A thread about BLACK BURNOUT! When I saw this article pop up yesterday I was excited to read it. Yes, I finally identity with something targeted for elders millennials—yahoo—me! I was even going to excerpt & retweet & be all proud/vulnerably cute about my burnout. BUT then...
the more I read this lengthy article, the more and more I DID NOT SEE MYSELF. The article even states that millennials are a “specific subset of mostly white, largely middle-class people born between 1981 and 1996” I don’t expect avery article to tackle every angle,
but when talking about the “the dominant millennial condition, regardless of class or race or location” WELP, that just seems dangerous. For me, BLACK & BROWN BURNOUT are different, especially when coupled with factors like toggling scarcity mentality and fighting systemic racism
that this article barely even skims or scratches or just utterly dismisses completely. A couple of wonky references & anecdotes to race/cultural paradigms here & there, but as an afterthought, which is funny/sad to me that an article about burnout, which discuss the feelings &
behaviors of a generation—my generation—but my dead black batteries are not included. The author even gives definitions for being “poor” and “lazy,” but doesn’t situate the hefty histories of these adjectives, especially in terms of the construct of race in the workplace.
If I don’t answer an email or attend a committee meeting at my university, I might suffer different consequences than my white, male millennial counterparts. Not filling out arduous insurance forms for certain communities isn’t just bothersome, but could be damaging, fatal even.
Yes, we are all so damn tired & in debt, but that painful exploitation is stratified across various identities & to ignore that splintering is just as damaging as acknowledging that we all feel like commodities, which for black people wasn’t a simile, but a reality until 1865.
The truth is, for me, I don’t feel like I am allowed to be tired. Every black woman I know is exhausted has been exhausted. I was born from tired, black women who did not have the luxury to ghost on their responsibilities or people DIED. Now, the stakes are different for me,
but I’m still trying to untangle the weight of my blood with respectability politics. I enjoyed a large of chunk of this article at its attempt to define our current anxieties and stasis, but this wasn’t a mirror, in which I saw myself a reflected, just another reminder...
that my flavor of burnout is invisible and reduced to a few mentions without context. Bloop. #blackburnout
Just noticed lots of typos in my thread—yikes! Sorry! Written in haste, but with loads of love. Forgive me 💛🤗🙌🏾!
