Award-winning journalist and novelist Danyel Smith is speaking out about the criticism ambitious Black women face for continuing to chase their dreams as they get older.
“There is no safe space for an ambitious Black woman.”
Danyel Smith said that in a conversation with Felicia Pride, the founder and host of the podcast It’s Good Over Here, which is made for women over forty. Smith was describing what it costs to keep wanting things, and what people do when a woman does not stop.
She put the reaction in the voice of the people giving it. “Damn, you still dreaming?” she said. “And damn, you still going after your dreams.”
The sting is in the word still. It carries an expectation that ambition has a window, that a woman is allowed to want a great deal early and is supposed to taper off on schedule, and that carrying on past the schedule is a lapse of taste rather than the same person continuing.
Pride, who built a show around women in exactly that stretch of life, was visibly moved by it.
A clip of the conversation was posted online and pointed viewers to the show’s second episode. The caption put the question flatly: why does an ambitious Black woman still make folks uncomfortable, especially as we get older?
Smith offered no strategy for it. What is in the exchange is plainer than that. A woman with a long career said out loud that the discomfort is real, that it is pointed at her, and that she is still going after the dreams anyway.
