It’s safe to say we’ve entered a new era of vocational burnout
Everyone is feeling it, but especially Black women.
Nearly every Black woman I know hates her job—or, at the very least, feels trapped by the life that job requires her to maintain. For many of us, work has become a constant negotiation between survival and identity, between what we have to do to live and what it costs us to do it.
Black women have been trying to navigate this tension in countless ways:
By getting more degrees to increase our earning potential.
By climbing the corporate ladder to positions of leadership and power.
By starting a side hustle, hoping to create a “passive” income stream to increase our earning potential.
By prioritizing the viral aesthetics of rest and ease, embracing the #softlife.
And yet, for so many of us, these attempts feel like a cycle of endless striving. it feels like we are doing more in systems that continue to demand too much.
The result? We’re still exhausted, still unfulfilled, still in need of support, and still disconnected from what truly matters.
"Knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential for the survival of the subordinate"
— Patricia Hills Collins, 2000
What if the problem isn’t us,
but how we’ve been taught to approach work?
Our ancestors carried wisdom we’ve been forced to forget: how to survive, resist, and build community in the face of oppression. They knew how to withstand, how to fight for their rights, and how to protect what is sacred. Now, it is our turn to take those inherited lessons and apply them to a new practice: soulwork.
Soulwork invites us to consciously choose how we labor, aligning our work with our deepest purpose and values. It’s about more than what we do; it’s about how we do it, why we do it, and who we do it for. Soulwork challenges us to ask difficult, transformative questions:
Does this work reflect the essence of who I am and the legacy I’m called to uphold?
How am I contributing to my own liberation and the well-being of my community, and how might I be perpetuating cycles of depletion and exploitation?
How does my lived reality become an essential form of knowledge and resistance in the work I do?
This is the call of Soulwork: to reframe vocation as a practice of intentional labor. To reclaim your time and energy as sacred. To build a life where every labor—paid or unpaid—reflects your worth and fuels your liberation.
It’s not about quitting your job or embracing hustle culture; it’s about approaching all the work you do in a way that honors your soul.
Black Women’s Labor in the us Has always Been Exploited, Yet It Has also Always Been Transformative
For centuries, Black women have been expected to labor under the weight of oppression, from the grueling toil of enslavement to the ongoing, invisible burdens of modern-day work environments. But even in these conditions, Black women’s labor has never been merely “work.” It has been an essential force—shaping cultures, sustaining communities, and holding families together. Yet, despite the weight we carry, our labor is too often exploited, overlooked, and undervalued.
Feminista Jones calls attention to this ongoing dynamic: “Black women’s cultural labor has been co-opted time and again—our styles, our language, our expressions—while our economic and social realities remain ignored.” We see this in the appropriation of our style, our language, and our work—whether it's the way our fashion trends set the tone for mainstream culture or the ways in which our contributions in workplaces or social movements are used and repackaged for others’ benefit.
But, as much as the world has taken from us, it has also been transformed by us.
Our labor has always been transformative—not just in the practical sense of making something function, but in a deeper, almost alchemical sense: turning struggles into movements, turning pain into power. From the domestic work forced upon us during slavery to our leadership in the Civil Rights Movement, we have been the architects of both survival and social change. Our ability to take what we’ve been given and create something meaningful from it is revolutionary.
Yet the transformative nature of our labor doesn’t shield us from the reality of exploitation. To this day, Black women are disproportionately represented in undervalued industries like caregiving, cleaning, and service work, even as the fruits of these labors fuel the functioning of the economy. Our innovation is often taken without credit, and our capacity for leadership is underappreciated until it becomes convenient for others to acknowledge. But rather than simply enduring exploitation, Black women have turned this reality into a well of creative energy and power.
Exploitation as a Catalyst for Innovation
The exploitation of Black women’s labor, while undeniably harmful, has often catalyzed the very innovation that drives social change. We didn’t wait for others to validate our contributions—we created our own platforms, our own spaces of belonging, our own avenues for influence. The birth of hip-hop, the flourishing of Black fashion, the formation of Black-led social movements—these are all products of labor born from the need to push against and transcend the boundaries that others placed on us.
When the world refuses to give us space, we take it. When our labor is disregarded, we reframe it, redefine it, and make it work for us in ways that no one anticipated. Our labor is transformative because we take nothing and make it into everything.
This dynamic is also reflected in the way Black women’s intellectual and creative contributions are commodified and repurposed by industries, often without us receiving the recognition or compensation we deserve. Think of how aspects of Black culture are consumed globally—from fashion to music to literature—while Black women remain underpaid, underrepresented, and marginalized within those very industries.
