When They Tell You It’s Raining
Corporate America spent years telling employees that inclusion, equity and allyship mattered. Then the political climate changed. Now we get to see what happens when those values become inconvenient.
“It’s a problem with the whole way of life.”
— Lil Baby, The Bigger Picture
There is an old saying about people pissing on your head and telling you it is raining. It is crude, but sometimes polite language cannot carry the weight of what is happening.
You know what happened because you were there. Sometimes everybody else knows too. The meeting changed. The opportunity disappeared. The standard moved. Somebody who had been praised for months suddenly developed a “performance issue.” A Black woman who asked a legitimate question became “difficult.” The person who spoke plainly became the person with the “tone problem.” Then the institution does something especially effective: it renames what happened until the original harm almost disappears.
Bias becomes a misunderstanding. Retaliation becomes a business decision. Unequal treatment becomes leadership discretion. Exclusion becomes culture fit. Sabotage becomes performance management. A decision that deserves scrutiny gets wrapped in enough corporate language to sound objective, reasonable and completely disconnected from race.
Corporate language can soften an ugly situation and shift suspicion toward the person describing it. Now she has to defend her interpretation, her memory, her tone, her motives and sometimes her credibility while the organization presents its version as neutral because it arrived in an email from somebody with a title.
Everybody can see she is standing there soaked.
The real power move is convincing the room that questioning the weather is the problem.
Lil Baby released The Bigger Picture on June 12, 2020, during the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd. The song opens with news reports and protest audio, and its video was filmed around demonstrations in Atlanta. It became one of the defining protest songs of that moment.
That context matters here because 2020 was also the year Corporate America began making public promises at a remarkable pace. Companies announced racial-equity commitments. Executives published statements. Employee resource groups expanded. Diversity programs gained visibility. Corporations pledged money, changed recruiting strategies and talked openly about systemic racism.
Lil Baby was asking us to see a bigger picture.
Corporate America said it saw one too.
Six years later, I have questions.
That is where Black Girl Magic comes to mind for me.
I wrote Black Girl Magic: Navigating Microaggressions and Unconscious Bias in the Workplace for Black women moving through corporate spaces, entrepreneurial relationships and professional environments where the rules printed in the handbook and the rules people experience can be two different things.
I wrote about microaggressions, unconscious bias, advocacy, mentorship, sponsorship and allyship. I encouraged Black women to pay attention to behavior. Who demonstrates fairness when fairness requires something from them? Who speaks when silence would be easier? Who uses influence when influence matters?
That was 2024.
Then the political environment changed.
And Corporate America changed with it.
That is where this story begins.
The Signal Changed
President Donald Trump made ending federal DEI programs an explicit administration policy when he returned to office in January 2025.
On January 20, his administration rescinded Biden-era equity policies and directed agencies toward eliminating federal DEI programs. On January 21, Trump signed an executive order titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. The order described some DEI practices as unlawful race- and sex-based preferences and directed federal agencies to encourage the private sector to end practices the administration considered discriminatory. The administration frames these actions as enforcing civil-rights law through individual merit and equal treatment.
Those policies are politically contested, and several implementation efforts have faced litigation. But the signal to American employers was unmistakable.
DEI had moved from something many major corporations publicly embraced after 2020 into an area carrying significant political, regulatory and litigation risk.
Corporate retreat had already begun. The administration change accelerated the pressure.
Target announced in January 2025 that it would end several DEI initiatives, including its Racial Equity Action and Change program, which had included a $2 billion commitment involving Black-owned businesses. Meta, Amazon, Walmart and other major companies also changed diversity programs, goals or language. Reuters documented similar changes at Citigroup, McDonald’s, Goldman Sachs and other corporations.
By 2026, companies also faced direct federal enforcement scrutiny over employment programs tied to DEI. That legal pressure matters because federal employment law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race and sex. Companies have a legitimate responsibility to review whether their programs comply with those laws.
But two questions keep getting collapsed into one.
One question is whether a particular DEI program unlawfully uses race or sex.
The other is whether racial bias, unequal opportunity, subjective standards and discrimination still operate inside American workplaces.
Those questions are different.
A corporation can remove a representation target and still have a promotion problem. It can rename its diversity department while Black employees continue receiving unequal access to influential assignments. It can eliminate training while subjective performance language continues operating differently depending on who receives it.
The acronym can disappear overnight.
Human behavior stays.
The Numbers Did Not Get the Memo
This is where the data begin interfering with the idea that ending DEI programs resolves the underlying workplace questions.
LeanIn.Org and McKinsey’s 2025 Women in the Workplace research examined 120+ participating companies and 9,000 employees. For every 100 men promoted from entry level into management, only 60 Black women received the same promotion.
Sixty.
That first promotion is the broken rung.
The problem begins long before the executive suite. Fewer Black women reaching manager means a smaller pool later positioned for director, vice president and executive roles.
