How the person who speaks can become the problem
How does racial bias in the workplace travel from one person to another? In Letter Three of My Dear White Friend, I reflect on racial bias in the workplace: how labels, informal professional narratives and inherited assumptions can shape the way a Black woman is perceived before others have had the opportunity to know her for themselves.
My dear White friend,
I have been thinking lately about what happens when somebody raises a concern in a workplace and, somehow, over time, the concern itself becomes less important than the person who had the courage to raise it. Perhaps you have watched this happen from a distance. Someone challenges a decision, questions a process, names an injustice, or points to something that others would simply rather not examine. At first, the conversation is about what they actually said. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, something shifts. People stop talking about the issue and begin talking about how they said it. Their tone. Their manner. Their personality. Whether she is “difficult”, “too sensitive”, “always complaining”, “intimidating”, “not a team player”. Before long, the original concern has almost disappeared, and the person who spoke has become the problem.
I have been thinking about this because, my dear White friend, I have experienced versions of it more than once in my professional life. I look back across my career and wonder how easily a concern raised by a Black woman can become a story about the Black woman who raised it. There is a particular set of words that seem to travel rather easily around us: difficult, intimidating, aggressive, hard to manage, confrontational, too much.
I wonder what happens inside you when you hear one of those descriptions applied to a colleague. Do you become curious? Do you ask, “What did she actually say?” Do you wonder what happened before she reacted, or whether the behaviour being described would have been interpreted in the same way if it had come from somebody else? Or does the label quietly begin doing the work for you?
Labels are terrifyingly powerful. Once someone has been described as “difficult”, every new interaction can be filtered through that description. A normal disagreement becomes evidence. A firm professional boundary becomes evidence. A direct question becomes evidence. Frustration becomes evidence. Even silence can become evidence. Eventually, people look at the accumulation and say, “You see? This keeps happening.” But I have learned to ask a different question: is the person repeatedly creating problems, or are similar systems repeatedly responding to her in similar ways? Those are not the same thing.
I think about dominoes. You enter a new organisation genuinely believing you are beginning again, with a fresh page, new people and new relationships. But perhaps the next domino has already been positioned before you even walk through the door. A conversation has happened. A name has been mentioned. Someone knows someone. An impression has travelled. A story has arrived before you have. Professional networks are often much smaller than we imagine, and reputations can travel far faster than context. There have been times when I entered a new role and had the unsettling feeling that people had already decided who I was before they had really had the chance to know me.
My dear White friend, think for a moment about the last time you started a new job. What did you worry about? Perhaps whether you would like your colleagues, whether you would understand the systems, whether you would make a good impression or whether you were really ready for the role. But I wonder what you didn’t have to worry about. Did you wonder whether people would see your race before they saw your qualifications? Whether confidence would be read as arrogance, directness as aggression, or authority as something you had somehow overreached to claim? Did you wonder whether one mistake might be remembered as evidence about people who look like you? Did you worry that somebody else’s previous experience of a White person might quietly enter the room with you? Did you feel you had to prove that you belonged before you had even begun? Perhaps one of the privileges of being White is that there are questions like these that you may never have had to ask yourself. And perhaps privilege is sometimes most visible not in what you receive, but in what you are spared having to think about.
When you finally walk through the door, the next person may encounter you through something they have already heard. They see you through somebody else’s lens. Then a normal workplace interaction occurs, they interpret it through that inherited story, and they tell somebody else. Eventually, this falling chain of dominoes begins to look like independent confirmation: “Well, she seems to have had problems everywhere.” But, my dear White friend, have you ever wondered whether what looks like several separate pieces of evidence might actually be the same story echoing through different corridors of the profession? The dominoes fall one after another, and because each one falls separately, we mistake repetition for objectivity.
And I wonder whether you have ever experienced the opposite. Have you ever entered a workplace assuming, without really thinking about it, that people would meet you rather than a story about people who look like you? That mistakes would belong to you rather than to your race? That disagreement would be understood as disagreement rather than as evidence of some wider characteristic? Perhaps that kind of individual freedom is itself a form of privilege: the freedom to be ordinary, inconsistent, complicated and occasionally wrong without carrying an entire group into the room with you.
Of course, Black women can be wrong. We can make mistakes. We can communicate badly. We can hurt people. We can sometimes be difficult. We are human. But that is not really the question I am asking. The question is: who gets interpreted generously? Who is allowed context? Who gets the benefit of Let’s hear her out. We may not know the full story. Perhaps something happened before this. Who is described as passionate rather than aggressive? Confident rather than intimidating? Assertive rather than difficult? Independent rather than unmanageable? Who gets to have a bad day without it becoming a permanent character assessment? Who is understood as responding to circumstances rather than revealing who they fundamentally are?
