Why Black Women’s Blessings Are Audited And Others Aren't

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. 

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. 

Once the donations started rolling in, the counting started. Some people online decided that something sinister or inherently wrong was occurring. They priced out what a cremation runs on average, setting that number against the six figures that had been raised, and questioned whether a woman whose dog was shot and killed deserved to receive more than the price of what it cost to take care of final expenses for a four-legged fur baby. 

If a Black woman could have her dog shot by police in front of her and still draw an online crowd of random meddlers counting the money kind strangers sent, then what does a Black woman have to do to receive support without being subject to judgment wrapped inside of an audit? How high do we have to climb before the pocket watching stops?

I have no answer to the former, but the answer to the latter is that history, combined with our lived experience, illustrates there is no height. 

Shonda Rhimes reached the top of her industry and pocket watching followed her there. By 2017, her TV shows had earned ABC and its parent company Disney more than two billion dollars. She held an all-inclusive Disneyland pass, a standard employee perk. When she asked for one extra free ticket for a family member, a senior executive allegedly responded, “Don’t you have enough?” After she hung up, she reportedly told her lawyer to get her out of her Disney contract. 

We all know that the free ticket was never really the issue. One extra body in the park from a free pass tends to earn Disney more money than it gives away. Disneyland isn’t a small family-owned corner store where a free ticket dents the register. Once a guest is inside the gates, they spend on food, souvenirs, and the requisite photos with Minnie and Mickey. The free pass was invisible money, which is why the company hands it out as a perk to employees in the first place. 

Even at Rhimes’ level, her altitude and the money she generated bought her no exemption from this treatment. White people routinely feel emboldened to evaluate Black women’s abundance against their own ideas of what they feel is reasonable, appropriate, and what they feel we deserve. 

When Black women exceed those expectations, blessings become sources of discomfort. They disrupt deeply held assumptions about who should possess even basic amounts of care, comfort, and joy. The way they see it, those things are only meant for us in theory or in small doses they get to approve, if at all. 

This treatment runs through the lives of many of us Black women with the same insistence and peculiarity. We have all watched the videos by now. A Black man birdwatching in a park. Someone white decides we don’t fit the picture and don’t belong among them, in their company, or living or walking through the same subdivision or living community. They feel emboldened by our mere presence to question us and call the police on us for being somewhere they didn’t expect or want us to be. It’s pocket watching in another form, and it’s rooted in the same belief that we don’t belong in nice places, and they are willing to use the police as the muscle to enforce it.

Then there’s the assumption that whatever we have was handed to us because of diversity mandates. A Black woman gets into an Ivy League university or lands a big promotion, and white folks decide affirmative action must be the sole reason. 

With alarming frequency, the focus often turns to how we took a spot away from a more deserving (presumably white) candidate without the basic respect of considering or acknowledging that we might be more qualified than others who applied.

When it happens in the workplace, our accomplishments are often marked with an asterisk before we make it through new-hire orientation. We can outwork all of our peers and still hear that we are only there to fill a quota. 

Meanwhile, the largest pipeline into elite schools and corner offices runs straight through family names and connections. Not sure I’ve ever heard anybody call a legacy admit or the boss’s nephew a diversity hire. The suspicion is saved for us. 

And then there’s the topic of rest. A Black woman takes an extended vacation, posts a photo from a beach, and the response is often some version of “must be nice.” We are allowed to be tired, as long as we keep working through it for the company at the expense of our health and our families. 

We can have the trip once we have earned it twice over and apologized for needing it. Rest gets read as proof that we have it too easy, when the reality is most of us have been running on fumes for most, if not all, of our adult lives. What a pitiful testament to the world we live in when even our stillness is met with scrutiny and has to be justified.

Because we as Black women have grown accustomed to living and working under constant surveillance and review, we learn to process our worlds with a second track running underneath that automatically drafts our defense. 

I have lived this. At a new job, my supervisor asked me to send her an accounting of how I spent every hour of every week. I asked whether I was falling short of her expectations or whether there was something my predecessor had done that I wasn’t, because I wanted to course-correct if so. She said no, that accounting was simply important to her. I later learned that none of my white colleagues were asked to do the same, and the demand continued for as long as she was my boss, even as I received stellar performance reviews and spearheaded award-winning journalism.

None of this is contrived or in our heads, by the way. Lean In and McKinsey’s research on women at work found that Black women are far more likely to be the only one in the room, and that those who report feeling closely watched and on guard. 

Catalyst calls the result an emotional tax, the constant vigilance of bracing for bias. Scholars who study what they call workplace policing have documented the same pattern: Black women held to standards their white colleagues never have to meet, made to prove our competence again and again. 

Perhaps the oldest version lives in welfare discourse, rooted in a discussion as old as welfare itself, that the stereotypical Black single mother on public welfare must account for everything in her grocery cart. She is expected to buy the cheapest version of everything and to never be caught with anything that resembles a treat. Let her reach for a good steak, or a cake, or anything perceived as “extra” or unnecessary, and a stranger in line behind her decides to speak out and accuse her of gaming the system and living too well on the public’s dime. 

By the way, white single mothers, who make up a larger share of welfare recipients than Black women, rarely get their carts inspected by a stranger in the checkout line.

What never seems to be critiqued is that the same tax dollars that fund food benefits also bankroll steak dinners at pricey restaurants for government officials. It’s rare that anyone tells them they don’t deserve it. 

People willingly gave money to Marseilles during what was very likely the worst week of her year, as a video of its worst moments reached millions of viewers. The donations represented what those strangers felt as they watched a woman lose someone she loved to a senseless killing, and they wanted her to know in a tangible sense that she was not carrying it alone. That is the definition of generosity and compassion.

What we have earned, what we receive, and the care others extend to us, owes no one an explanation. Stop counting what lands in our hands. Stop weighing over and over again, whether we have done enough to deserve to be cared for, to have a nice house, to drive a Jaguar to and from work. Let the blessing be a blessing. As Black women, we deserve to have nice things, full stop. 

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