I think this is where people sometimes misunderstand how workplace inequity reproduces itself. It does not require a manager walking into a conference room and declaring that Black women should be held back.
It can happen through decisions that look ordinary when examined one at a time.
One employee receives the project senior leaders will see. Another gets candid coaching before evaluation season. Someone is introduced to the executive who can change a career. One mistake becomes a development opportunity while somebody else’s mistake becomes evidence that she lacks judgment. One employee gets the assignment because leadership believes she can grow into it. Another is told she needs experience before she can receive the experience.
Eventually somebody looks around and asks where the Black women went.
The answer may have been forming several floors below.
Sociologist Victor Ray offers useful language for understanding this. His theory of racialized organizations argues that organizational rules, hierarchies and resource distribution cannot automatically be assumed to operate outside race. One of the mechanisms he identifies is decoupling, where formal organizational rules become separated from what happens in practice.
Anybody who has worked inside a large institution understands this without needing a sociology degree.
The handbook says speak up while everybody knows which leader nobody challenges.
The evaluation process says objective while everybody knows who has a sponsor.
The promotion standard says leadership while “leadership presence” becomes remarkably flexible when an organization has already decided whom it sees as leadership material.
The anti-retaliation policy is printed in bold while employees remember exactly what happened to the last person who complained.
The difference between the policy and the lived experience is where the weather report begins separating from the weather.
Black Women Took an Economic Hit While This Was Happening
Then came another set of numbers.
Throughout 2025, headlines circulated saying roughly 300,000 Black women had disappeared from employment. Early monthly federal estimates showed a decline in that range at one point, but labor data are revised, and the final story requires precision.
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research analyzed revised Bureau of Labor Statistics data and found 251,000 fewer Black women employed between January and August 2025. Black women represented 14.1 percent of the female workforce at the beginning of the period yet accounted for 54.7 percent of women’s employment losses during that decline. Employment recovered somewhat later, leaving approximately 113,000 fewer Black women employed in December 2025 compared with January.
Those figures cannot tell us that every lost job resulted from anti-DEI policy. IWPR identified several forces, including federal workforce reductions, DEI retrenchment and broader economic conditions. Its later research also found significant Black women’s job losses across professional and service occupations outside government.
The revised number is still a warning.
And those numbers are attached to actual lives.
A job can carry health insurance, retirement contributions, mortgage payments, tuition, caregiving responsibilities and the future a household built around a steady paycheck.
That is why I get impatient when the entire conversation gets reduced to whether DEI is good or bad.
If merit is the answer, let merit withstand scrutiny.
Show the promotion patterns.
Show who receives visible assignments.
Show who receives sponsorship.
Show how subjective criteria are applied.
Show who receives coaching before a performance problem becomes official.
Show whether discipline is consistent.
Show what happens after somebody complains.
Merit becomes credible when the process can survive daylight.
Business as Usual Is a Story Too
This may be what bothers me most.
Federal policy shifted. Corporations rewrote programs. Diversity language disappeared from some company materials. Black women experienced a disproportionate employment shock. DEI became politically dangerous in ways it had not been during the corporate racial reckoning of 2020.
And then Monday morning arrived.
The meeting still started at nine.
The performance review was still due Friday.
The employee survey still landed in the inbox.
The company values were still on the wall.
Business as usual.
Except employees are watching.
They notice when a diversity executive leaves and the work quietly gets absorbed into something called talent, culture or engagement. They notice when leaders who once spoke confidently about racial equity become careful about vocabulary. They notice which programs disappear and which conversations suddenly feel risky.
People study incentives.
They learn what an organization wants to hear.
They learn what questions create discomfort.
They learn who gets rewarded.
They learn what happened to the person who challenged a decision.
Nobody has to send an email telling employees to walk on eggshells.
The workplace teaches them.
And the country itself is deeply divided about what people are seeing.
Gallup found in August 2025 that 64 percent of Americans believed racism against Black people was widespread, including 83 percent of Black adults. The overall figure tied Gallup’s highest measurement since the organization began tracking the question in 2008.
Pew Research Center found that 74 percent of Americans said Black people faced at least some discrimination in 2025. But the partisan difference was wide. The share of Republicans and Republican-leaning adults who said Black people faced at least some discrimination fell from 66 percent in 2024 to 54 percent in 2025, while Democratic views remained around the low-to-mid 90s.
Those beliefs walk into work with us.
The executive deciding who appears ready has beliefs.
The manager interpreting somebody’s behavior has beliefs.
The HR professional deciding whether a complaint sounds credible has beliefs.
The coworker deciding whether to speak has beliefs.
Race did not leave the workplace.
The country became deeply divided over how to interpret its influence.
The Company Can Become Evidence of Its Own Innocence
This is one of the most revealing pieces of research I found.
