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The Corporate Crash Out: #3
What are we crashing out about today, besties?
First and foremost, you’re in the right place.
This is my full sized newsletter here for more crash outs, more discounts to work shops, coaching and more.
It’s Black History Month. And somehow… silence, and hell, and it's really loud.
My DMs are dry. My calendar is empty. The news cycle is sparking a migraine.
Speakers who are usually booked out months in advance have heard nothing. Panels are popping up left and right with the same recycled faces. Representation is being treated like an optional add-on instead of the baseline. And yes, I’m included in the group wondering what happened between the land acknowledgements and the budget approvals.
This isn’t about being forgotten. It’s about being deprioritized because the news cycle has decided we're no longer "trending".
Every year, Black History Month rolls around and organizations swear they care about impact, equity, and amplifying Black voices. And every year, too many of them wait until February 20-something to realize they haven’t booked a single Black speaker, partnered with a Black business, or paid a Black creator.
And i keep seeing your copy/paste panels, most without a single Black speakers. So we're back, baby.
I’m relaunching Black Speakers Collection.
But V2 is back, better + bigger. I've taken some time away from my favorite project because the last 2 years ran me over, and thought of creating was overwhelming.
But now it is the only thing I can think about.
Because the truth is, so many of us are pivoting to creating, to owning our businesses and writing our own books.
We need circulation. We need ecosystems. We need people to stop acting like Black talent only exists in keynote form once a year.
We are our own customers. We are our own economy. We are our own community.
So we're evolving.
In addition to our speaker directory, we’re launching:
a Black Business directory
a Black Creator directory
a Black Author directory
Because Black excellence doesn’t live in one lane. Because supporting Black voices shouldn’t stop at the applause. Because representation without redistribution is just PR. This is about making it easier to find us, book us, pay us, promote us, and keep us in the room long after February ends.
If you’re a planner, a leader, a buyer, a reader, or someone with a budget and a platform, this is your reminder: the talent is here. It always has been.
And if you’re Black and feeling that familiar quiet this month, know this, it’s not because you’re less brilliant, less relevant, or less needed.
It’s because the system still defaults to comfort, and you know I hate keeping it comfortable.
Have an old profile? Come claim it.
Have an old profile and no longer want to hang out? You can delete it.
This time around, YOU own your profile.
Join the party here.
Book Club Winners:
If you read my content this week you know that I am giving away five Black books.
Unmasking the Strong Black Woman- Kara Stevens, EdM
Cashing Out- Julien Saunders + Kiersten S.
I'm Not Yelling- Elizabeth Leiba
decentering whiteness in the workplace- Dr. Janice Gassam Asare, (Ph.D.)
Let Them See You- Madison Butler 🏳️🌈🦄, CPT i'll be signing this copy!
drum roll please
Winners (in order of books listed above)
Congrats on your new library additions! ill be DMing you for how to ship your winnings!
My favorite Black owned brands today:
Handbags: Brandon Blackwood New York
Skin: Black Girl Sunscreen
Skin: The Lip Bar
Fitness: Vertical Activewear
Fitness: My Solely Fit
Snacks: Ghetto Gastro
Snacks: Partake Foods
Alexa, play "PfknR".
Alot of you got on Pedro Pascal's internet this week to complain about how The Benito Bowl was in Spanish, and you couldn't understand it.
Just remember, you didn't understand last year's show either, or the year before that and those were in english.
If you hated the half time show, it's a good day to remember that not everything is made for you, and it's okay to sit and enjoy other people enjoying joy, culture and love.
Culture is not a customer service experience. You're not always right.
We tried to explain this lesson last year, it appears you may have forgotten.
Your discomfort is not opression.
Your lack of understanding is not exclusion.
America is full of all kinds of culture, not just yours.
There is so much joy in watching other people experience their own culture, if you're willing to decenter yourself for a clock tick, you might get to experience it too.
Community is built by knowing when to sit still and let other people experience culture, joy, and love without demanding an explanation (or a subtitle).
But revolutionary work is not all or nothing.
