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!