Jacquie Abram

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Jacquie Abram

Author Jacquie Abram.

Jacquie Abram

After enduring decades of workplace racism, Jacquie Abram exited corporate America when her daughters, Deborah Harris and Delilah Harris, began experiencing similar inequality in their careers. The three women struck back by collaborating to write Hush Money: How One Woman Proved Systemic Racism in her Workplace and Kept her Job, a novel based on their and others' real-life experiences. In this Wisconsin Book Festival event, Abram will talk about the best-selling novel and its 2022 follow-up, Hush Money: The Cost of Being Black In Corporate America.

media release: Presented in partnership with Madison College, Jacquie Abram discusses her new book, HUSH MONEY, and the real life experiences that helped her create the story. All Ebony ever wanted was a chance to live the American Dream. But for someone who was living in poverty, struggling financially, and finding it hard to make ends meet, the dream was more like a fantasy with no hope of becoming a reality. That is, until the day Ebony got a job with an organization, after years of working dead end jobs, that put her one step closer to living the American Dream. But her dream quickly turned into a nightmare when she became a victim of systemic racism in employment, was stripped of all dignity, confidence, and strength, and was left with three impossible choices: suffering in silence to keep her job, resigning to keep her sanity, or waiting to be unjustly fired. Or is there a fourth path? And does Ebony have the strength to follow it?

Before Jacquie began her journey as an Author and DEI and Antiracism Consultant, she had a career in higher education that she was very good at and that she enjoyed. A career that paid her a lucrative income which, as a single mother of two girls, was the only income that allowed her to not only provide for her family, but also to pay her bills. A career that spanned nearly two decades and by any measure should’ve been a successful career. But it wasn’t. Because throughout her career, she experienced racism in the workplace and not the kind you see in a lot of movies, books, and TVs shows about racism  that occurred decades ago during a time when it was more overt and easily spotted, but the kind  of racism that is more covert, hidden, and harder to prove. 

As her career which spanned nearly two decades was derailed multiple times by multiple employers, she suffered racial trauma that, to this day, she has not fully recovered from. And when the same thing happened to others including both of her girls after they began careers of their own, she pulled herself out of corporate America, wrote a book inspired by true events and co-authored by her girls, and began selling that book from the trunk of her car for three important reasons: 

1) To provide employers wanting to prevent racism in the workplace with a better way  to understand & identify the covert aspects of modern-day racism you can’t easily  see; 

2) To provide employees who are experiencing racial discrimination with the sound  strategy one woman used to fight it, survive the battle, prove it, and keep her job;

3) To put allies who have never experienced racism in the workplace but want to help into the shoes of a racial discrimination victim to see and feel the FULL impact of  modern-day racism including racial trauma in a REAL way;