I hear so many Black people describe the feeling that the same behaviour is judged differently depending on who performs it. The same disagreement, a different story. The same boundary, a different judgement. The same confidence, a different interpretation. That is why I keep returning to the idea of the lens. The behaviour may be real. But what are we seeing when we look at it? And what assumptions have already entered the room with us?
Perhaps there is another question for you here, my dear White friend. Have you ever been described as confident, assertive, ambitious or strong-minded? If so, did those descriptions generally enhance your professional identity or diminish it? Have you ever stopped to wonder whether a Black woman behaving in exactly the same way might have been given a different set of words? I am not asking you to feel guilty about the interpretations you may have benefited from. I am asking you to notice that interpretation itself is not neutral.
My dear White friend, there have also been times in my professional life when I entered spaces where very few people who looked like me had previously held that kind of authority. From the outside, being “first” sounds celebratory. A milestone. Progress. Representation. And sometimes it is all of those things. But it can also be extraordinarily exposing. You are highly visible. Your mistakes are visible. Your confidence is visible. Your decisions are visible. Your difference is visible. Sometimes even your authority appears to surprise people.
I have been left wondering whether the discomfort in the room was really about what I had done — or was alleged to have done — or whether something about who was doing it had become part of the reaction. Whether my very existence in that role had unsettled something. I cannot always know, and I do not want to pretend that I can. But uncertainty should not stop us asking the question.
And I wonder whether you have ever had to ask yourself that question about your own authority. When you entered a senior role, did you wonder whether people would accept that you had earned the right to be there? Did you wonder whether your competence would be treated as surprising? Did you feel pressure to represent White people well in every meeting, every decision and every disagreement? Or were you largely allowed to arrive as an individual? Sometimes privilege lies in precisely that freedom: the freedom not to have your presence interpreted as unusual before you have even spoken.
There have been times when I have wondered whether the real difficulty was not what I had said at all. Perhaps it was what hearing me would have required. If I was right, somebody might have had to change something. Someone might have had to apologise. A decision might have had to be reconsidered. A comfortable story about how fair a system was might have become harder to sustain. Perhaps, sometimes, it is easier to question the person speaking than to sit with what they are saying.
My dear White friend, sometimes nobody needs to disprove what you are saying. They only need to make enough people doubt the person saying it. And that may be enough.
This is the part I want to ask you about. Imagine someone you trust tells you that a Black woman is “difficult” or “troublesome”. What happens next inside you? Do you absorb that description? Do you become slightly more guarded before you have even met her? Do you interpret her directness differently because you are already expecting difficulty? Do you listen to her concerns with the same openness you might have had before? Or has the description already moved you a little further away?
And what would it take for you to resist that movement? Could you hold the information lightly enough to meet the person for yourself? Could you ask the colleague who gave you the warning what actually happened rather than accepting the conclusion they reached? Could you remain alert to the possibility that someone you trust may still be passing on a biased interpretation? Trusting someone does not make them immune from bias. Nor does liking them.
Perhaps nobody asks you to discriminate. Perhaps nobody tells you not to trust her. Perhaps there is no dramatic racist statement. Perhaps somebody simply hands you a lens, and you start looking through it. And perhaps that is how some professional cultures reproduce themselves. Nobody has to announce that you do not belong. Enough people simply inherit the same story about you.
And I wonder how many Black professionals eventually stop knocking at doors not because they lacked the ability to walk through them, but because the cost of continually proving that they belonged became too high.
There is another question I find myself asking. When somebody has raised concerns in more than one environment, the obvious conclusion can be: She is the common denominator. She always complains. She sees racism everywhere.And of course we should always remain open to the possibility that the person themselves has things to reflect on. But there is another possibility too.
What if she repeatedly enters systems with similar blind spots? What if she repeatedly encounters similar assumptions? What if the reason she keeps speaking is not because she is uniquely problematic, but because she keeps noticing things other people have learned not to see?
My dear White friend, sometimes the person who appears to be “always causing trouble” may actually be the person who has not learned to look away. That does not mean she is always right. But her persistence should not automatically become evidence against her. There is a difference between a person who creates conflict everywhere they go and a person whose presence repeatedly exposes conflicts that were already there. Those two stories can look remarkably similar from a distance.
And perhaps I should turn the question around. When have you noticed something was wrong in a workplace? Did you speak? Did you stay quiet? If you spoke, what did it cost you? And if you stayed quiet, what made silence possible? Did you believe somebody else would deal with it? Did you know that remaining silent was unlikely to alter how people saw your competence, your character or your right to belong? I ask because speaking up never carries exactly the same risk for everybody.
