By Dr. Yaya Diamond
Black women are expected to be strong enough to endure anything. But the moment a Black woman challenges how she's being treated, suddenly she's the problem.
That double bind is not an accident, and it is not new. It has a history — and that history is still showing up in performance reviews, promotion decisions, and everyday working life.
Employment attorneys Sherry D. Soanes and Sacred B. Huff, two Black women civil rights lawyers, made this case in a presentation on understanding historical racism and combating bias, later recounted by the New York employment law firm Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser. Their argument is simple and devastating: the "strong Black woman" was not born. She was made — and what made her was slavery.
Where the myth came from
Enslaved Black women were forced to work as field hands and domestic laborers, then expected to care for their own families after those long days — all while living under the constant threat of sexual violence. According to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, enslaved women were made to raise their enslavers' children while neglecting their own, and were punished for the sexual assaults committed against them. The domestic slave trade tore families apart on an industrial scale: historians estimate the long-distance trade broke up one in three enslaved marriages and separated one in five children from their parents. Under a 1662 Virginia law known as partus sequitur ventrem, a child born to an enslaved mother was enslaved from birth, no matter who the father was.
For many enslaved women, survival meant concealing pain. Showing grief, exhaustion, or fear could be dangerous. That forced endurance — a survival strategy under brutality — was then twisted into a fiction: that Black women were naturally stronger, that they could withstand more suffering, and that they therefore needed less protection, less support, and less compassion than white women.
Scholars have mapped how that fiction was maintained. Historian Deborah Gray White's landmark Ar'n't I a Woman? (1985) showed how the "Jezebel" and "Mammy" stereotypes worked together — one justifying sexual abuse, the other recasting slavery as benign. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins called these "controlling images": pictures of Black womanhood designed to make oppression look normal. And in Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman (2009), Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant argues the strength ideal works to "defend and maintain a stratified social order by obscuring Black women's experiences of suffering, acts of desperation, and anger."
The myth has a name in the research
Psychologist Cheryl Woods-Giscombé formalized this as the Superwoman Schema in a 2010 study published in Qualitative Health Research. Based on focus groups with Black women, she identified five obligations the schema imposes: (1) present an image of strength; (2) suppress emotions; (3) resist vulnerability and dependence; (4) succeed despite limited resources; (5) put caregiving for others ahead of self-care.
Woods-Giscombé traces the schema directly to history, writing that racism, oppression, and limited resources "during and after legalized slavery… forced African American women to take on the roles of mother, nurturer, and breadwinner out of economic and social necessity."
When the schema was later turned into a validated questionnaire and tested across studies totaling 739 women, stronger endorsement of it was associated with higher perceived stress, more depressive symptoms, stress-eating, poorer sleep, and less physical activity. A separate 2019 study in Sex Roles found that the pressure to manifest strength, combined with self-silencing, was linked to depressive symptoms — and that asking for help felt "diametrically opposed" to the identity itself.
The word for the specific blend of racism and sexism underneath all of this is misogynoir, coined by scholar Moya Bailey. It names the uniquely racialized and sexist violence directed at Black women at the intersection of racial and gender marginalization.
How it shows up at work today
Fast forward to the modern workplace. Who is expected to do more with less? Who gets less mentoring and less sponsorship? Who, when she objects, becomes "aggressive," "insubordinate," "unprofessional" — a woman with a "tone" problem?
The data backs up what Black women have been saying for generations.
The broken rung is worst for Black women. McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org's Women in the Workplace 2024 — covering 281 organizations and more than 10 million employees — found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 81 women were promoted, and Black women's promotion rates had regressed to 2020 levels. The share of Black women who say their race has hurt their chances of getting a raise or promotion jumped from 45% in 2018 to 61% in 2024. Only 23% of Black women said their manager helps them navigate organizational politics, compared with 37% of white women. And the report quotes the double bind in Black women's own words: "If you're too strong, you're an angry Black woman. If you're too soft, you can't handle the role, or you're unqualified." One senior manager described pitching her naturally deep voice higher in her twenties because of reactions to her "tone of voice."
Feedback itself is skewed. Textio's analysis of more than 13,000 performance reviews found Black employees received 26% more unactionable feedback than other groups, even while receiving less feedback overall. Its earlier research found women were 11 times more likely than men to be called "abrasive" in reviews and 7 times more likely to be called "opinionated."
The "angry Black woman" penalty is measurable. In a 2022 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (two studies, 555 participants), researchers found that when a Black woman expressed anger, observers attributed it to her personality rather than her situation — and rated her performance and leadership worse as a result. The stereotype itself did the damage.
And it shows up in the paycheck. According to the National Women's Law Center's analysis of Census data, Black women working full time, year-round were paid just 65 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men in 2024 — a gap that adds up to more than $1.1 million in lost earnings over a 40-year career.
Even the courts have wrestled with this. In Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989), the U.S. Supreme Court described the aggressiveness double bind — penalizing a woman for behavior that would be rewarded in a man — as "an intolerable and impermissible catch 22." Legal scholars made the point plainly in the Iowa Law Review: the "angry Black woman" trope is routinely invoked to deflect blame onto the woman who spoke up, and the law still offers few effective mechanisms to stop it.
The cost to the body
Enduring more and asking for less takes a physical toll. Researcher Arline Geronimus calls it weathering: the cumulative effect of chronic stress and structural disadvantage wearing the body down early. In one widely cited finding, Black women between 49 and 55 were biologically an estimated 7.5 years older than white women of the same age, with stress and poverty accounting for a significant share of the gap. The mask of strength, worn long enough, becomes a health risk.
This history is not just history
That is the heart of Soanes and Huff's challenge to their fellow lawyers — and it applies far beyond the courtroom. If we do not recognize coded racism when it walks into a workplace wearing words like pushy, aggressive, or not a team player, we cannot name it, and what we cannot name, we cannot fix.
Black women were never superhuman. They were surviving. The expectation that they keep surviving — silently, gratefully, and without complaint — is not a compliment. It is an inheritance no one asked for, and it is long past time to set it down.
Sources
Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser, LLP — presentation summary (Oct 15, 2026): facebook.com/reel/1071949845678567 · Woods-Giscombé (2010), Qualitative Health Research, and the 2019 Superwoman Schema questionnaire validation studies (PMC7544187) · Abrams et al. (2019), Sex Roles (PMC6510490) · Bailey, M., Northwestern University news · Motro et al. (2022), Journal of Applied Psychology (PubMed 33793257) · Iowa Law Review 102 (2017) · National Museum of African American History and Culture, searchablemuseum.com · Lowcountry Digital History Initiative, College of Charleston · Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2009), Temple University Press · McKinsey & LeanIn.org, Women in the Workplace 2024 · Textio (2023), performance feedback research · National Women's Law Center (2025), wage gap data · Geronimus et al., weathering review (PMC8020496) · Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228 (1989).