From Workforce to Life Force: When Black Genius Is No Longer Organized Around Survival
- Erica Satori
- Jul 25
- 9 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
On my second day as a Chief Diversity Officer, another C-suite executive welcomed me by complimenting the remarkable vision I had presented during the interview process.
That compliment was followed by a warning.
They reminded me that I had mentioned looking to my spirit animal as one source of personal empowerment alongside other sources, my faith, family, and other sources of strength. They said a few people had been sensitive to that language I used because they associated it with Native American cultural practices. I asked the obvious question: Who was sensitive to it?
I had presented to a large group of White and Hispanic men and women. I showed up as myself because I didn't want to be in an environment where I couldn't be myself... especially since the job was, quite literally, to create inclusive environments.
My professional background and credentials spoke for themselves, so I chose to differentiate myself by also sharing my personal background. I talked about being a first-generation college graduate from Hampton, Virginia.
Hello, 1619 heritage.
Hello, Pocahontas and Powhatan awareness.
Hello, Hidden Figures, citing how that was my high school and my sorority sisters in that true story
I shared all of that and explained that I am a walking artifact of American history, directly shaped by the events people read about in textbooks and museums. Those histories were not distant concepts to me. Their consequences were present in my family, my community, and my daily lived experiences growing up.
I also shared that I am a Jones from Charlottesville, Virginia, where my grandmother recently had yet another front-row seat to racial terror from her own yard. Hello, Unite the Right rally. No one raised a concern during my presentation. In fact, I received an ovation and then many words of appreciation from those who lined up to shake my hand after my presentation in the auditorium.
More importantly, the comment from the fellow executive assumed that I was borrowing from a culture outside of my own, as though Soulaani Black Americans do not have a myriad of ancestral, spiritual, symbolic traditions from across the African diaspora.
My response was simple and unapologetic. "I'm Black. Did they miss that I'm Black?"
And just like that, on day two of being the executive responsible for advancing diversity, I experienced the very thing I had been hired to address. My cultural worldview was being questioned before I had even had the opportunity to lead.
Be Diverse, but Not Too Different
There could have been a thoughtful conversation and education about language, context, and cultural interpretation. I welcome those conversations, they're are part of the work. And piece of me can accept that the tap on the shoulder was likely well meaning and they thought they were looking out for the only Black in the boardroom and new kid on the block.
But that was not how the exchange felt, it was a reality check. It felt like a warning that the organization had hired my expertise while reserving the right to regulate how much of my identity could accompany it. I was being asked to create a more diverse work and learning environment while simultaneously receiving an early lesson about which expressions of diversity might be deemed too unfamiliar, too risky, or too uncomfortable.
The message was subtle, but recognizable: Bring your visionary leadership. Bring your credentials and expertise. Bring your labor. But be careful about bringing too much of yourself. Not too much now.
That tension is familiar to many Black professionals. Our organizations often want the measurable benefits of our difference without having to encounter the full complexity of it. They want our resilience, cultural intelligence, adaptability, creativity, emotional labor, and ability to see what others miss.
Our ways of inner knowing may still be treated with suspicion. Our language may be scrutinized. Our emotional expression may be misread. Our confidence may be labeled arrogance. Our cultural practices may be viewed as unprofessional, inappropriate, or irrelevant unless they can be translated into terms the dominant culture already recognizes.
In other words, Black genius is frequently welcomed as a resource before Black people are welcomed as whole human beings.
From Cotton Fields to Corporate Fields
We have to be careful when drawing comparisons between modern employment and the enslavement of our ancestors. A corporate job is not chattel slavery, and reducing slavery to a metaphor can flatten the horror and specificity of what our ancestors endured.
But we should not be so afraid of imperfect comparisons that we refuse to study the historical patterns still embedded in our institutions. The American economy was built through the extraction of Black labor, those are the facts. Our ancestors’ bodies, natural abilities, universal knowledge, seemingly magical creativity, and reproductive lives were treated as economic resources.
