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It was a beautiful sunny day. I was wearing a short-sleeved aqua-blue top, walking into the building where I worked at a Fortune 500 company. Coming directly from an appointment at the salon, I loved my new hairstyle in which my hair had flat two strand twists in the front and was hanging down with its usual straightness in the back. For the first time since joining the company, I felt I was embracing the Blackness in my hair, at least on part of my head. Upon arriving at my desk, however, my manager quickly made it clear that my new hairstyle was going to be a problem if I wanted to advance at the company. They explained that Afrocentric hairstyles were not in my best interest, and that, if I wanted to get ahead, I should keep my hair straightened. My heart sank in that moment, and I went on to spend years of my career working as an employee in environments with racialized hostilities and imbalances of power before finding resistance in entrepreneurship.
Context and Autoethnography
We often consider the toil of Black women in the context of slavery’s forced labor, or we assess the inequities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have made work (and overworking) a necessity for Black women. There is, however, more to the narrative as myriad stories of agency and resistance coexist in the chronicles of working Black women.
Thankfully, we have records of past Afro-descendant entrepreneurs through both written and oral histories. Via her autobiography, we learn of Elleanor Eldridge’s antebellum painting and whitewashing business in New England. Turning one’s gaze south, the works of historian Michael L. Twitty document the business ventures of Black women who as “enslaved Africans in North America would make okra soup, oxtails, and pepper-pot soup and sell them on the street and at market along with fritters…the esteemed pepper pot that was popularized by Black women hawking it on the streets.” This legacy of Afro-descendant women as entrepreneurs continued into the Jim Crow era, thanks to individuals like Mrs. Ida Blaylock, my great-grandmother. In 1956, the Albany Herald recognized her for “operating many business activities…the only Negro ginning plant in this section of Georgia…a grocery store, dry cleaning plant, farming and vast real estate holdings.” There is most certainly connective tissue between these foremothers and Black women as entrepreneurs today.
As an anthropologist, I understand that reflection upon one’s positionality is an important part of the research and writing process. So, it is with reflexivity that I approach the topic of Black female entrepreneurs in the U.S.: as a researcher who has conducted over 300 studies and analyses of Afro-descendants in the U.S., as a pracademic who teaches a multidisciplinary undergraduate course focused on entrepreneurship, and as a social scientist whose passion resides in studying the intersections of race, space, and ethnicity. I also acknowledge that my role as an entrepreneur accounting for one of the “nearly 2.7 million businesses nationwide” owned by Black women affects my gaze on the subject matter. Together these roles render me an insider-outsider anthropologist on the topic of Black women and entrepreneurship and lead me to an autoethnographic assessment of entrepreneurship as practiced among Afro-descendant women in the U.S.
Importantly, autoethnography centers the relevance of the researcher’s lived experience while acknowledging subjectivity. It is “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience”. In autoethnographic work, the researcher conducts anthropological fieldwork on himself/herself/themselves and their experiences. As described by anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, “Using autoethnography, I turn my anthropological skills toward my own life and experiences, making myself the object of study.” By utilizing autoethnography as a means to examine Black women and entrepreneurship as resistance, the lived of experience of the subject takes center stage so that, rather than the discipline of anthropology becoming the reader’s focal point, a different approach emerges: the emic perspective of Black women choosing business ownership is the centerpiece as theory converts to practice. In this article I consider two inflection points in my life that led me to entrepreneurship as a form of resistance.
The Gift
I will never forget the day I received a gift on my desk at work. Shortly after providing difficult feedback to individuals reporting to me at a Fortune 500, I walked into my office and proceeded to open mail that had been left for me. One item was a padded package larger than the rest. Upon opening the package, I instantly dropped the contents, took a step back, and drew in my breath. In front of me was an adorned Voodoo doll with pins and curse details attached to it. Being a Black woman from Texas and a “supertoken” in the organization at work, I immediately understood the implications of this gift. I gazed at the gift of terror on my desk, called a friend, and immediately informed HR of the incident. I then encountered a lack of protections in reporting the incident despite admission by a white employee that the voodoo doll left in my office was theirs.
Just as Bronislaw Malinowski observed the contours of gift-giving through the Kula as “regulated by a set of traditional rules and conventions” and that the “transactions are public,” the gift of terror left in my office was acknowledged publicly, and it came to me with an expectation rooted in a specific racialized tradition. It was meant to provoke fearful submission on my part, and to maintain a previous social order that excluded Black leadership. In a 2023 interview with NY1 news, Professor Timothy Malefyt explained that gifts serve to solidify relationships, and this particular gift of terror left in my office was intended to reinforce an imbalanced relationship rooted in my capitulation as the first Black person to lead that department.
