WHAT'S ON MY MIND

Hey everyone! Parker here.

Earlier this year, the Economic Policy Institute released a report about the unemployment rate of Black women. The findings were depressing: “In 2025, Black women’s employment rate fell by 1.4 percentage points to 55.7%. This is one of the sharpest one-year declines in the last 25 years…The decline among Black men and white women was no more than 0.5 percentage points each.” Black women with Bachelor’s degrees, the report found, faced the greatest loss in employment, and people working in public sector jobs were especially hard-hit.

(Perhaps not coincidentally during that time, we also saw the Trump administration roll back anti-discrimination safeguards and eliminate some 250,000-350,000 public sector jobs – jobs that were once a cornerstone in Black upward mobility.)

As Black women not only face the highest rate of unemployment, but are also statistically the least likely to be promoted at work, I’ve been examining my own relationship to work. That led me to an eye-opening conversation with Jodi-Ann Burey, author of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work. After treatment for spinal cancer, Burey returned to the workplace as a Black, disabled woman, and what she realized was that when employers ask you to bring your authentic self to work, they don’t really mean it.

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“It was important for me to always assert my disability because a lot of the ways that people were frustrated with my work – the performance of work, not my actual work – can overlap with biases against being a Black woman” — biases like assuming she was angry when she was actually in pain, or that she didn’t get along with others because she couldn’t physically walk to a meeting and took it remotely from her desk instead.

What she determined was that bringing your full, vulnerable, beautiful self to work… is a trap. “What we call, quote-unquote, "authentic" within the workplace is usually a thing that makes someone different, and what makes them different makes them [appear to be] antagonistic to the institution…Institutions are not designed to change, and so we can hire, you know, a very bold woman, saying that we want her ideas, we love the way that she pushes back, there's this authenticity to who she is, and then when she does those things, it's a problem,” she said in our conversation.

We covered so much sobering ground in today’s episode, from the dangers of being “authentic” at work to why even being the best, most credentialed person in your field – like Serena Williams or Beyonce or Ketanji Brown Jackson – is not enough to protect you. Take a listen – and in the meantime, I’m gonna try to work on my own boundaries between work and self.

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ALSO ON THE POD

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On the pod this week, we also get into the pyramid scheme of one white nationalist group. Patriot Front is a white nationalist group that focuses on high visibility stunts, like banner drops, disrupting events, or swarming Washington, DC for Independence Day. Meanwhile, the State Department has convened 60 nations against what it calls far-left terrorism. We talk to NPR’s Odette Yousef about who the guys in Patriot Front actually are, why their finances resemble a pyramid scheme selling stickers and stencils, and what it means that the federal government is aiming its counterterrorism attention in a very different direction.

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Written by B.A. Parker and edited by Dalia Mortada

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