bill berry

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I Quit My Job After a Particularly Good Beach Day

“Once upon a time, I worked at a magazine, reporting to a cowardly white woman who, early in our working relationship, told me that she didn’t consider me a threat because ‘a black woman will never have this job.’”

“I grew up with that Olivia Pope mentality that as someone with my race and gender, you have to work twice as hard to get half as far. I think that also meant that I had to work twice as hard to gather half the courage it took to quit a workplace that did not deserve my talents but still benefited from my excellence. It was hard to walk away from what looked, at least on paper, like a very good job.I’m a woman of color and a first-generation American. It is practically encoded in my DNA to put up with inordinate amounts of microagression, if not outright aggression. I talk about this with my girlfriends who share that DNA, a lot. For us, quitting requires more than the ‘take this job and shove it’ swagger that sometimes presents when people of a different hue and class do it.”

#ThisResonates! #IdeasFor2020!