By Nikki Adebiyi, Founder, Bounce Black

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“Toxic leaders are intentionally pushing Black women out of their jobs and into poverty.”

Jacquie Abram

These searing words landed on my feed in a post shared by Jacquie Abram pleading with LinkedIn users to support a Black woman in need.

These words strike at the heart of an often-ignored crisis: the direct link between workplace discrimination and the social and economic displacement of Black women.

These words carry the very same sentiment I have written and spoken on before about the link between racial (in)equity, mental (ill-)health and (lack of) social mobility.

Behind the corporate slogans of “diversity and inclusion,” many Black women navigate workplaces that are anything but safe, supportive, or fair.

Instead, they are met with subtle sabotage, hostile environments, and systemic barriers that leave them overworked, undervalued, and, too often, unemployed.

This is a struggle I have known myself. And let’s be clear: when a Black woman is pushed out of her job—whether through gaslighting, retaliation, or being repeatedly passed over for promotions—it’s not just a personal setback.

It’s a social justice issue.

It’s a blow to generational wealth-building. It’s a forced detour away from the hard-won gains of education, training, and aspiration.

And it’s a strategy, whether by intent or complicity, that maintains racial hierarchies in the workplace and beyond.

It’s a slap in the face when organisations sell the optics of inclusion, luring in often naive and unsuspecting Black talent in entry level roles, some who only go on to find themselves chewed up and spat out, and left alone to recover their sanity and confidence.

The Cost of Being “Too Much”

Black women are frequently labeled as “aggressive” when advocating for themselves, “ungrateful” when pointing out unfairness, or “not a good fit” despite exceeding performance metrics.

This racially loaded and coded language is often used to justify demotions, pay stagnation, or terminations. The result?

A revolving door of job loss and job search, with each exit taking a toll on mental health, financial stability, and career momentum.

Ask me how I know.

This isn’t just about individual bias either.

It’s about informal policies and procedures that reward conformity to whiteness, penalise differences.

It’s about the ways toxic leaders exploit power, weaponise feedback, and create cultures of fear, hostility and exclusion.

It’s about the systems that insist on Black women “knowing their place”, and subject them to betrayal, intimidation, humiliation and degradation, leaving Black women no choice but to leave as a matter of survival.

Social Mobility Shouldn’t Be Conditional

For many Black women, the promise of upward mobility was the reward for doing all the “right” things: getting degrees, working hard, playing by the rules.

But when systemic discrimination blocks progress, or worse, reverses it, we’re forced to confront a brutal and unspoken reality:

Social mobility is not a guarantee for everyone.

For Black women, social mobility is conditional.

Conditional on being palatable.

Conditional on enduring harm.

Conditional on silence.

Or else…

Risk retaliation in all manner of ways. Losing your job, losing your ability to obtain another job due to quiet and elaborate smear campaigns, losing your sanity and self-belief.

The costs are endless.

What We Must Do

Divine providence aside (and believe me, God has come through for me financially against all odds), what we need is action.

Long gone are the days where leaders, colleagues, and bystanders can get away with performative allyship.

The unsurprising rollbacks of DEI initiatives marked the era of saying the Quiet Part Out Loud, bringing with it a matching fatigue with corporate platitudes.

Respectfully, we’re over it. Over it, I tell you.

What we urgently need now is:

• Accountability for toxic leadership that drives out Black talent.
• Legal protections that recognise the unique racialised and gendered forms of workplace abuse.
• Trauma-informed HR practices that support, not silence, survivors of workplace discrimination.
• Access to legal and mental health support for Black women navigating employment trauma.
• Investment in Black women’s careers, businesses, and leadership: not as a diversity metric, but as a moral imperative.

Workplace discrimination and bullying with racialised implications doesn’t just damage reputations, it derails lives. In the worst of cases, it ends them too.

And when Black women are forced out of employment, the ripple effects extend into families, communities, and futures.

It’s never just a one-off situation, never just an isolated incident. It is a problem that reinforces systemic oppression of Black professionals and entrenches systemic suppression of Black futures.

We cannot claim to care about equity while standing by as Black women are pushed out of positions they’ve rightfully earned.

Lord knows, I cried for days on end after I was forced to resign from the most traumatic hostile environment I’ve ever known possible, and I am still being haunted by it all these years later. As are other Black women, many of whom reach out to me regularly to share their ability to relate to my experiences.

We must challenge toxic leadership, demand structural change, and centre Black women’s experiences in any conversation about justice and opportunity.

Because if the workplace continues to be a site of harm rather than hope, social mobility will remain a myth for too many, and a weapon wielded by the few.

And at some point, all hell is bound to break loose. If a riot is the language of the unheard, how will the trauma of the silenced manifest?

Let’s not mess about and find out.

Black women deserve better.