The Boyfriend Project (The Boyfriend Project, #1)

by Farrah Rochon

Been there. Done that. Got the ticket stub, T-shirt, and bad memories to show for it.

“Because even with this nice condo and her incredible job and her boss-bitch car—whatever that is—people will still question why she doesn’t have a man,”

Women in general have a hard time being taken seriously in this industry, but a black woman?” She huffed out a humorless laugh. “We’re not expected to be good at math and science. We’re not expected to understand lexical analysis, or method overloading or any of the concepts that we all work with every single day. It feels as if I’m living under a microscope, Daniel. As if I’m expected to fail at any moment.” She pointed to the ground. “And like that ant, I’m carrying the weight of so many others on my shoulders.”

Resistance was for exercise bands and political activists. Not for a single woman who had to work with this delicious human being day in and day out.

Do you have any idea how steep the hill I have to climb is just to get people in this industry to take me seriously? So many write me off the minute I walk into a room, or when they learn that the S in SBrooks at Trendsetters dot-com stands for Samiah and not Samantha or Sarah or some other ‘nonethnic’ name. I’m not a perfectionist because I want to be one, it’s because I have to be one.”

“I’m not afforded the luxury of making a mistake. When I mess up, it just makes it that much harder for the next bright young black girl who has so much to contribute to this field. I refuse to get in her way.”

“That night, he told me to make sure I controlled every part of my life, because when you’re not in control awful things can happen and you can’t do anything about it. That’s why I need to control as much as possible.”

Hiring directors will look at two résumés and hold all things constant. They don’t factor in how much harder that young black engineer had to work in order to get into that same position, and how that engineer will bring that same work ethic to the company.”