Psychologist Cheryl Kaiser and colleagues studied what happens when people know an organization has diversity structures such as diversity policies, training or awards. Their experiments found that those structures could make members of higher-status groups perceive organizations as fairer even when women or racial minorities had experienced disadvantage. That perceived fairness could also reduce sensitivity to discrimination claims. A later correction changed results from one of the six experiments, while the other five studies and the broader conclusions remained intact.
Think about what that looks like at work.
We have Black executives.
We have an employee resource group.
We sponsored the conference.
We conducted training.
The HR representative is Black.
We would never discriminate.
Those facts may tell us something about an organization.
They cannot tell us whether this decision was fair.
That distinction matters because representation can become an institutional alibi.
The company points to the Black faces on the leadership page.
The employee is trying to tell you what happened Tuesday at 3:15.
Those are different conversations.
Allyship Becomes Real When There Is Something to Lose
This is where I have started thinking differently about allyship.
Allyship is easy when the organization rewards it. It is easy at the Black History Month luncheon, when leadership approved the panel, the language and the employee resource group event.
The real test comes when telling the truth creates friction.
It comes when the person causing the problem is somebody you like.
It comes when that person outranks you.
It comes when leadership has already decided which version of the story it prefers.
It comes when the Black woman raising the concern has less organizational power than the person she is challenging.
It comes when correcting the record could affect your own access, reputation or opportunities.
That is where support and allyship separate.
Support can remain private.
Allyship eventually has to appear somewhere.
Sometimes Black women need mentors. Sometimes we need sponsors. Sometimes we need somebody to tell us how to handle the room.
Sometimes we need a witness who remains a witness after the meeting ends.
There is a particular cruelty in watching something happen to somebody, reassuring her privately that she saw it correctly, then developing amnesia when the institution asks what happened.
She enters the process believing three people know the truth.
She leaves looking like the only person who remembers it.
That is how weather gets rewritten.
Sometimes the Black Face Becomes Part of the Cover
Now we get to the part that tends to make people uncomfortable.
Sometimes the person carrying the institutional message is Black.
The HR representative is Black.
The manager is Black.
The executive is Black.
The person sitting across from another Black employee explaining why the promotion disappeared or defending a disciplinary decision looks exactly like the employee raising the concern.
Then somebody treats that Blackness as evidence.
How could race have mattered? The HR person was Black.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission explicitly rejects that assumption. Its race-discrimination guidance says the race of a decision-maker may be relevant, but it is not controlling. Federal discrimination law recognizes that discrimination can occur between people of the same race.
A Black face participating in a decision does not make the decision race-neutral.
And visibility does not tell us how much authority a person holds.
Who initiated the action?
Who approved it?
Who controls the headcount?
Who controls the money?
Who interpreted the policy?
Who could stop the decision?
Who selected the person who would deliver the message?
Representation and power can overlap.
They are different things.
This is where the idea of the pawn becomes SOMETHING TO PONDER.
Conveniently there is no credible national dataset proving that corporations systematically send Black HR professionals to take adverse actions against Black employees because executives believe a Black messenger provides racial cover. It’s more of a IYKYK.
The research gives us something deeper.
A 2026 Academy of Management meta-synthesis examined 15 studies involving 431 Black professionals across corporate settings, healthcare, higher education and other fields. Researchers identified recurring themes that included tokenism, constrained authority, emotional labor, symbolic representation and discrimination.
Constrained authority matters.
A person can have the title and lack the power everybody assumes comes with it.
A Black HR professional can become the visible face of a decision she did not originate.
A Black manager can be responsible for delivering policy created several levels above her.
A Black executive can sit at the table while somebody else controls money, headcount or final approval.
And sometimes the Black decision-maker genuinely agrees with the decision.
Sometimes she participates in harm.
Shared race creates no automatic solidarity.
Research on self-group distancing gives us another mechanism to consider. Studies of minority employees have found that social identity threat can sometimes lead members of disadvantaged groups to distance themselves from their own group, emphasize alignment with a dominant group or support existing status hierarchies. The researchers describe this as a coping response under particular organizational and identity conditions, rather than as an inherent trait of minority employees.
None of this means every Black manager who disagrees with another Black employee is a pawn.
It means Black representation cannot end the analysis.
Follow the authority.
Follow the incentives.
Follow the process.
Follow the receipts.
The pawn can be Black.
The pawn can also have a title.
The real question is whose game is being played.
Sometimes the Scapegoat Gets the Promotion First
Representation requires context for another reason.
Researchers Alison Cook and Christy Glass examined every CEO transition in Fortune 500 companies over a 15-year period. They found that women and racial or ethnic minority leaders, grouped as occupational minorities in the research, were especially likely to be promoted to CEO at poorly performing firms. When firm performance declined during the tenure of those leaders, they were especially likely to be replaced by White men. The researchers connected the first pattern to the glass cliff and called the replacement pattern the savior effect.
