hear the very same stories from young Black professionals today.
As you are reading this, you might be thinking, It seems like you did OK. Affirmative action worked for you. And there is no denying that it did. This is an example of a federal policy that enabled thousands of people of color at lower socioeconomic levels to go to college. Programs inspired by affirmative action are still helping people who would not otherwise be able to attain the education they need to enhance their chances to achieve their life’s goals. While data show that white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action,6 people of color have also benefited, albeit to a lesser degree. And many of these programs are being rolled back under the Trump administration as unfair to white students. The Trump administration called for abandoning Obama administration policies that allowed universities to consider race as a factor in diversifying their campuses.7 This is a prime example of “two steps forward and three steps backward.” It is fatiguing to have to continue to fight for affirmative action—a policy signed into law in 1965. It is fatiguing not to be able to have confidence that gains made based on such programs are sustainable.
Living While Black
As I researched and wrote chapter 4, “Racism Literally Makes You Sick,” memories of my late husband, Joseph Winters, were in my mind. He, like me, was a first-generation college graduate, coming from urban Washington, DC, in the 1960s. He had a degree in statistics and an MBA and worked as a director of finance for Eastman Kodak. He died of a massive heart attack in 1997, at age 47. He was diagnosed with coronary artery disease at age 38, after months of not feeling well and having no tests performed to explore the possibility that his shortness of breath and chest pain were related to his heart. When he was finally diagnosed, the cardiologist said that he had suffered a heart attack several months before; there was now significant heart damage and he needed a transplant. In the meantime, we found a renowned heart surgeon who was willing to perform quintuple bypass surgery in lieu of a transplant, which he really could not wait for. He lived for nine years after the surgery. There were no strong hereditary markers for heart disease in his family. I cannot be sure whether the stress of being one of a few Black men at his level in a major corporation contributed to his heart disease. I cannot be sure that, had he been diagnosed sooner, the outcome would have been any different. I cannot be sure that the reason he was not diagnosed sooner was related to racism. It is something I still wonder about.
Joe and I produced two amazing offspring. Joe II is the tenured Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies with secondary positions in English and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University, and our daughter, Mareisha, is trained as an electrical engineer but left the field as a result of many of the same inequities that I encountered and that other women in STEM fields face. She has served as chief operating officer at The Winters Group for the last eight years. She has been instrumental in the company’s double-digit growth.
When Joe was 13, I came home from work one day to find a police car in the driveway with my son in the back seat. I was very surprised and concerned. Joe was a straight-A, mild-mannered young man and certainly never in trouble. The police officer informed me that a parent of another student had filed a complaint that Joe had started a fight with the boy on the bus. After receiving more information, I learned that the other boy (white) had been bullying my son for weeks. This account was corroborated by other students. The other boy challenged my son to a fight. According to my son, the fight lasted all of five seconds, and the other kid had a minor injury. I would have thought that the other parent might have contacted me or Joe’s dad instead of calling the police. The police officer found Joe at a neighbor’s house playing basketball. He apparently had to search the suburban neighborhood, and my son would stand out as the only Black boy. Joe was afraid, and so was I. When his dad got home from work, we had the “talk,” which I explain in chapter 8. It is not uncommon for spontaneous thoughts about his safety to still manifest for no apparent reason. That incident happened almost 30 years ago, and we know that it could have just as easily been today.
When Mareisha was 10, she begged for a dog. No one else in the family really wanted a dog. We finally gave in, and on her eleventh birthday we surprised her with a little brown-and-white shih tzu. He was too young to leave his mother, so we eagerly anticipated his arrival in six weeks’ time. Two weeks before we were to pick up Snickers, as he had been so named by Mareisha, I received a call from the breeder. She said that we could no longer have the dog. I was shocked. I could not imagine why. After doing some checking with the person who connected us with the breeder, we learned that the breeder’s partner had discovered that we were Black and refused to sell us the dog. There was no way that I was going to tell an 11-year-old child that she could not have a dog because she is Black, so I immediately went searching for a dog that looked like Snickers. I found one, but the process was stressful and fatiguing. I tried to find some organization that would address this blatant racism. It seems that because she was an independent breeder, there was little recourse.
Again, the sad part is that this happened almost 30 years ago but could just as easily have happened last week.
In My Work
After almost four decades in the diversity, equity, and inclusion business, there are thousands of stories that I might share. I have selected one that happened in the course of writing this book that epitomizes the reason for Black fatigue: a failure on the part of many white people to “get it”—to get how their white identity represents the normalized dominant culture and abnormalizes every other identity.
As part of a large professional services firm’s multicultural summit, I was asked to be a breakout speaker on white culture and inclusion in the workplace. In another breakout session, the Center for Talent Innovation presented the findings of its most recent research on Black professionals in the workplace. The first thing I noticed was that even though the summit of over 350 people was very visually diverse, the Center for Talent Innovation breakout session of over 50 people was attended by only Black people, with the exception of two whites. My session on white culture was also attended primarily by Black, Latino, and Asian participants.
In my experience presenting at and attending many conferences over the years, sessions on topics pertaining to Black people are almost always filled primarily with Black people. We refer to this phenomenon as “preaching to the choir.” After such sessions, attendees may feel affirmed by the opportunity to share common experiences, but they also likely feel frustrated with the recounting of the lack of progress. In the case of the Center for Talent Innovation study of over 3,000 respondents, there were many data points that confirmed lack of progress, such as the fact that black professionals hold only 3.2 percent of all executive or senior leadership roles and less than 1 percent of all Fortune 500 CEO positions, even though we represent 12 percent of the workforce.
In my session on white culture, well-meaning white people in the room were hard-pressed to know what to do, even though they were interested in the topic. I shared whiteness theory concepts based on scholarly research that shows that many white people see themselves as “raceless and cultureless.” A study by Pew Research conducted in 2019 revealed that 75 percent of Blacks and over 50 percent of Latinx and Asians regard their racial identity as very important to them, while only 15 percent of whites responded that their racial identity was important.8 One of the young white men in the room said, “It’s true. My race is not important. If it is not, how can I make it? I can’t feel something that I just don’t.” I recommended that he start reading about the history of white people and whiteness theory to get more grounded in the ideas. I suggest some specific references in chapter 2. While most of the participants of color were eager to support this young man’s learning, there were a few eyes rolling like, Really? The sentiment voiced by a few was, “I don’t want to be your teacher, and you should know what to do.”
It is fatiguing for me after all these years to hear about the same lack of progress toward racial equity decade after decade and have white people respond with the same ignorance or lack of interest in the topic or by not acknowledging the profound impact of their racial identity. I sometimes do not know whether to scream, cry, or just give up.
SUMMARY
Even with all the fatiguing experiences I have encountered because I am Black, I am blessed. I benefited from the early affirmative action days when the powers that be were afraid and wanted to avoid lawsuits. Even though I was the token in many instances, it has likely been a lot easier for me than for other people of color who did not get that boost. I know that I had to work at least twice as hard to get where I am, and I am fatigued. However, I want to bring hope to the generations that now hold the torch. When I hear millennials declare that they are exhausted and not willing to be the educators of the ignorant, I am gravely concerned. The inequitable systems will continue to be exhausting for millennials and Generation Z (born after 1997) to navigate, whether they are teachers or not. Black fatigue leads to all manner of physical and emotional problems, many of which go undetected. Lifting the burden of being an educator may lessen the day-to-day fatigue, but that alone will not dismantle racist systems. As I shared in the introduction, maybe the 2020 global Black Lives Matter protests against racism were a real wake-up call. No longer could white people claim sublime ignorance of anti-Black racism.