Stop Pocket Watching: The Tax Black Women Pay For Success
When Black women exceed expectations, blessings become sources of discomfort, disrupting assumptions about our finances. The post Stop Pocket Watching: The Tax Black Women Pay For Success appeared first on MadameNoire.
Black News 
As Black women, we aren’t allowed to have nice things—or so many white folks believe.
I learned that lesson for the first time in college during my first news internship at the CBS News affiliate in Philadelphia. My boss was a Black woman who’d spent her whole career in television news, and she knew the business cold.
During a social outing, I’d learned she drove a Jaguar that she purposely concealed from our work colleagues, opting never to drive it to work. I didn’t get it. The way I saw it, if you could afford a luxury car, you drove the luxury car.
She explained to me that from her purview, white people didn’t believe we deserved nice things, and seeing her in a Jaguar would work against her professionally. Her white colleagues at the station already assumed that, as one of the highest-ranking Black women at the station, she carried a chip on her shoulder, and the car would be another reason to justify that belief.
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She explained that it would ignite the pocket-watching. Somebody would start asking how her salary got high enough to afford it, even though she made less than some of the men in similarly ranked positions.
The latter reality wouldn’t translate into a call for a salary review or adjustment. The car would.
The pocket watching isn’t confined to the workplace. Marie Marseille was celebrating the NY Knicks championship victory when Los Angeles police arrived at her door and shot her two-year old dog Jameson in front of her. The family’s GoFundMe cleared more than $160,000 within a few days, gathered from thousands of kind strangers who felt compelled to give money after watching the video of Marseille on the ground, screaming and grieving over her beloved pet.
The post Stop Pocket Watching: The Tax Black Women Pay For Success appeared first on MadameNoire.
