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https://blackgirlnerds.com/how-black-women-fit-into-the-great-renegotiation/
You may have heard of the Great Resignation, which refers to labor market workers quitting their jobs to search for better opportunities. Now two years since the pandemic started, we’re entering into a new era in the workforce: The Great Renegotiation.
It’s a result of inflation, and experts say there is an uptick in workers seeking higher pay to stay on pace with the rising cost of living. This has left many industries struggling to keep operations going while relying on fewer employees than normal. Within this movement, women in leadership positions demand more and are willing to leave their roles if their demands aren’t met. But where do Black women fit into this scenario?
After the recession in 2009, Black women’s employment didn’t recover for nearly a decade. As the U.S. economy is trying to rebuild, Black women are again enduring a slow employment recovery. C. Nicole Mason (president, and CEO of the nonprofit Institute for Women’s Policy Research) says that without significant action, it will be a repeat of 2009 with Black women getting left behind. “We have an opportunity to really dig a little bit deeper and address some of the structural and institutional barriers to workforce participation for people of color, and Black women in particular,” Mason said.
I’ve been away from corporate America since 2008. Black women were having internal conversations then about salaries and what upward mobility looked like. Now we are in a climate where it is harder to recruit and retain talent. It’s important that employers also look closer at gender gaps that exist to make sure opportunities are present in their ranks.
One thing that I found essential to my success was managing my manager. During yearly reviews, employers always look at what you’ve contributed to the company and where you see your future. So, I always kept detailed notes on projects I contributed to, professional development that I obtained, and training so when it came time to be evaluated, my manager was being evaluated too. I also used this as a negotiating tool for the next company I worked for.
The pandemic has prompted many people to reevaluate how they work and what’s truly important. Working remotely allowed people to do just that. It changed the game for many of us. Many people want to keep the jobs they have but on their own terms. They want the ability to work where they want and when they want. It’s more about having fulfillment in your work which translates to fulfillment in your personal life. We always hear about maintaining a work-life balance, so now employees are putting that to the test.
According to information from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, there is a gap between what women want from employers and what benefits employers provide. The survey found that more than 75 percent of women rate paid leave, health insurance, and job security as “very important” or “important” when considering jobs.
Black women are always taking inventory of their corporate careers, and lately, many have decided to become entrepreneurs. Among many of my girlfriends, a lack of childcare and benefits has led to them leaving the workforce. They are opting for starting their own business, jobs where they can work from home, and jobs with great earning potential.
Black women still remain among the country’s fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs. Although this fact remains, Black women still trail behind their white female and male co-workers in terms of wages and employment outcomes.
I believe too little attention has been given to why disparities persist and what solutions are needed to level the playing field for Black women. The current economy is not a win for us despite what reports say. There has to be a deeper understanding of Black women’s economic realities. We must prioritize solutions that target pay disparities, promote greater workplace equality, and improve the economic standing of Black women overall. These have been overlooked, and the economy has never leaned in our favor. Even when unemployment rates decline, Black women consistently have the highest unemployment rates among all women.
So, what if companies aren’t willing to offer high-quality professionals the pay, work arrangements, benefits, and clear paths for advancement they desire? Well, it’s easier now than ever for them to walk away. Companies have to focus on how they can help employees succeed and do something about the gaps Black women experience.
Throughout the pandemic, workers have shown they are placing a renewed focus on their work balance, as well as creating new paths to get what they want professionally. While employees who choose not to partake in the Great Resignation have considerable negotiation power, they must know exactly how and when to make their big move to get what they want from their employer.
You may have heard of the Great Resignation, which refers to labor market workers quitting their jobs to search for better opportunities. Now two years since the pandemic started, we’re entering into a new era in the workforce: The Great Renegotiation.
It’s a result of inflation, and experts say there is an uptick in workers seeking higher pay to stay on pace with the rising cost of living. This has left many industries struggling to keep operations going while relying on fewer employees than normal. Within this movement, women in leadership positions demand more and are willing to leave their roles if their demands aren’t met. But where do Black women fit into this scenario?
