Black Thriving in US Rebounds, But Gaps Remain

Black women are responding to job losses and attacks on DEI by building businesses, organizing communities and pursuing political leadership.

Black women’s labor has helped build, sustain, nurture, and transform America—often without receiving the recognition, protection, or compensation it deserves. Today, Black women are experiencing a disproportionate employment downturn. In 2025, 251,000 fewer Black women were employed between January and August, accounting for more than half of women’s employment losses during that period, despite Black women representing only about 14% of the female workforce. As a Black doula, this conversation is deeply personal. My work is labor in every sense of the word. I support women through pregnancy and childbirth, advocate for mothers, educate families, hold hands, calm fears, and provide care during some of life’s most vulnerable moments. It reminds me that Black women have always done the work of caring for America while fighting to be valued by it. Whether in hospitals, classrooms, boardrooms, businesses, homes, or birthing rooms—our labor matters. We cannot continue celebrating Black women for being “strong” while ignoring the economic, physical, and emotional weight we are expected to carry. Black women deserve equitable opportunities, fair compensation, economic security, rest—and care, too. I became a doula because Black women deserve to be supported while they labor. I believe we deserve that same support in every part of our lives. Thank you, Senator Natalie Murdock, for creating space for this necessary conversation and for continuing to center Black women, maternal health, caregiving, and economic justice. Our labor deserves to be seen, valued, protected, and supported.

www.shareflame.com From The Coaching Room | What If It Isn't Only Resilience, But Leverage? I recently read a post celebrating Black women who successfully moved into entrepreneurship after being pushed out of corporate America. The conversation centered resilience. Then a commenter offered a distinction that stopped me: The pattern wasn't simply resilience. It was leverage. That stayed with me. Because we often celebrate Black women's extraordinary capacity to survive, recover, adapt, and keep moving. And yes, there is resilience there. But what if resilience isn't the only story? What if we're also witnessing what happens when expertise, intellectual capital, leadership, relationships, creativity, and knowledge that may have been undervalued within an organization become leverage outside of it? That shifts the questions. Instead of only asking: How did she survive what happened? We might also ask: What did she already possess that the system failed to adequately recognize or value? Being pushed out should not have been required for someone to discover their value. And entrepreneurship is not automatically liberation. But an organization's valuation of someone's expertise was never necessarily an accurate measure of its worth. The Coaching Question What if the expertise you've been asking an organization to recognize is expertise you haven't yet fully recognized as leverage yourself? And as we do here in The Coaching Room: What might change if you gave yourself permission to explore this question rather than immediately solve it? #JusticeRootedLiving™ #TheCoachingRoom #BlackWomen #Entrepreneurship #Leadership #CareerDevelopment #WomenInBusiness

This is for the Black woman who is excelling in college and exhausted at the same time. You have felt it. Walking into a lecture hall, a study group, or a campus event and realizing you are the only one again. The quiet work of navigating spaces that were not designed with you in mind. The second-guessing. The bracing. The loneliness that does not always have a name. That experience is real, it is valid, and it deserves more than just pushing through. BLKGRL@PWI is a closed 8-week group for Black women navigating predominantly white colleges and universities, led by Dr. Bianca Busch, MD, dual board-certified psychiatrist and founder of The College Psychiatrist. This is a small, intentional cohort, not an open drop-in group, so real trust and real growth can happen. You will walk away with real tools for the moments that wear you down, language for the experiences that are hard to name, and a community of women who understand without explanation. Because you deserve a space where you can exhale. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gJHEd8AF

Black Feminist Thought (BFT) is a foundational work by Patricia Hill Collins that examines the experiences, knowledge, resistance and social position of Black women through a specifically Black feminist perspective. The 30th Anniversary Edition revisits and extends Collins's influential framework for understanding how race, gender, class and other systems of power interact to shape people's lives. At its heart, the book challenges the idea that Black women's experiences can be adequately understood by studying either racism or sexism independently. Black women experience multiple, interconnected forms of oppression, and their knowledge and lived experiences provide important resources for understanding those systems. Black women are not simply objects of knowledge; they are producers of knowledge about their own social realities. Black Women's Health Imperative, Black Feminist Fund, Black Feminist Future, Black Feminist Praxis, Feminists In Kenya (FIK), Feminism and Organization, Feminism In India, Feminism from margin

Wow this so needed. Especially with the pushback on EDI, antiracism & decolonising in higher education. They extract knowledge & experience, then when you are 'too' knowledgeable & changing the status quo with impact, they decide to make you & your work invisible by removing you from the organisation or keeping you out within the organisation, & they align to whiteness again. Epistemic injustice.

This Black August Tribute highlights Maulana Karenga's Operational Unity concept during the Black Power Movement. He understood that to achieve Black Power there must be Black Unity, and until unity is achieved in the ideal sense, unity must be operationalized. This concept guided three Black Power conferences as well as Black United Fronts around the country. "Maulana Karenga, founder and chair of the Organization Us (Us), developed the concept of operational unity during the Black Power Movement. Several organizations actively contributed to the Black Power Movement in the United States such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Us, the Black Panther Party, the Congress of African People, The Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), the Black Women’s Alliance (BWA), as well as Black Student Union’s (BSU) and Black Student Alliance’s (BSA) to name a few. These organizations, their leadership, and their constituents reflect geographical, ideological, and political diversity within the movement. To develop and sustain movement possibilities, Karenga developed the concept and practice of operational unity to create and maintain unity across diversity. Here, the concept of operational unity is revisited and examples of it in practice are discussed, revealing its successes and contributions to the Black Power Movement." https://lnkd.in/g8wQ2u7A #blackaugust #operationalunity #maulanakarenga #blackpower #umoja

Associate Professor Raquel Muñiz recently co-authored a new book that explores the lack of Black women represented in the field of higher education. In “Disrupt the “Not-Telling”: Gatekeeping Issues on the way to Tenure and Promotion for Black Women at HBCUs, MSIs, and PWIs,” Muñiz and her co-authors present case studies and narratives from Black women to investigate this representational discrepancy. Read more about this issue and how institutions can move forward: https://bit.ly/43jXDhx

https://lnkd.in/gBxTRMGU “Black Thriving in America: 2026” is the fourth installment of a 100-year research commitment. This year’s edition represents an evolution in scope and analytical depth. The report examines the wellbeing of Black Americans through decades of research and surveys. For the first time, the study places American findings within a global framework, comparing U.S. wellbeing data with Gallup’s World Poll across approximately 140 countries and territories. While the report’s headline finding offers encouragement — Black thriving has rebounded to 49%, narrowing the gap with other groups — the data reveal a more complicated story.