That research does not mean every Black leader receiving a difficult assignment has been set up.
It tells us why the title alone is insufficient information.
What condition was the organization in when the leader arrived?
What authority came with the accountability?
What resources were available?
How long had the problem been developing?
How quickly was the new leader expected to fix it?
Who becomes the explanation when the structural problem survives?
Sometimes an institution can give a marginalized leader a genuine opportunity and hand her somebody else’s mess at the same time.
Then if the organization fails, the individual becomes the story.
That is scapegoating with a corner office.
Black Women Cannot Self-Help Their Way Out of an Organizational Problem
We have become extraordinarily good at teaching Black women how to survive work.
Document.
Network.
Negotiate.
Manage perceptions.
Find mentors.
Find sponsors.
Control your tone.
Prepare for the evaluation.
Learn executive presence.
Know when to leave.
A lot of that is useful.
I wrote some of it myself.
But somewhere along the way, we began assigning Black women an enormous amount of responsibility for adapting to systems other people have the authority to improve.
If promotion data show a broken rung, teaching Black women how to become promotion-ready addresses one side of the equation.
If subjective performance standards are applied inconsistently, coaching the Black employee on executive presence may teach her how to survive the standard while leaving the standard untouched.
If Black women remain on guard because experience has taught them bias can carry consequences, helping them manage stress can support the woman while leaving the source of the stress intact.
Personal strategy matters.
I believe deeply in agency.
Agency means understanding what is happening, knowing your options and deciding what belongs in your life.
It does not require convincing yourself that every institutional failure can be solved through personal excellence.
Sometimes you need to improve.
Sometimes the organization does.
A mature workplace should be capable of telling the difference.
So What Happened After We Started?
That is the question I keep coming back to when I hear The Bigger Picture now.
2020 was filled with declarations.
We have to change.
We have to listen.
We have to do better.
Companies promised to start somewhere.
So what happened after we started?
Which commitments changed systems?
Which produced programs?
Which became branding?
Which disappeared when they became inconvenient?
Which leaders still believe what they said when the political reward for saying it disappeared?
That is the bigger picture I want to examine now.
When I wrote Black Girl Magic, I focused heavily on helping Black women recognize what they were experiencing and move through it with greater strategy. Understand microaggressions. Recognize unconscious bias. Advocate for yourself. Build relationships. Find sponsors. Know your value. Protect your wellbeing.
I still want Black women to know every one of those things.
But I am asking a different question now.
Why do Black women have to become so extraordinarily skilled at navigating situations everybody else keeps debating whether they even experience?
Why does she have to become the workplace anthropologist, investigator, historian and documentarian?
Why does she have to remember the email, the meeting, the original standard, the changed standard, the witnesses and the explanation that somehow shifted between Tuesday and Friday?
Why does she have to collect enough evidence to prove the rain is wet?
That is where this series is going.
I want to understand what happens inside HR when the complaint itself becomes an institutional risk. I want to examine tokenism when representation exists without meaningful authority. I want to look at sponsorship, performance management, retaliation, executive presence, scapegoating and the difference between being invited into the room and possessing enough power to change what happens inside it.
This series is about the systems Black women are expected to survive, the people who benefit from silence and the decisions that determine whether corporate values mean anything once living those values becomes inconvenient.
I want to know who controls the weather.
Because when people piss on your head and tell you it is raining, the issue eventually becomes bigger than whether you know the difference.
The deeper question is what everybody standing around you is willing to call it.
That is where allyship becomes real.
That is where leadership reveals itself.
And that is where “business as usual” stops sounding so innocent.
Marenda Hughes Taylor is the author of Black Girl Magic: Navigating Microaggressions and Unconscious Bias in the Workplace: A Guide for Black Women in Corporate America. The book explores workplace microaggressions, unconscious bias, allyship, sponsorship, self-advocacy and professional strategy for Black women.
Sources and Further Reading
U.S. White House, January 2025 executive actions concerning federal DEI programs and race- and sex-based employment practices.
LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company, Women in the Workplace 2025.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research, research on Black women’s employment during 2025 and 2026.
Gallup, 2025 research on Americans’ perceptions of racism against Black people.
Pew Research Center, 2025 research on perceptions of racial discrimination.
Cheryl R. Kaiser et al., Presumed Fair: Ironic Effects of Organizational Diversity Structures and published correction.
Victor Ray, A Theory of Racialized Organizations.
Marla L. White et al., Racialized Tokenism: A Qualitative Interpretive Meta-synthesis of Black Tokens’ Experiences.
Belle Derks et al., research on self-group distancing among minority employees.
Alison Cook and Christy Glass, Above the Glass Ceiling: When Are Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities Promoted to CEO?
Lil Baby, The Bigger Picture, Quality Control/Motown, 2020.
