In The Black Subaltern, Shauna Knox revolts against the construct of the decontextualized self, electing instead to foreground the complex and problematic lived experience of the Black subaltern.
Knox offers an account in which Black humanity is flattened, desubstantialized, and lost in a state of perpetual in-betweenness, which she coins subjective transmigration.
Over the course of this book, Knox weaves autobiographical vignettes featuring her own journey as a Jamaican migrant to the United States together with theoretical reflection in order to elaborate on the conditions of Black subalternity.
She considers the dissolution and disappearance of the subaltern authentic self to be a prerequisite for acquiring access to society.
Knox reflects that Black migrants, though rooted in a new country, still remain integrally engaged with their country of origin, and as such, ultimately find themselves in a purgatory of in-betweenness, inhabiting nowhere in particular.
This book’s innovative use of postformal autobiography to give voice to the Black subaltern provides students and researchers across the humanities, Black studies, diaspora studies, anthropology, sociology, geopolitics, development, and philosophy with rich material for reflection and discussion.
Editors’ note: This piece is from Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine’s spring 2024 issue, “‘Stop Drowning Us, and Stop Making Us Disappear’: A Critical Report on the State of Black Woman Leadership.”
The very presence of Black women leaders in the workforce is fugitive.
We were never intended to function in it beyond our historically designated roles in “agriculture and domestic service.”1
Black women are systematically suppressed within the labor economy through chronic underemployment and an enduring exclusion from “employer-provided retirement plans, health insurance, paid sick and maternity leave…[and] subsidized child and elder care.”2
We are overwhelmingly present in low-wage, inflexible service work, but there is a small contingent of Black women who have somehow transgressed this universal sentencing to unprotected, low-wage oblivion, and have beaten the odds only to find that the reward for their efforts is an impossible dilemma—a choice to drown or to disappear.
In my essay collection on the interiority of Black women, The Black Subaltern: An Intimate Witnessing, I write, “If we allow ourselves to be as Black as we are, they will drown us in the darkness. If we refuse to be as Black as we are, they will make us disappear.”3
A Black Woman Leader Drowns
Any Black woman deemed to be an Angry Black Woman will quickly find herself shunned for this fatal flaw, castigated for the way it impacts the entitled contentment of her environment and the people in it.
In predominantly White spaces, a Black woman is expected to code-switch, mimic White culture, and either explicitly or implicitly affirm harmful propaganda about Black people, in order to signal that she can be trusted by the establishment.
Beyond that, she is also expected to turn a blind eye to the presence and implications of institutional racism and its impact on herself and other Black people, both within the organization and without.
If she is willing to do these things, she will be rewarded with both upward mobility and proximity to the gatekeepers that hold power within that ecosystem. Take Candace Owens, who in 2007, with the support of the NAACP, sued and settled with the Stamford Board of Education for failing to protect her from hate crimes motivated by racism.4
By 2019, and now functioning as a leading voice within the Republican Party, not only did Owens denounce the NAACP as “one of the worst groups for Black people”5 but also—in 2020—insisted that Ahmaud Arbery’s death was unrelated to his race, even after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reported that his killer referred to him as a “fucking n—r” before killing him.6
Her willful and irrational denial of overt White supremacy—even in instances in which it is categorically undeniable—demonstrates, if on a farcical level, a knowing determination to barter race blindness and denialism for continued preservation of her transgressive leadership as a Black woman within a White establishment politic.
Beyond such absurdly problematic Republican party pandering, Black women who lead across industrial structures are routinely found participating in the same type of exchange.
If, however, a Black woman in leadership decides that the price for the goodwill of the establishment is too high and too cutting of a self-betrayal, she will quickly find herself cast in the role of any number of prejudicial tropes—and none so pervasive as the “Angry Black Woman.”
In 2022, the Harvard Business Review published an article about the workforce politics that reinforce the lore of the Angry Black Woman, finding that the imagery dates back to the era of enslavement—which makes sense, since the trope justifies the belief that a Black woman’s anger results from an innate personality defect rather than from a harmful situation.7
An Angry Black Woman must be put back in her place—stripped of her dreams and her dignity, and left on her own. She will drown, because nobody’s coming to save her.