Reflective Prompt:
In your work, your family, your community, think about how your labor has moved people, shifted perspectives, or created new opportunities for growth and healing. Even in a world that undervalues you, your labor has undeniable power. How do you take ownership of that power?
Black Women’s Labor in the us Has always Been Exploited, Yet It Has also Always Been Transformative
“Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?”
For generations, Black women have been socialized to believe that our worth is tied to how much we can endure and produce. our labor has always been harnessed by forced and relegated to the realm of “unskilled”. Scholar Saidiya Hartman describes this in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, noting that Black women’s labor has historically been extracted while our lives have been deemed unworthy of care. Even now, the trend persists: Black women are overrepresented in low-wage service jobs and underpaid in professional fields, making 64 cents to every dollar a white man earns (AAUW, 2023).
This economic reality fuels a deeply ingrained survival-based mindset. We internalize the idea that we must work twice as hard for half as much, that struggle is noble, that burnout is proof of our value.
But let’s be clear: this is not empowerment. It is exploitation disguised as resilience.
A 2022 study from the women’s health report found that Black women experience some of the highest levels of stress-related health issues, including hypertension, autoimmune diseases, and chronic fatigue, all linked to racial tension and overwork. We are literally dying from the labor we have been conditioned to see as necessary.
sources linked here
Reflective Prompt:
Where in your life are you working out of fear rather than purpose? What would it look like to shift from survival mode to self-honoring work?
And the irony? The same culture that demands our labor doesn’t reward it. Research from Lean In and McKinsey shows that Black women, despite having higher rates of degree attainment compared to Black men and many other women, remain the least promoted demographic in the U.S. workforce. Our education, experience, and effort rarely translate into the security and advancement we’re told they will.
So why do we keep pushing? Because we were raised to believe that stopping is dangerous. That rest is a failure. That if we just work harder, we will finally be seen, protected, and valued.
But the system was never built to recognize us.
And if we continue to labor under this belief, we only perpetuate cycles of exploitation that were never meant to serve us.
Breaking the Cycle
Releasing this harmful inheritance requires more than just personal mindset shifts—it demands collective refusal.
We must name this pattern for what it is: a survival mechanism, not a destiny.
We must unlearn the belief that our value is tied to suffering.
We must begin working in ways that sustain us, rather than deplete us.
Black feminist scholars have long theorized labor, distinguishing between exploitative work and labor that sustains the self and community. Joan M. Martin’s concept of embodied labor, introduced in More Than Chains and Toil, recognizes that Black women’s labor is never just physical. It is intellectual, emotional, and spiritual, often demanded without acknowledgment or compensation. This labor carries the weight of survival and care, passed down across generations.
Similarly, rest as resistance, a framework popularized by Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry, challenges grind culture and asserts that Black people deserve ease as a birthright. It calls for a refusal to be reduced to productivity.
Soulwork aligns with these frameworks but extends them further: it reframes labor itself as a site of reclamation and self-determination. While embodied labor critiques the burdens placed on Black women and rest as resistance calls for refusal, soulwork insists on intentional labor—on choosing how, where, and for whom we work in ways that prioritize our liberation. It is not just about resisting the systems that exploit us; it is about actively building new ways of laboring that honor our essence and purpose.
Whether you call it a distraction, a job, a calling, or a survival strategy, soulwork demands that our labor reflect our deepest values. It asks: How can my labor nourish me? How can it serve my community? How can I engage in work that aligns with my worth rather than undermines it?
Intentional Labor Is a Revolutionary Act of Self-Determination
Soulwork is a call to reclaim our time, our energy, and our right to labor on our own terms. Because the truth is, we are always laboring. The question is: how much of that labor is to the benefit of yourself and your loved ones?
Choosing how and where to labor is a revolutionary act of self-determination for Black women.
Quiet quitting, standing up for yourself, starting a side hustle, prioritizing rest and utilizing your skills in your community are all acts of resistance rooted in ancestral wisdom. Each option has a long and pronounced history for the totality of the Black American experience.
By reclaiming our time and energy, we disrupt cycles of exploitation and create space for liberation. This is exactly why the VIP Vocational Weekend exists—to provide Black women and MaGeS with the tools, clarity, and coaching needed to align our labor with our liberation. Through intentional reflections, strategic planning, and soul-centered vocational guidance, this weekend is a space to envision and embody what labor on our own terms truly looks like.
vocation vip weekend
Interested in group coaching over the weekend to get aligned?
dig into the real work of shifting your relationship with labor, so you can start making choices that serve your soul, not your stress. You’ll leave with tangible tools—practical, real-world resources that you can start using right away.