The Privilege of Starting a Business in a Pandemic

Elizabeth reflects on the privilege that allowed her the privilege to stay home with her son when his school, along with the world, shutdown in Spring 2020.

Last March 2020, I was on the road to find more career consistency after a four-year move-and-kid-induced career detour. My goal was to find a rewarding, steady, and full-time salaried position. While I had worked for myself on and off the previous four years, I wasn’t yet committed to a complete business model redesign. 

Then, of course, the pandemic hit.

My kid’s preschool shut down for four months. Job postings slowed. And with a three-year-old home full-time and a partner whose work in healthcare did not allow him to work from home, applying for--let alone starting--a new job seemed impossible. So I leaned into the pause and halted any movement in my career (which, honestly, happened to a whole lot of moms).

Despite constantly feeling the burden of child-care and child-rearing as the on-call parent in a pandemic, it was still immediately clear to me that we were, indeed, the lucky ones. The privileged ones, rather. 

All around me people were losing jobs and, with it, their financial stability. People were struggling for their lives in hospitals still ill-equipped for Covid. People of color were especially more vulnerable because they were often in underappreciated jobs now considered “essential” and more likely to have health risk factors that the Centers for Disease Control now rightly sees is largely caused by racism in healthcare. Whatever I was experiencing in the awfulness of sending thousands of job applications into the void and then having everything stop was a blow to my ego and momentum, but it was not a disaster as it was to so many. It was put into stark relief against the backdrop of global racial justice uprisings prompted by the murder of George Floyd.

This was all happening as I re-emerged from my own four-month pause when my son’s school reopened and I was suddenly granted the time and space to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. The privilege of my situation was not lost on me. The time and space I had, the financial stability to take that time, is something I have because of generational wealth. Wealth that I possess because I’m white and all the societal advantages were granted to my family (and my husband’s family) because they were white. We were solidly middle class where, unlike so many families, had a constant state of financial stability and, with it, a family safety net. In my husband and my cases, we have the safety net of two white folks who’ve benefited from generational wealth and white privilege. We are clear examples of the Black-white wealth gap.

I think for many white people, especially those who consider themselves in precarious financial situations, aren’t as aware of even how they benefit from generational wealth. It’s a privilege I’ve been thinking a whole lot about in this last year. Generational wealth is when parent’s or family member’s wealth is passed on to their children by serving as a kind of safety net. One of the major assets for wealth and wealth-building in the United States is home ownership. However, intergenerational wealth-building was largely extended mostly to white people because of racist segregation practices like redlining that diminished the ability for Black families to own homes at fair mortgage rates (among a whole lot of other sinister tactics). Because of that, there are fewer opportunities for Black families to build generational wealth. Thus a young Black person today, is much less likely to have a family safety net than a young white person like myself. I highly recommend Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law for a deep dive into the topic. 

I also realize that there are millions of people of all races who found themselves in precarious and awful financial situations during Covid-19. But the racial and gender disparities are stark. As the economy began to recover, the New York Times assessed the demographic breakdown of job losses and it was brutal for Latinx and Black women in particular where Hispanic women faced a 24% drop and 10% for Black women. These show the intersection of race and gender in these numbers. 

These are numbers that I think about a lot in my work. I am able to recover more quickly because of my generational wealth. I was able to emerge from the pause with the opportunity to work for myself, I did this knowing that I was able to because of privilege. 

What I do with this privilege is more important than my mere awareness of it. Admittedly, that process of doing something with my privilege is a challenging one. It’s a question regularly processing with a tight-knit group of folks who are also trying to figure it out. In some ways, it comes in the form of the mission and vision I have for my organization, the lens I take to my work, the type of clients I take on, who I hire, who I learn from and how I compensate them, how I distribute my money through mutual aid or other donations, and by consciously raising my kid to be aware of and discuss race and racism. In the process, I’ve had some really challenging conversations with people of color who have essentially “called me in” to help me see how I could do better in both big and small ways. This, by no means, should be their job, but in most cases, they were friends who I’ve built trust with in the first place and I appreciate their honest and open feedback. It’s also recognizing actions that might come from privilege on my own.

By itself, acknowledging my privilege isn’t going to do much of anything. Action is essential to be part of any productive change. But it does start with self-awareness and humility and it’s something I continue to bring to my work every single day.