Meeting with HR and the individual to whom the voodoo doll belonged in a glass conference room, I realized that upon receiving this voodoo doll my time for resistance had come. I would not, under any circumstances, conform to the traditional rules and expectations which accompany gifts of terror. I would not participate in the exchange by offering the expected reciprocal gift of compliant submission, which the giver of the voodoo doll hoped to receive back from me. I would instead exercise agency to resist the oppressive work environment in which I had found myself as an employee. I took a vacation abroad where I embraced resistance by charting my path of conversion from an employee confronting targeted hostilities to a liberated Black business owner free to work each day without enduring racialized malice.
Now, my work as a business owner often centers Black constituents and Blackness, although the voodoo doll gift of terror was intended to reinforce a position of marginalization and Blackness held at the periphery. Instead, in my life as an entrepreneur, I practice resistance by asking Fortune 500 research clients to carefully consider why they use terms such as “white space” rather than “Black space,” by co-teaching workshops which center the Afro-Latino/e experience rather than the erasure often present in Latinidad, and by conducting research that combats the essentialization of Afro-descendant cultures. By breaking with the tradition and expectations of submission that accompany gifts of terror in the workplace I, and others like me, have turned instead to a practice of liberatory resistance as entrepreneurs, moving Blackness and Black peoples from the margins to the center.
Ritual Denied
I still remember certain words uttered by clients of my company. “If she’s Black, then why is the company she owns closing for a three-week break? It’s not like she’s European.” “Your company will never survive if you insist on just working a four-day week.” I listened to these statements with practiced calm, while determination and rebellion overflowed inside of me. Neither of the clients are members of the African Diaspora. In many ways, because of the racism embedded in American capitalism, the concept of a Black woman being entitled to dedicated rest was unthinkable to them. Yet their words reinforced my determination and resistance as an entrepreneur, to claim and practice the ritual of rest long refused to Afro-descendants in this country.
Rituals carry meaning and reveal what is valued in a community. Scholars have long documented how the ritual of rest has been denied to Afro-descendants in the U.S. In her Lectures on Liberation, Dr. Angela Davis recounts the forced labor endured by Frederick Douglass at the hand of an overseer while enslaved. More recently, research has shown that “Black respondents were consistently less likely to get 7 hours of sleep a day compared with their white counterparts and other people of color”. According to Dr. Caraballo-Corovez, at Yale’s Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, “factors related to working or employment conditions are disproportionally preventing Black individuals from having adequate sleep,” and other studies have shown unique tolls on Black women, resulting in sleep deficits compared to white women and to Black men.
Working as a Fortune 500 employee, I found myself needing to comply with the expectations of long hours to advance. In some cases that meant working 70-hour weeks for months at a time. As an entrepreneur, however, I have chosen to practice resistance against overexploitation and expectations of the Black body working dawn to dusk. In structuring my company, I have exercised agency in implementing ways of working that support rituals of rest for myself and my team. In particular, as a business owner, I practice resistance by embracing a four-day work week, work from anywhere policy, and flexibility for each person to choose their own working hours each day. I rarely toil 40-hour weeks as an entrepreneur, as opposed to the dehumanizing long hours that were required of me as a worker in Corporate America. The rituals of rest facilitated at the company I own demonstrate resistance to oppressive norms I once endured as an employee.
Theologian Tricia Hersey proclaims the liberating power of rest as a revolutionary act and writes, “Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy.” She urges Black women to claim their bodies as “a site of liberation.” Perhaps it is no surprise then that there has been a 70% increase in the number of businesses owned by Afro-descendant women in the U.S. during the last four years as more Black women choose resistance, liberation, and rituals long denied for themselves.
Resistance and Freedom
Members of the African diaspora residing in the U.S. have resisted racialized oppression, torture, persecution, and injustice from the very moment kidnapped Africans arrived in this country. Our resistance to racialized injustices and imbalances of power has taken many forms including escape, oral histories, authorship, armed revolt, peaceful protest, creative works, nonconformist physical appearance, and the audacity of business ownership. From the first self-sufficient Black community of Hayti to the well-known Black ecosystem of Greenwood, business ownership has functioned as a form of Black resistance. Importantly, women of African descent have played key roles in Black business ecosystems. Despite intertwined hurdles of racism and sexism, lack of access to capital, threats of violence, and exclusionary practices, Black women have persisted as entrepreneurs such that now “Black women are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S.”
Among other things, my journey to business ownership exemplifies a Black woman’s resistance to hostilities and imbalances of power, and it demonstrates the claiming of freedoms through entrepreneurship by embracing liberatory norms and centering Blackness. As explained by scholar and activist Dr. Angela Davis, “The first condition of freedom is the open act of resistance…In that act of resistance, the rudiments of freedom are already present,” and each day as Black women like me choose entrepreneurship, acts of resistance abound.
While anthropological expertise empowers me to illuminate broader dynamics via autoethnography and anthropological insight enables me to critically gaze upon racialized imbalances of power in employment, this article’s attention to entrepreneurship as an act of resistance is a love letter to my great-grandmother Mrs. Ida Blaylock and other Afro-descendant female entrepreneurs of the past. It is my hope that readers of this text gain a new understanding of ways entrepreneurship acts as resistance because, “Survival is not the end goal for liberation. We must thrive.”