Some days you just feel like you don’t get taken for your full potential at work or at home. Your advice and insights are discounted. Your opinion is held in decently high regard because of a track record of hard work and having good judgment that has proved itself over and over, but still in lower regard than it would if your physical shell was different – if you were a tall white guy, for example. Then you’d be the smartest guy in the room, the one every executive wanted to mentor, the one everyone took seriously. It’s a thought experiment I do occasionally…
I remind myself more often these days than ever before that I will not succumb ever to letting my era define me. This is a long era spanning centuries, where women of color have been labeled as stupid, weak, intellectually inferior, lacking strategic insight, lacking vision and long-range planning, lacking street smarts, just lacking in general. The media speaks of us as poor helpless things. Articles reflect on our poorer health outcomes, our lower wealth, our lower incomes, our lower promotion rates. At least there is an awareness growing about how underprivileged so many women of color are. But in many of these articles there is an air of “and that’s just the way it is” and sometimes it feels like the lack of words in our support, on the work we do in the world, on the contributions we make, on the team players we are, suggests that the authors of some of these articles believe we deserve this place in the world, or it just couldn’t be any other way – we were supposed to be at the bottom of the food chain by the design of nature or destiny, because of our incompetence perhaps.
For a long time, I bought into this narrative about myself too. It was the easy default option to see myself that way. And then somehow, inspired by other women of color who championed our cause, inspired by the few men – authority figures – who did believe in me, and having changed as many variables as were in my control to make my environment more hospitable (supportive work environment, supportive partner), I saw a new light, and once I’d seen that light, it was really hard to go back to a place of darkness.
These days I don’t see myself the way the world sees, or rather doesn’t see, women of color. That’s what brown girl confidence means to me. It means going through a whole life of negative messages or neglect, of not being represented in leadership, of being talked over in meetings, of being looked over for promotions, of being compensated for your time and effort at lower rates than your white male peers, of being missed out in acknowledgment speeches, of working hard but not being appreciated as a critical team member, of being turned down for dates, of being rejected in ways subtle and overt, yet still believing that You are a worthy member of this universe. You were supposed to be here. You are no less than anyone else. That is Brown Girl Confidence.
I mention these negative experiences that are routine realities for women of color not to whine, but to show brown girls who do feel that confidence, even if it’s a fleeting butterfly in their lives that comes and goes, just how strong they are for feeling it at any time. That confidence is in true defiance of everything they are taught, everything around them, every proof point, every ‘evidence’ and in defiance of centuries of thinking and social conditioning. It’s an ember within that burns bright in the darkest of nights. That’s just how strong brown girls are and how strong Brown Girl Confidence is.
