The Women In Every Room

A Plan to Counter The Assault on Black Women In America

I have been in a lot of rooms this year. Galas in New York and Chicago. Boardrooms downtown and LA. Living rooms on the South Side. Conference floors out of state. Family gatherings on a Sunday. And in every single one of them, I have met a Black woman who has lost her job.

Not one. Not two. Plural. In every room.

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A senior policy advisor who was running federal programs three years ago. A communications director who built a Fortune 500 brand from a desk most people never saw. A grant officer who funded the very programs that lifted a generation. A nonprofit executive who held the line through the pandemic. An HR leader who spent two decades teaching companies how to be better than they thought they could be. A doctor’s wife who was the doctor. A vice president. A founder. A first chair. A first hire. A first in her family.

Their resumes are flawless, and their phones are quiet.

I want to say something plain before we go any further. This is not a slow market. This is not bad luck. This is not a personal failing on the part of any one woman. What I am describing has a name and a shape, and you cannot understand it until you look at the numbers and decide to believe them.

In 2025, nearly 300,000 Black women left the U.S. labor force in the first half of the year alone. By December, Black women’s unemployment rate had climbed to 7.3 percent, the highest in four years. Federal employment for Black women fell by more than 30 percent, while it fell by 11.6 percent for all other women.

Black women are 6 percent of the country’s labor force. They were 33 percent of the federal layoffs.

I will let you sit with that math.

The agencies hit hardest were not random. Education. Housing and Urban Development. Veterans Affairs. The departments where Black women were not just present but central. Where they were 36 percent of the workforce. Where the work itself, of educating children, housing families, caring for veterans, was the closest thing this country has to a public ministry.

Carter G. Woodson told us a hundred years ago that history is what gives a people their direction. James Baldwin told us that not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. So let us face this. You do not cut these specific jobs in these specific agencies and pretend the pattern is invisible. You do not dismantle these programs and call it efficiency. This is targeted. This is intentional. This is the quiet work of erasure done in the language of budgets and reorganization.

And here is what I want every reader who is not Black to understand, because some of you are good people who have not yet connected the dots. When you come for Black women, you are not just coming for Black women. You are coming for the engine of the entire Black community.

Eighty percent of Black mothers are the breadwinners in their households. Sixty percent of Black women are heads of household, the highest share of any group in this country. Inside Black America, women hold two-thirds of the bachelor’s degrees, seventy percent of the master’s degrees, sixty percent of the doctorates. Black women own 3.5 million businesses generating sixty billion dollars in annual revenue. They are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the United States.

Now read that paragraph again, and then think about who you laid off.

The wealth in our community is not generated in the abstract. It is generated by a Black woman who got up at five, dropped her kid at her mother’s, drove to a federal building or a corner office or a small business she financed on her own credit, and produced. She paid the mortgage. She funded the church. She tithed to the campaign. She kept the family business alive. She built the local economy three blocks at a time.

You pull her out of the room, you do not just take her income. You take her household’s stability. You take her child’s college fund. You take the small business she was about to scale. You take the dollars that would have flowed back into a barber shop, a salon, a corner store, a restaurant, a Black-owned bank. You take the donor who would have funded the scholar. You take the volunteer who would have run the program. You take the deacon, the den mother, the precinct captain, the alderwoman in training.

This is not a personnel issue. This is an attack on a community’s balance sheet.

I think a lot about a thing Malcolm X (happy birthday) said. Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. So I have been studying. And what history tells me is that every time this country has moved meaningfully toward justice, the backlash has come dressed in the clothes of normalcy. Budget cuts. Restructurings. The end of programs that were always called pilots, so they could always be ended. I’ve seen it firsthand in my work at Chicago Scholars. We were challenged by funders to cut our YMOC programming because it centered boys of color. College partners, under threat of federal authority, ended their partnerships with us. This is not to call them out. This is designed to make you aware of what’s going on. And the people sent home first are the ones whose presence in the room was always treated as a favor instead of a fact.

It is not a favor. It is a fact. A Black woman in a room is the result of generations of fight, and her removal is not a market adjustment. It is a theft.

So what do we do?

We hire them. Not as a charitable gesture. As a competitive strategy. The talent pool currently looking for work is one of the most credentialed in American history. If you run a company, a foundation, a board, a campaign, a school, a hospital, you have an opportunity right now that you will not have in five years.

We fund them. If you have capital, point it at the 3.5 million businesses already in motion. Closing the revenue gap between Black women-owned firms and the average firm would add 1.7 trillion dollars to the American economy. That is not a moral argument. That is a math argument. You should be embarrassed to be leaving it on the table.

We stand with them. Loudly. In the rooms where they are no longer present, say their names. Send the introduction. Make the referral. Write the letter. Cosign the loan. Put them on the agenda. Put them on the dais. Put them on the cap table.

And we tell the truth about what is happening. The data is in the open. The pattern is in the open. The only thing missing is the courage to name it for what it is. An assault on the most productive segment of the most resilient community in this country.

I love this city. Chicago has always known how to recognize who is doing the work. The Black women in our churches, our schools, our boardrooms, our policy shops, our small businesses, they have been carrying us. They are still carrying us. The least we can do is carry some of it back.

In every room I walk into, they are still showing up. Dressed. Prepared. Smiling. Looking for the door that is supposed to open.

Open the door.