Strong Black Woman Archetype in Organizational Life

Abstract

Black women face multiple jeopardies—racism, sexism, classism—as they navigate American society (King, 1988). With more Black families economically depending on Black women, and as their presence within the U.S. workforce continues to increase, it is vital that we better understand their experiences and communication. The purpose of this narrative thematic analysis is three-fold: (1) to investigate how the Strong Black Woman archetype manifests in the workplace, (2) to understand how Black women are affected by it through the lens of organizational emotionality, and (3) to interrogate how Black women use communication to resist oppression in the workplace. Using the Strong Black Woman Collective (SBWC) framework (Davis, 2015) and organizational emotionality (Miller et al., 2007), the data revealed that there were both internal and external expectations for Black women to embody the Strong Black Woman archetype in the workplace.