ILLUSTRATIONS BY Meghan Willis
T WAS AN enviable dilemma. Two
galas on the same night. Luckily, they
were at the same place, Manhattan’s
gleaming, glass-paneled Time Warner
Center. First stop: the fourth floor, for a party
raising money for school reading programs.
Tickets cost $1K a head for a cocktail
reception in a lounge with sweeping views
of Central Park. I wore a one-shoulder black
Tahari dress and strappy Stuart Weitzman
heels. On arrival I was greeted by an
acquaintance known to make five-figure
gifts to the organization. After some small
talk about summer plans (mine: a rental
house with friends in Montauk, the Long
Island fishing village that’s become more
swanky than shanty—Malia Obama
celebrated her 19th birthday there a couple
of summers ago), I tucked my Ferragamo
clutch under my arm and rode the elevator
up to the second event. Also $1K a ticket,
this one supported a charter school network.
More canapés, more Champagne, more
celebrities (hi, Katie Couric!). Although I
was one of very few black faces in the crowd,
I was pretty sure my polished appearance,
my degrees from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and Georgetown
Law, and my career as an attorney signified
that I was just like everyone else. I dressed
the part, I talked the part. With my Narciso
Rodriguez perfume, I even smelled the part.
But here was the reality: A mentor had
covered the price of my admission to both
events. I attended UNC on a scholarship
that included a stipend for living
expenses; to complete my JD, I borrowed
$100,000. The designer perfume, which
has become my signature scent, was a gift
from a friend who works in fashion. Those
$250 Stuart Weitzman heels? I’d frantically
charged them a decade earlier, after a
corporate head of diversity pulled me aside
at a networking event to warn that my
$80 flats would be held against me. And
the whole time I was chatting about
Montauk, I was fretting about my budget—
specifically, the $400 I’d just promised to
lend a relative in need.
Even though I make six figures and have
a plum job in the Big Apple, I am like many
black women in the sense that my familywasn’t able to launch me financially into the
world. It’s simply not in our experience. In
so many cases, we’ve had to work harder to
get where we are; once we get here, we
have to work harder to stay. There’s a lot
riding on our success—people are counting
on us. And so we live with the unsettling
sense that with the slightest tug, our
carefully conceived plans for success could
instantly unravel.
I’m 33 years old. No matter how much I
achieve, it never feels like enough. And
in many ways it isn’t enough—to pay off my
student debt, buy a home, amass the kind
of retirement funds I should have by now.
Yet, in the eyes of my rural North Carolina
family, I have achieved the American dream.ANNE PRICE HAS heard countless
stories like mine, from professional black
women who are exhausted from sprinting
just to stay in the middle of the pack. A
policy analyst who’s spent the past eight
years as head of the Closing the Racial
Wealth Gap Initiative at the Insight Center
for Community Economic Development inThe particular financial stress of being young,
professional, female—and black.
THE
BY ERIKA STALLINGS@OPRAHMAGAZINE SEPTEMBER (^2019115)