On Our Own Terms: Building on Leith Mullings’s Transformative Black Feminist Ethnography

In this article, I stage an analytic encounter between two Black female ethnographers, Leith Mullings and myself. Drawing on years of encounters with Dr. Mullings and her work, I explore the development of my research on the Black professional elite, particularly the experiences of cisgender married Black women. By examining my own trajectory from Black female doctoral student to professor, I think through how I first began working on the ethnographic research that became the foundation for my first book to show how we must think critically about the possibilities of choice for Black women who are thinking about work and family options. Through my interactions with Mullings when I was her student at the CUNY Graduate Center, I show how my understandings of the Black community were very different from and also shaped by many of the themes that her research engaged. I discuss how Mullings’s work with female‐headed households complicated my framework, where I interrogate how Black women’s “decisions” were mitigated by work, marriage, and motherhood. Building on Mullings’s groundbreaking work that identified the Sojourner Syndrome and Black women’s resilience and stress, my research highlights the intersectional impact of race and class when Black career women modify their relationship with work. Here, I think about how the space between our research as Black female ethnographers allows for us to fully embrace the complexity and nuance of divergent Black women’s experiences.