There is no one way to do the work
Do not let a random influencer on the internet make you feel bad for enjoying the benito bowl.I've seen alot of criticism online about watching the halftime show or caring about what celebrities do.
I’ve seen a lot of moral posturing online about watching the halftime show, following celebrities, or caring about pop culture, as if joy itself has become suspicious.
It's a lazy take.We can both critique celebrity culture, and embrace when people in that space bring power to their platforms.
The revolution will not be televised.
That phrase was never meant to imply silence, deprivation, or aesthetic starvation.
It was a critique of who controls the narrative, not a demand that we reject storytelling altogether. And storytelling has always been central to how power moves and how doors ae opened.
Over the last several decades, the world has shifted to online and social mediums for story telling. Although revolution is always going to be grass roots dependent, I will never say someone should not use their platform to tell their story.
Because there are people who will never listen to me, or anyone who looks like me, ssimply because of how we look, how we love, or how we exist. But they might listen when the message reaches them through a doorway they already have open.
There is benefit to viewership on the world stage.
Not because it replaces the work, but because it expands who the work can reach.Movements don’t only grow through correctness; they grow through reach.
Through repetition. Through exposure that makes new ideas harder to dismiss.If liberation requires demanding that people reject joy in the name of the "cause", we're not liberating people, we are trying to control how they move in our spaces.
There is room for many roles in this work.
Some people organize.
Some people educate.
Some people create.
Some people rest.
Some people watch the halftime show and dance in their living room
AI in HR? It’s happening now.
Deel's free 2026 trends report cuts through all the hype and lays out what HR teams can really expect in 2026. You’ll learn about the shifts happening now, the skill gaps you can't ignore, and resilience strategies that aren't just buzzwords. Plus you’ll get a practical toolkit that helps you implement it all without another costly and time-consuming transformation project.
Want to know what makes me want to crash out?
Ignoring the concept of intersectionality when addressing systems of harm.
Recently, Queer Eye star Karamo Brown made headlines not for a makeover or life lesson, but for refusing to show up to press appearances because he was protecting his mental health after years of workplace bullying.
Instead of joining his castmates on CBS Mornings and Today, Karamo’s team shared a statement in his absence: a reminder that you must protect your peace from worlds and people who seek to destroy it, which is exactly why he couldn’t be there.
This wasn’t about PR or performance. This was about survival.
And boy, oh boy, did that feel familiar for myself as a Black woman, straight, queer, and everywhere in between, that moment didn’t feel isolated or dramatic. It felt like a mirror. Because while celebrities have platforms, most of us just have our bodies and the expectation that we should endure harm quietly.
I had the pleasure of talking to Kara Stevens, EdM about how HR teams can create true change and policy to protect all identities from an intersectional lens.
When Conflict Isn’t Just Conflict
Power, Bias, and Self-Protection in “Inclusive” Workplaces
Let’s start here: your hurt is real.
Before we diagnose anything as conflict, bias, or bullying, we have to undo the reflex so many of us were taught at work — to gaslight ourselves. To minimize. To assume we’re “being sensitive.” To swallow discomfort because we don’t want to be seen as difficult.
Regardless of the label, if something harmed you, it matters.
Conflict vs. Bias vs. Bullying
Conflict is normal. Healthy even. Every workplace has disagreement, tension, and competing perspectives. The problem is that many people were never taught how to engage in healthy conflict — so they default to power, dominance, and harm instead.
When I coach clients through workplace conflict, I ask them to slow down and interrogate what’s actually happening. A few grounding questions:
Is this situational or patterned?
Conflict can be resolved. Bias always spins the block.Is the behavior targeting my work, or who I am?
How does this person treat others who don’t share my lived experience?
Am I being required to code switch as a survival mechanism?
What is my body doing? Is my fight-or-flight activated?
Conflict often feels mutual, a disagreement between people with relatively equal power. Bias and bullying feel different. They erode safety. They shrink your ability to show up. They live in your nervous system long after the meeting ends.
Your body usually knows long before your HR team will.
Why Most Inclusion Training Fails
Many DEI frameworks collapse because they treat marginalized identities as a monolith.