And eventually, perhaps the most damaging thing begins to happen. The external scrutiny becomes internal. You start questioning yourself. Was I too direct? Should I have said less? Should I have smiled more? Was my tone wrong? Should I have waited? Should I have looked away? Am I actually the problem?
Self-reflection is vital. I believe that deeply. But there is a point where self-reflection can become self-erosion. You become so accustomed to examining yourself that you stop asking whether anybody else should be doing the examining too. You begin carrying responsibility for everybody else’s discomfort. You start trying to make yourself smaller, softer, quieter, easier, more acceptable, more comfortable for the room. You edit yourself endlessly to keep the room comfortable.
But that is not belonging. That is fitting in. And fitting in is an incredibly expensive path when the price is the continual deletion of who you are. You may bend and bend and bend, and still discover that it is never enough.
This distinction between fitting in and belonging is one I have been exploring more widely through the Six Stages Framework, including in my reflection Human Encounters: How Do People Feel After They Encounter Us?.
I wonder whether you have ever had to calculate yourself in that way, my dear White friend. Whether you have sat outside a meeting and rehearsed not only what you were going to say, but how much of yourself the room would tolerate. Whether you have wondered if your facial expression might confirm somebody’s stereotype. Whether you have worried that being visibly frustrated would be used to explain away the very thing making you frustrated. Perhaps you have. But if these are not calculations you routinely make, that absence matters too.
There came a point in my own life when I realised something. If my survival continually depended upon gaining permission from systems in which other people controlled the doors, perhaps I needed to build a door of my own. That did not erase what had happened. It did not mean the systems no longer mattered. It did not mean creating something new was the answer for everyone. But for me, it became an act of agency.
It was the emotional shift from “Will you let me in?” to “What can I build?” From “Will you recognise my credibility?” to “What happens when I stop allowing your recognition to be the sole measure of it?” That shift did not remove vulnerability, but it changed something. It changed the balance of power.
Perhaps that is why I think so much about doors now. Who controls them? Who gets invited through? Who has to knock repeatedly? Who gets described as troublesome for knocking too loudly? And who eventually decides to stop knocking and starts building?
And I wonder about your relationship with those doors too. Which doors opened for you without you having to notice that somebody was holding them? Who assumed you belonged on the other side? Whose recommendation was enough? Whose familiarity made you seem like a safe choice? Privilege does not mean you did not work hard to walk through the door. It may mean that your race was not one of the things making the door heavier.
My dear White friend, next time you go to work, sit in a meeting or join a professional conversation, I want to invite you to notice something. If there are Black colleagues in the room, do not scrutinise them. Notice what happens around them. Who gets interrupted? Whose ideas are taken seriously the first time they are spoken? Who has to repeat themselves? Who is described as confident and who as intimidating? Who can disagree without their manner becoming the subject of the conversation? Who is given the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong? Who is invited into the informal conversations where relationships and reputations are built? And perhaps notice what happens when a Black colleague raises something uncomfortable. Does the room become curious about what they are saying, or curious about what is wrong with them for saying it?
And notice yourself too. Whose account do you instinctively trust? Whose behaviour do you explain generously? Whose confidence feels comfortable to you? When somebody describes a Black colleague as “difficult”, do you inherit the description or pause long enough to ask where it came from? You do not have to become suspicious of everyone around you. I am simply asking you to become curious about things you may previously have had the privilege not to notice.
My dear White friend, I am not asking you to blindly believe every allegation. That would be too simple. I am asking for something much harder: curiosity.
When you hear that someone is difficult, ask what they raised. When you hear that they are intimidating, look closely at the behaviour actually being described. When you hear that there have been “problems everywhere”, ask whether those environments may share some of the same blind spots. When somebody challenges a system, resist the temptation to examine the challenger more rigorously than the system itself.
And when a Black woman becomes the subject of the conversation, ask yourself whether the original concern has quietly disappeared.
Perhaps also ask yourself: What role am I playing now? Am I interrupting the dominoes, or am I becoming the next one? Am I meeting this person for myself, or am I inheriting somebody else’s lens? Am I giving her the complexity I would want somebody to give me?
Sometimes the most revealing question is not, “Why does she keep causing problems?”
It is: “What happens to people who keep making the problem impossible for us to ignore?”
With love,
Your Black friend
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My Dear White Friend is a reflective series exploring race, relationships, identity, belonging and the psychological processes that shape how we see ourselves and one another. The letters draw on lived experience, memory and reflective inquiry. Identifying details are changed, generalised or omitted, and the “White friend” should not be understood as one individual. The purpose is not to expose individuals or organisations, but to explore the psychological and relational questions that difficult conversations about race can reveal.
Continue reflecting: Explore the My Dear White Friend series | Read Human Encounters: How Do People Feel After They Encounter Us? | Explore Accountability and Certainty | Start with the Six Stages Framework