After the recession in 2009, Black women’s employment didn’t recover for nearly a decade. As the U.S. economy is trying to rebuild, Black women are again enduring a slow employment recovery. C. Nicole Mason (president, and CEO of the nonprofit Institute for Women’s Policy Research) says that without significant action, it will be a repeat of 2009 with Black women getting left behind. “We have an opportunity to really dig a little bit deeper and address some of the structural and institutional barriers to workforce participation for people of color, and Black women in particular,” Mason said.
I’ve been away from corporate America since 2008. Black women were having internal conversations then about salaries and what upward mobility looked like. Now we are in a climate where it is harder to recruit and retain talent. It’s important that employers also look closer at gender gaps that exist to make sure opportunities are present in their ranks.
One thing that I found essential to my success was managing my manager. During yearly reviews, employers always look at what you’ve contributed to the company and where you see your future. So, I always kept detailed notes on projects I contributed to, professional development that I obtained, and training so when it came time to be evaluated, my manager was being evaluated too. I also used this as a negotiating tool for the next company I worked for.
The pandemic has prompted many people to reevaluate how they work and what’s truly important. Working remotely allowed people to do just that. It changed the game for many of us. Many people want to keep the jobs they have but on their own terms. They want the ability to work where they want and when they want. It’s more about having fulfillment in your work which translates to fulfillment in your personal life. We always hear about maintaining a work-life balance, so now employees are putting that to the test.
According to information from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, there is a gap between what women want from employers and what benefits employers provide. The survey found that more than 75 percent of women rate paid leave, health insurance, and job security as “very important” or “important” when considering jobs.
Black women are always taking inventory of their corporate careers, and lately, many have decided to become entrepreneurs. Among many of my girlfriends, a lack of childcare and benefits has led to them leaving the workforce. They are opting for starting their own business, jobs where they can work from home, and jobs with great earning potential.
Black women still remain among the country’s fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs. Although this fact remains, Black women still trail behind their white female and male co-workers in terms of wages and employment outcomes.
I believe too little attention has been given to why disparities persist and what solutions are needed to level the playing field for Black women. The current economy is not a win for us despite what reports say. There has to be a deeper understanding of Black women’s economic realities. We must prioritize solutions that target pay disparities, promote greater workplace equality, and improve the economic standing of Black women overall. These have been overlooked, and the economy has never leaned in our favor. Even when unemployment rates decline, Black women consistently have the highest unemployment rates among all women.
So, what if companies aren’t willing to offer high-quality professionals the pay, work arrangements, benefits, and clear paths for advancement they desire? Well, it’s easier now than ever for them to walk away. Companies have to focus on how they can help employees succeed and do something about the gaps Black women experience.
Throughout the pandemic, workers have shown they are placing a renewed focus on their work balance, as well as creating new paths to get what they want professionally. While employees who choose not to partake in the Great Resignation have considerable negotiation power, they must know exactly how and when to make their big move to get what they want from their employer.
At what point can we say someone is deserving of death? At what age do we say a person has used up all of their goodwill? We often hear talk of consequences for actions, but this discourse typically mistakes “consequences” for “punishment.”
A logical consequence of jumping in front of a speeding car is that you will be hit by it. Punishment for being a loudmouth at a baseball game is when someone hits you. This is not to say that XXXTentacion’s multiple alleged and confirmed acts of violence amounted to nothing more than being raucous at a sporting event.
If his ex-girlfriend Geneva Ayala is to be believed (and there’s little evidence saying she shouldn’t), the music star was vicious at times, choking, beating, and drowning a woman he claimed to love desperately. To put it shortly: there’s a reason why articles praising X’s music inevitably lead to articles discussing the ethics of these memorializing tendencies. The singer, born Jahseh Onfrey, was complicated. That cliché may be the only fitting term.
Fader’s new Hulu documentary, Look at Me: The Untold Story of XXXTENTACION, looks at Onfrey’s intrapersonal conflicts and contradictions without ever feeling like it is letting him off the hook for any of his actions.
Like many docs on those slain young, Look at Me takes viewers back to Onfrey’s childhood. This is where his seventeen-year-old mother and Rastafarian father gave him a name meaning “God said.” From here, we see Onfrey, known to close friends and family as Jah, grow up.
Even at an early age, Jah seems distant. He doesn’t smile much in childhood photos, though his mother is often beaming. This may be because he grew up in a home that had violence. His father beat his mother, and his mother fought back. She refused to call the police, because, where she grew up, they didn’t do that.