We talk about Black people.
We talk about queer people.
We talk about women, immigrants, veterans.
But we rarely talk about what happens when those identities are all one person how power moves between marginalized groups.
You cannot build psychological safety without intersectionality. Full stop.
That means being willing to have uncomfortable conversations, like naming anti-Blackness in queer spaces. These conversations feel polarizing because they disrupt proximity to power. But discomfort is not harm. Avoidance is.
Frameworks that actually work include:
Power-aware identity mapping
Impact over intent modeling
Trauma-informed management training
Bystander accountability training
“Inclusion” is the word organizations love to perform.
Safety is the standard they avoid.
And safety cannot exist without auditing power, including proximity to whiteness, over and over again.
When HR Gets It Wrong (and they normally do)
I am an anti-HR People practitioner.
I got into this work believing HR existed to protect people. What I learned instead is that HR too often protects the organization from people.
HR is not the DEI team, but HR must understand power dynamics to resolve conflict responsibly. When they don’t, everything collapses back into “basic handbook policies.”
And handbooks are not built for nuance.
They are built for organizational CYA.
If HR wants to handle conflict where marginalized identities overlap, they must understand:
Shared marginalization does not mean shared power
Anti-Blackness exists within many marginalized groups
Proximity to whiteness changes who is believed, protected, and punished
Practitioners need to ask harder questions:
Who is more likely to be labeled “aggressive”?
Whose reputation is more fragile?
Who is more protected if this escalates?
Neutrality in unequal systems is not neutral.
It sides with power.
History has been very clear about how that ends.
What Organizations Get Wrong About Bullying Black Employees
Blackness has been weaponized for centuries. Professionalism has been used as a tool to discipline us into palatable shapes.
We have been bullied into changing our hair.
Our clothes.
Our voices.
Code-switching isn’t preference, it’s survival.
Most workplace bullying involving Black employees is systemic, not interpersonal. It’s normalized harm. And organizations respond by focusing on tone instead of impact.
They would rather write us up for speaking up than address the behavior that caused harm in the first place. Our voices are treated as weapons. Our pain is treated like a PR problem.
Too often, the “solution” is a quiet exit.
A performance plan.
A slow erasure.
Our trauma is not a business risk.
It is a leadership failure.
A Word for Black Women Navigating This Moment
Straight. Queer. All of us.
We have to protect ourselves — at all costs.
Because work is a plastic ball.
And you, my love, you are the glass ball.
When work drops, it bounces.
When we drop, we fracture.
Do not fall for the branding.
Do not fall for the Pride flags or the Black History Month budget.
Companies love to capitalize on us.
They hate to love us.
Harm doesn’t disappear because an organization celebrated February or June. Some of the most “inclusive” workplaces are still traumatizing their Black and brown employees daily.
And some of the most dangerous environments are the ones that insist they’re safe.
So self-protection becomes a practice:
Keep your receipts. All of them.
Over-document. Over-document. OVER-DOCUMENT.Trust your body when something feels off.
Withhold access when safety hasn’t been earned.
Remember no job is worth your health, your joy, or your sense of self.
We are constantly asked to be resilient instead of protected.
Grateful instead of honest.
Silent instead of safe.
Today, I’m asking you to choose safety.
However loudly or quietly you need to.
Protect your peace.
Protect your heart.
And above all, protect yourself.
Want to learn more about Conflict?
“This book isn't about being mean. It's about being clear. Whether you're constantly overcommitted, afraid to disappoint others, or exhausted from being everything to everyone, I Said No gives you the tools to speak up, hold your line, and stop apologizing for taking up space.
It's time to stop shrinking. Time to stop explaining. Time to say no-with a backbone and no regrets.”
Order your copy here.
I am giving away Dr. Jen Fry’s book to someone who refers my newsletter (use the link at the bottom of the page!)
Ways You Can Support Me:
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Let me know what you want to crash out about next week.
Stay Tuned for What is Coming Next.
Being here counts. Thank you for supporting work that tells the truth. 🖤
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