The structures have changed. The laws have changed. The working conditions have changed.
But remnants of an extractive logic remain as we are still conditioned to brag about which field we work in. Many Black professionals still find themselves in systems that are highly skilled at using their labor but poorly equipped to recognize their humanity. They may be celebrated for how much they can endure, how quickly they can adapt, and how effectively they can solve institutional problems without being given meaningful control over the conditions, direction, or rewards of their work.
They were invited into the field. They may even receive an impressive title within it. But they still are expected to produce according to someone else's design.
Looking through my sociological lens, this is what I think people are naming when they talk about corporate jobs dimming the light of their creative expression. They are sensing the continuation of a cultural relationship to Black labor in which productivity is valued more readily than sovereignty, imagination, ownership, and life. The language may be provocative, but the underlying exhaustion is real.
We Were Taught to Prove Ourselves Through Labor
Black Americans have long been taught that safety and success come through exceptional performance. And I get it, I too did all of the things...
Work hard.
Be twice as good.
Earn the degree.
Secure the benefits.
Get into the room.
Climb the ladder.
Do not give them a reason to doubt you.
For generations, this strategy has helped Black families survive and advance within systems designed to exclude them. Education, employment, and institutional achievement have created real opportunities, mobility, security, and influence.
But survival strategies can become restrictive when we are no longer allowed to question them.
What happens when the ladder no longer leads anywhere we want to go? What happens when the role that once represented success begins to feel like confinement? What happens when a person has mastered the ability to function in a system but has lost connection with their own desires, natural abilities, creativity, and purpose?
We often experience this as imposter syndrome or call this burnout.
But sometimes burnout is not only the result of doing too much. Sometimes it comes from spending too many years using your life force energy in ways that are disconnected from your identity and misaligned with your assignment.
Most People Are Not Unmotivated. They Are Disoriented.
I regularly see people say they have no passion. They cannot identify a dream career, I couldn't when I was growing up. Some have no desire to climb the corporate ladder. Others feel depressed by the possibility of working another thirty years in jobs that leave them unfulfilled.
It is easy to interpret these statements as laziness, lack of ambition, or entitlement.
As a social scientist, I hear something else. I hear disorientation.
Many people have spent their entire lives being directed by external reference points and other people's authority. They were taught what success should look like, which careers were respectable, how much money they should make, and which accomplishments would prove that they were doing well.
They learned how to navigate systems, yet never got the chance to learn how to locate themselves in their lives or livelihood. So when the traditional directions stop making sense, they assume that they have lost their way and their passion for life.
But a person can deeply desire a meaningful life while having no idea what meaning looks like for them. They can crave freedom without having a framework for creating it. They can possess extraordinary abilities without understanding the environments, relationships, and forms of work in which those abilities function best. They are not empty. They are without an internal point of reference.
You cannot align with an assignment that you do not recognize.
My Work Has Always Been About the Person Inside the System
Before I became a C-suite executive, I began my career as a foster care social worker. That matters.
Social work taught me how to solve social problems by looking beyond individual behavior and examine the environment surrounding the person. It taught me that people do not struggle in isolation. Their experiences are shaped by families, organizations, institutions, economic conditions, cultural expectations, and systems of power.
When a person appears unmotivated, a social worker asks what they have endured. When someone cannot move forward, we ask what obstacles, messages, relationships, and structures have shaped their understanding of what is possible. When a person is exhausted, we do not only ask how they can become more productive. We ask what has been extracting from them and whether their environment supports their well-being.
My work as a Chief Diversity Officer expanded those questions into organizational life.
Who is recognized as a leader?
Whose knowledge is considered credible?
Which forms of communication are rewarded?
Who is expected to assimilate?
Whose discomfort is prioritized?
Who is allowed to be complex, culturally grounded, intuitive, creative, and fully human at work?