From there we learn of Onfrey’s father going to prison when Onfrey was ten.This perhaps led to him acting out in school. School psychologists diagnosed Onfrey with bipolar disorder, but his mother did not want him medicated. She preferred counseling and talk therapy. If this approach helped, we do not see it in the documentary.
The rest of the portion dedicated to his pre-music life depicts him angry, incarcerated, and in multiple fights. Where fourteen-year-old Onfrey made a turn, however, was when his mother rewarded him with studio time every week he didn’t skip school. It was this positive and reinforcing consequence that helped him hone his craft.
The story becomes what we’d expect from here as far as music bios go.
He begins accruing fame while touring with friend and fellow South Florida musician Ski Mask the Slump God. He begins viral video campaigns to bring views and streams to his SoundCloud account. He and his friends attempt to manipulate Instagram algorithms with multiple sockpuppet accounts to put more eyes on Onfrey.
We get scenes of him at pulse-pounding concerts leading the show. We get behind-the-scenes footage of him and a producer having a eureka moment when they stumble upon creating the hit single “SAD!”
All of this is fine. The scenes of Onfrey dancing around the stage, blurring the line between “rapper” and “rock star” is engrossing. It becomes quickly apparent how and why XXXTentacion’s shows were a can’t miss event for his fans. When the documentary becomes most interesting, however, is when it eschews X, the rapper/singer/songwriter, for Onfrey, the child and teenager struggling with bipolar disorder.
As I said earlier, the documentary is not a hagiography. It is not the legend of a martyr slain in the prime of his goodness and life. It is the story of a wildly troubled young man shot to death eight months before the birth of his child.
The documentary, directed and executive produced by Sabaah Folayan in addition to Onfrey’s mother Cleopatra Bernard, never excuses Onfrey of anything. But it does attempt to contextualize them. And maybe this is wrong.
Maybe, this is a more subtle attempt to garner sympathy for an alleged abuser. If to understand is to forgive, maybe this doc is a wholesale attempt to get us to understand Onfrey’s actions and therefore have us forgive them. This is certainly a possibility, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
Instead, what we get is a person as complicated as any other person. More violent than most people, but still a person.
There’s an interesting moment late in the documentary where the interviewer presses Onfrey’s aunt Deandra Ellis about his supposed attempts at redemption. Ellis says Jah was trying to right his wrongs as they were concerned about the alleged beating of Geneva Ayala. The interviewer asks how is that possible if he never publicly admitted this wrongdoing? An admission that likely would’ve saved Ayala from online and in-person harassment.
Ellis does some mental gymnastics to explain that away, saying admitting it to himself and maybe Ayala would’ve been enough. A friend of Onfrey’s sitting in on the interview offers that maybe, admitting it in public would have cost Onfrey the legal case against him. This then begs the question: if we assume prison is a logical, growth-oriented consequence, can one truly be sorry if they’re unwilling to deal with the fallout of admitting guilt? Can one redeem himself of a wrong he refuses to, at least publicly, admit it exists?
Look at Me discusses these questions by way of only hinting at them. Onfrey’s family is involved, but so is Ayala. She has forgiven Onfrey, but the documentary never dictates that we should. In fact, it’s hard to watch sometimes.
Jahseh Onfrey could be a sadistic brute. But then, he could also be a loving older brother with genuine charm. Jahseh Onfrey could be manic and paranoid, but he channeled this into his X persona and became one of the world’s most-streamed artists, even after his death.
Maybe XXXTentacion, Jahseh Onfrey, or both, got exactly what they deserved. Maybe a life of violence, even when you begin taking ostensible baby steps to right these wrongs, will inevitably lead to a violent death. Maybe being shot in the throat three times while being robbed is exactly the punishment Jahseh Onfrey merited.
“Everybody will get a death that is deserving. Everybody will get a life that is deserving,” he says in the documentary. And if we all agree that his actions were often juvenile to the point of pathology, why would we ever cosign such a foolish statement? Jahseh Onfrey didn’t get the death he deserved. He simply got death. This documentary does a fantastic job of looking at his life.
Look at Me: The Untold Story of XXXTENTACION will be available to stream on Hulu Thursday, May 26, 2022.
