A Letter to BIPOC Professionals Working in Tech

Dear BIPOC professional,

Can you be yourself at work?

It sounds like an easy question.

Of course. Be yourself!

But what if you have spent most of your professional life learning how to be the version of yourself that will be accepted?

What if you've become so good at adapting that you aren't even sure what "yourself" means in certain spaces anymore? I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

"I don't know how to not accommodate white people in spaces."

That's something I recently said out loud. And once I heard myself say it, I realized just how much weight was sitting inside those words.

I don't know how to not accommodate white people in spaces.

I don't know what it feels like not to automatically assess the room, adjust myself, and make other people comfortable.

For most of my life, that has been part of navigating predominantly white professional environments.

And I didn't always recognize it as pressure.

I just thought I was being professional, adaptable, reading the room. I thought I was doing what I needed to do to succeed.

But recently, a therapist helped me see something differently: the amount of pressure that constant accommodation has created in my system.

For years, I have been code-switching, adapting, monitoring, and moving different parts of myself around depending on the environment. And it isn't just something I did at work. Those patterns can follow us home, into our relationships, our families, and the ways we understand ourselves.

I'm going to be 55 soon, and I can honestly say that in corporate, predominantly white spaces, I don't always know how to be my natural self. That realization was sobering.

What happens when adaptation becomes automatic?

I have a friend, Tanya, who works in tech. When we talked about this together, we were both stunned by how familiar the experience felt.

There is so much pressure to adapt in corporate and tech environments, and sometimes the pressure is subtle enough that you don't even recognize it as pressure. You learn how to speak, dress, how much personality to show, how to respond to conflict. How much of your culture to bring into the room with you. What parts of yourself might make other people uncomfortable.

And eventually, you don't have to consciously make those decisions anymore: your body does it for you. You walk into the room and adjust to make yourself easier for the room to receive.

That can be an incredibly effective survival strategy. It can also be exhausting.

"Be yourself" isn't always simple advice

We're often told to bring our whole selves to work.

Be authentic. Be you. Show up as your full self.

But what happens when you've spent years learning that being your whole self isn't necessarily safe or accepted? What happens when you've internalized the message that some parts of you need to be omitted, softened, hidden, or selectively moved depending on who is in the room?

Then "be yourself" can actually be a complicated instruction.

Because…which self? The one who grew up in your family culture?

The one shaped by your racial and cultural identity?

The one who knows how to navigate white professional spaces?

The one who learned to make everyone else comfortable?

The one who is tired of doing all of that?

For me, this has meant sitting with the different parts of myself that hold these experiences and really listening to them.

And sometimes I sit with them and think: Wow. Look at what you've been carrying.

The pressure can show up in how we present ourselves

My friend Cynarah has experienced a different version of this pressure. For a long time, she believed that if she worked hard enough, race wouldn't be an issue. But looking back, she can see that race was always there.

It showed up in how she thought about presenting herself professionally.

As a Latina, she was acutely aware of the stereotypes attached to Latina women.

She didn't want to be reduced to the "sexy Latina" stereotype. She didn't want the way she dressed to become a distraction from her competence or credibility. She noticed white women could wear revealing clothing without necessarily carrying the same calculation.

She knew she couldn't make the same choices without worrying about how she might be perceived, so she adapted. She made deliberate choices about how to dress and present herself because she wanted to be taken seriously.

That's the kind of calculation that can be invisible to the people around you. Someone else may simply see a woman in a professional outfit, and they may never know that she spent years thinking about what she could and couldn't wear because she was already aware of the stereotypes attached to her identity.

Race doesn't disappear because you worked hard

One of the most painful realizations can be looking back and recognizing that something you once believed wasn't true.

Cynarah thought:

If I work hard enough, race won't be an issue.

But hard work doesn't erase race. Neither does achievement, professionalism, or success. Sometimes, success simply gives you more opportunities to notice how much adapting you've been doing.

What parts of you have been working overtime?

This is one of the reasons IFS has become such an important part of how I understand my own experience. Internal Family Systems gives us language for the different parts of ourselves that develop in response to our experiences.

There may be a part of you that knows how to code-switch before you've even consciously noticed you've done it. The goal isn't to shame these parts or tell them to stop.

After all, many of them developed for very good reasons.

The invitation is to become curious. Reflect:

• What are you protecting me from?

• When did you learn that we needed to behave this way?

• What are you afraid would happen if I didn't accommodate everyone?

• What would you need from me to feel safe enough to relax?

Sometimes healing begins with recognizing how much work these parts have been doing. When you've been adapting for decades like I have, it can be easy to mistake the adaptation for your identity.

You might think:

This is just who I am. But maybe it isn't. Maybe it's a strategy you learned; a part of you that has been working very, very hard.

You don't have to figure out "being yourself" all at once

I don't have a neat answer for what it means to finally be “completely yourself” in every space. For BIPOC professionals working in tech, corporate environments, or any predominantly white space, there may be very real reasons to remain aware of how you're perceived.

We shouldn't romanticize authenticity as if everyone can simply walk into every environment and be completely unguarded. Some level of adaptation is necessary for everyone.

But perhaps we can begin to notice when we're adapting, especially when the adaptation looks like shrinking, code-switching, or making everyone else comfortable at our own expense.

We can notice the parts of us that have been carrying that responsibility for years, and we can begin to build relationships with those parts that aren't based on shame.

You are more than the version of yourself you've learned to present for survival. There is a whole person underneath all that accommodation, and you deserve to get to know them.

With love,

Mayra Vasquez