Sistas,

Is that greeting too off-putting because I don’t know each and every Black woman in America?!

We may not all be related. We are definitely not a monolith, but we share enough experiences that it is safe to say we are a sisterhood.

Even as strangers, we let each other know if there is lipstick on our teeth or if our purse is not zipped up.

So lately, there has been conversation about women, their careers and lives. Sheryl Sandberg is telling us to “lean in”; Marissa Mayer is saying we can’t work home and Anne Marie Slaughter says we can’t have it all. However, we don’t seem to have a “bitch in this fight”. [ I only say bitch because it is female for dog. I am not calling anyone a bitch or a dog.] What I am saying is that we Black women are NOT represented in this discussion. Neither are other women of color.

Anne Marie Slaughter, Marissa Mayer, and Sheryl Sandberg don’t speak for us. They also don’t speak for their sisters who are white and struggling to keep their jobs, their homes and feed their children.

Aspirational lifestyle articles that talk about Slaughter, Mayer,and Sanberg start off with the assumption that everyone reading them is making bank. They reek of privilege and do nothing to move the conversation about the difficulty of women’s evolving roles as business owners, mothers, wives and community leaders.

How can women without money and resources become authors like Sandberg? How can they become tech start-up entrepreneurs?
How can they homeschooled their kids? How can they run for political office?

We want those stories. Sistas have those stories. Let the conversation start from women with less than six-figure incomes. Everyone can learn from them.