Now, through Business Sociology, I am bringing those perspectives together. Through individual and team leadership and professional development along with personal growth and mindset coaching, I help people to understand themselves so they can understand and align with their assignment. I orient people so they can steady themselves within the larger social and organizational systems influencing their lives. We examine not only who they are, but how their natural strengths, leadership patterns, values, cultural experiences, and ways of contributing interact with the environments around them.
This is my philosophy and approach because I've found that most times, the person does not need to be fixed. Sometimes the structure is wrong. Sometimes the role is too small. Sometimes the environment requires a level of self-abandonment that is no longer sustainable. Location. Location. Location. But like any good fisherman, Navy captain, or network engineer will tell you, orientation comes before navigation. And like them and Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures, I too use the astronomical intelligence to calculate trajectory, but I apply that math to social science, instead of rocket science or computer science.
Self-Awareness as Economic Agency
Self-awareness is often treated as soft, private, or purely personal. For Black professionals, it can become a form of economic agency. When you understand how you naturally think, communicate, decide, create, lead, and collaborate, you are better able to determine which work structures support your genius and which ones merely consume it. You can begin asking more useful questions:
Am I best suited for traditional employment, self-employment, partnership, or a portfolio career?
Do I thrive working independently, inside a small collaborative team, or within a larger organization?
What conditions allow me to do excellent work without sacrificing my health, identity, relationships, and creativity?
Which abilities have I been using for free, minimizing, or treating as personality quirks when they are actually part of my intellectual and economic value?
Self-employment may be the answer for some. For others, it may be consulting, fractional leadership, cooperative ownership, a creative partnership, community enterprise, or just a more intentional relationship with employment.
The point is not that every Black professional should leave corporate America. The point serves as permission that corporate employment should no longer be treated as they only legitimate expression of ambition, leadership, security or contribution to society.
Our ancestors were denied choice. Our responsibility is not to romanticize work simply because it comes with a title and a paycheck. It is to expand the range of choices available to us and become more conscious about where our labor, creativity, and life force are going.
From Employability to Alignment
Black professionals have become masters of employability. We know how to earn credentials, translate ourselves for different audiences, exceed expectations, manage perceptions, and demonstrate value. We know how to become what institutions say they need.
But the next chapter must include something more. We must learn how to recognize our own needs, define our own measures of success, and build economic lives that allow our gifts to mature rather than merely perform. That requires a shift:
From proving our worth to understanding our value.
From climbing ladders to choosing landscapes.
From surviving organizations to creating aligned structures.
From being used for our abilities to having ownership in what those abilities produce. From workforce to life force.
This is not an argument against work. It is an argument for work that does not require the continual abandonment of self. It is an argument for employment, leadership, entrepreneurship, and collaboration that allow Black people to express our intelligence, imagination, cultural knowledge, spirituality, creativity, and humanity without apology.
Black Genius Was Never Missing
Our problem has never been a lack of talent. Black genius has been overworked, underrecognized, misdirected, and disconnected from ownership. It has been assigned to solve problems it did not create. It has been praised in private and questioned in public. It has been invited into institutions and then disciplined for refusing to disappear inside them.
I know this as a social worker and social scientist. I know it as a chief diversity officer. I know it as a Black woman who was reminded, on her second day in the C-suite, that even the executive responsible for facilitating diversity, equity and inclusion could still be culturally marginalized by the very same colleagues she was to collaborate with. And I know it as a business sociologist who now helps people understand themselves so they can recognize and align with their assignment.
We have spent generations proving that we can work. The next chapter is not about rejecting work. It is about reclaiming authorship over how, where, why, and with whom we work.
It is about using self-awareness to organize our lives around meaningful contribution rather than endless extraction.
It is about building businesses, partnerships, collectives, careers, and communities that make room for the whole person.
Black life was never meant to exist only as workforce. There is life force here. There is genius here. There is purpose here. And it is time we stopped leaving it in somebody else’s field.
