The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table

by Minda Harts

In my years in corporate America, I have found that white people want to feel like they know you. They want to feel like your “friends.” As black and brown women, we just want to do our job, do it well, and get the hell out of Dodge. And if women of color don’t act like we want to be “friends” in the workplace, then tons of assumptions are made about us—fill in the stereotype here. We are constantly fighting those lovely labels some of our colleagues like to adorn us with, so it’s important to take every opportunity to kill those harmful stereotypes that tend to follow us from workplace to workplace. They can’t say that we are aggressive or hard to communicate with if they experience us in different environments where we relax a little.