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On the podcast: work life balance is a myth

Staff
9 hours ago
1 min read

The Grown Black Girls on why work and rest must serve human flourishing  


A tiny plank balances on a tiny ball. On the left end, tiny blocks spell out the word "work." On the right, the letters "I F E" are piled on top of each other. Brown fingers hold a tiny block with a letter "L" on it, closing the space between it and the IFE blocks.
Assigning personal value to our productivity can go as far back as our enslavement. image credit: Shutterstock/Sirita Render


On the last Grown Black Girls podcast, Natalie and Charity explored what it truly means to balance your life and work. Re-visit three takeaways from their conversation, courtesy of our friends at African World Order. 


  1. A commitment to being “high performing” comes with risks.


Charity: I have been telling my Black women friends and colleagues who are in academia, stop doing so f***ing much. ... There have been so many stories about Black women, specifically in academia, committing suicide, having heart attacks...  


  1. Black women assigning value to our productivity can be linked to slavery.


Natalie: Capitalism erodes our humanity.

Charity: This is unfortunately, specifically true for Black women. ... We can always go back to our enslavement. In being reproductive, domestic, physical labor, and that being tied literally to the value that we have as chattel. 



  1. We haven’t spent enough unpacking the statistics around the 600,000 Black women who have left the workforce. 


Charity: [I have been] meeting a lot of Black women who have had to figure out what the afterlife of a career looks like, whether it be in government, whether it be in corporate, whether it be in academia, and listening to how we’re navigating those things.




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