Any Black woman deemed to be an Angry Black Woman will quickly find herself shunned for this fatal flaw, castigated for the way it impacts the entitled contentment of her environment and the people in it, incessantly denied the support she deserves to mitigate the issues she is contending with, and left enduringly alone, because she is intolerable and understood to be exiled to an isolation of her own making.
Even the very few who can see that she is being framed by this mythology, and accordingly sympathize with her condition, will continue to avoid her, because her social standing is contagious and dangerous for their own sociopolitical situating within the establishment.
So, the Black woman who leads in service of Black people, whose circumstances are in fact deeply upsetting, will invariably find herself drowning in an ocean of White discontent—and even those for whom she is sacrificing herself will not come to save her, because they know her fate is certain, and they are fighting to survive.
This drowning of Black women leaders isn’t exclusive to organizations led by White figureheads but—owing to the pervasive power of Whiteness in its underpinning, resourcing, and defining of the culture of the industrial landscape—is also present even in organizations with Black women at the helm.
In the case of Black Girls Code, CEO Kimberly Bryant, who founded the organization in 2011, was abruptly denied access to her email in December 2021 and later learned that she had been indefinitely suspended by her board of directors—after her company had been valued at $30 million in philanthropic funding.8
Accused of creating a toxic work environment—no doubt a thinly veiled nod to the widely acceptable typecasting of the Angry Black Woman—Bryant (by her own account) was removed “without cause or an opportunity to participate in a vote…[and denied] severance, healthcare assistance, or a vacation payout,…which she is entitled to by law in California.”9
Similarly, in 2019, Kim R. Ford was announced as the new president and CEO of Martha’s Table, following her service to “President Obama’s Administration, where she helped lead the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, distributing more than $350 billion in recovery funds to spur economic growth.”10
A short three years later, Ford unexpectedly resigned, publishing the following statement:
Throughout my tenure, the board has been extremely abusive towards me…. They have publicly threatened and humiliated me on many occasions, manipulated the team, sabotaged the organization and spoken very negatively about the community.
I was told that the behaviors would be addressed, people would be held accountable and things would get better. Instead, the behaviors got worse. I asked for help repeatedly.
I was even uncharacteristically vulnerable in telling them several times about how much their treatment had harmed my mental, emotional and physical well-being, and I even gave specific examples of the impact—but that was ignored.11
It is very easy to malign and mistreat an Angry Black Woman in a position of power—even if that categorization is based solely on imagined characterizations and conjectures that are reinforced through cultural media and the vagaries of modern public discourse.
An Angry Black Woman must be put back in her place—stripped of her dreams and her dignity, and left on her own. She will drown, because nobody’s coming to save her.
A Black Woman Leader Disappears
In The Black Subaltern: An Intimate Witnessing, I explain the theory of disappearance to signify how the Black female internal self can be absorbed into the system to which she is attempting to gain entrance—in this case, the workforce.
If a Black woman leader decides to play the game of racial self-denial in order to ascend institutional structures, my theory holds that she will be unable to recover what she has hidden of herself and will, in fact, be lost.
Shauna Knox, EdD
Sr. Vice President, National Black Child Development Institute
Dr. Shauna Knox is a researcher, strategist, and thought leader in Black humanity and the decolonization and re-humanization of Black citizens of the Global South.
Dr. Knox is Senior Vice President of the National Black Child Development Institute and Co-Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum for People of African Descent Working Group.
She served a six-year tenure at the U.S. Department of Education, during which she received a Breakthrough Award for her work on the steering committee leading the charge to upskill the Department following the eighth reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.
She was also the designated Subject Matter Expert for Human Trafficking and Child Labor Exploitation at the Department.
Dr. Knox has published two compelling books through Routledge Press:
The Black Subaltern: An Intimate Witnessing.
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