As children, we often see our mothers as one-dimensional. It is sometimes hard to separate them being our parents from their realities as women. Fresh off the heels of Mother’s Day, DeVon Franklin’s new tribute to the Black women in his life may inspire you to look at yours with a fresh perspective.
BGN spoke with Franklin via video chat to discuss why he developed It Takes a Woman, Kingdom Business, and created content that uplifts the human spirit.
What is It Takes a Woman about?
This book is one of the most personal, open, honest, transparent books I’ve done. It’s all about how it takes a woman for us to be who we are as men — for us to be where we are as families and as a community. We would be nowhere if it was not for the women in our lives.
With this audiobook that I’m doing through Audible, I wanted to tell how the tragedy of my father was a catalyst for my mother to bring in help from my great aunts to really surround me and my brothers to make sure that we didn’t become a statistic.
We tell our family story. We tell how this tragedy brought everybody together. Then you get more insight on [each aunt’s] and my mom’s story. I really wanted to do this project to celebrate women, honor women, and preserve the voices and the impact women had in our culture and community.
What inspired you to share this story now?
It was from a series of events. Audible had approached me about doing this book, and when they mentioned it, I said, “Yeah, you know, I’d love to tell that story.” I went to my mom and my great aunts that are still alive and asked, “Would you be open to participating in this book?” They were like, “Yeah, well, if you pay us, we’ll do whatever you want.” [Laughs].
So I said, “All right. Let me close the deal with you; you know, put a little something in your pocket.” I did, and they were just so honored to be able to participate and tell their stories. I love it, and I’m just so grateful and excited for people to hear it and grateful for the opportunity to have been able to do it.
You call those ladies your “village of love.” What is the most valuable lesson you’ve learned from them?
There are so many lessons, which is why I did this book; so that everyone can hear the lessons for themselves. One of the lessons that always has stuck with me that Aunt Donna says is you have to live it to learn it.
So often, you can intellectually think about something or approach it theologically but ultimately there are certain things in this thing called life you’re not going to learn until you live it. I didn’t understand what she meant until I started living life, and I said, “Oh, now I understand you gotta live it to learn it.” That has stuck with me from the day that she mentioned that to this very day.
What new truths did you discover about yourself or your village through this process?
I’ve spent countless hours with [my mom and aunts], yet I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to ask them more about their story, their experience in life, and how they felt about it. Through producing this Audible book, It Takes A Woman, I could hear their stories, ask them questions I never asked before, and hear things that they experienced I didn’t know.
That was really powerful for me to be the recipient of not just the wisdom but the pain and the transparency and the experience they have had. That was really a new revelation for me that there was much more to that they had to offer that I may have never known had I not had the opportunity to do this.
You have a new scripted series coming to BET+. Tell us about Kingdom Business.
Kingdom Business is a new TV series that I am the executive producer of for BET and BET+, producing it alongside the great Kirk Franklin and Dr. Holly Carter. It comes out on BET+ on May 19, 2022. It’s like Empire but set in the world of gospel music, so y’all better watch out!
It leaves no stone unturned in terms of drama. Yolanda Adams stars in it, and let me tell you something; y’all think you know Yolanda. You don’t. The character she plays is Donita Jordan, and Cookie Lyons has nothing on Donita Jordan. We have Serayah in it who’s an amazing rising star.
We have Chaundre, who’s a new actor on the scene. We have Michael Beach and Michael Jai White. La’Myia Good. We have a phenomenal cast. Kirk also plays a role. We have so many people in this series, and I cannot wait for people to see this. It’s eight one-hour episodes all on BET+; you can binge to your heart’s content. I guarantee you will want a season two.
You have the book available on Audible, a television series on BET+, and your latest book, Live Free, was just released in paperback. What’s next?
Movies, TV appearances, and new books. I got a lot coming and as long as I have the opportunity to create and the outlets that allow me to get that creation to the world, I’m gonna keep creating. I’m gonna keep trying to do everything I can to uplift the human spirit. That’s what it’s all about. We are in some difficult times, and I’m crazy enough to believe that content can change lives. I feel the responsibility of being in this position and trying to do something positive with it.
It Takes a Woman is currently available on Audible and Kingdom Business will be available to stream from BET+ on, May 19, 2022.