“I’m exploiting you. For your brains, your beauty, your talent.”
As a Black woman in STEM, I’ve heard a lot of bullshit.
It would have been another summer of volunteering for an organization that did racial justice work around Black health. I had spent years tutoring, working on a farm, conducting campaign evaluations, leading meetings, and performing various other roles because I am committed to supporting the community; despite the fact that the vast majority of this work was unpaid. While I certainly felt that each and every organization had poured into me by providing genuine connection and community, which meant support and resources, I relied on those organizations to remind me what work I could do for the world. That was until I had reached my wits end arguing with toxic men who ran programs, asking for more labor than I had capacity for and lashing out with punishments when I wouldn’t do it or would only do it for pay. This sort of entitlement enraged me, and until someone explicitly said they exploited me, I would have kept putting myself in the same position over and over again.
At first, I laughed at the idea of somebody openly stating they were exploiting me for my swag. But then I realized he had a point- I did have my own style. A nerdy scientist who's unapologetically ratchet, with impeccable fashion sense. And while I have loved myself deeply for a few years, I didn't think much of the influence I had over others. Yet, I had a distinct brand that I let others take control of. For this reason, which I call reason number zero (AKA being fed the fuck up), I decided to invest more time in my own wellbeing.
I spent more time reading, writing, and thinking with my best friends on the phone over two fat joints. Shamelessly, I theorized about why the world it was, thinking about my own life and how I could experience healing in a world that was full of harm. We created safe spaces over phone calls, on a yellow cushion in a bathroom lit up purple from my plant light. We built world in which we lived and loved and were well. My favorite world was planet Black woman, where I imagined a landscape lush with plants, purified with sound bowls, and euphoric with smoke. This world may have not been my complete reality outside of the bathroom, but in this high space I could create dreams that would be realized one way or another. And one of those dreams was about science and cannabis.
So this summer I decided to take a leap of faith and execute the Joint Highpothesis “potcast”- the creative project of my stoner dreams. The podcast has quickly become my way of creating a community of creatives and disseminating knowledge without Black women having to suffer. Also, if I am going to do work that I am passionate about, I deserve to be respected, supported and at least offered a living wage. Here are ten reasons why I moved my career into cannabis and other Black should do the same.
1. Black women are creative.
There isn’t a single one of us who doesn’t have a unique style that can be read from our clothing and hair choices or the way we respond to emails and brand our work. The cannabis industry is rapidly expanding and we must take control of our narrative before another all-white advertisement team makes another ignorant ass advertisement using us as props.
There is research on how racist jokes and stereotypes generated by majority white man teams create profit for their businesses in poor communities. Instead of letting them sell our culture to us, we should be defining what the industry looks like. What would you do if you saw an advertisement for Black girls taking edibles right before a spa day? Or a mom lighting up after her kids go to bed? Those advertisements would reflect our weed reality so much more than a couple of rappers and basketball players. We love Snoop Dog, but he simply cannot be all of our representation. We deserve safe and accessible cannabis that is manufactured and promoted with the goal of meeting our needs.
To the right above is my outfit, below is the artwork for Joint Highpothesis! Style can be expressed just about any way.
2. Because we deserve to be entrepreneurs.
While we deserve to be financially successful, we end up spending more time taking care of our communities and this labor goes unrecognized and unpaid (Banks 2020). When we do get paid to work from someone, we still are often underpaid, overworked and face discrimination- regardless of credentials. Entrepreneurship can be a way to renegotiate your relationship with work and connect with your community, according to Black entrepreneurs in a few sociological studies (Harvey 2005; Jackson 2021; Jackson and Sanyal 2019; Wingfield and Taylor 2016).
However, it is not for everyone. The same research points to Black women’s high involvement in entrepreneurship, yet significant challenges with bullshit (Jackson and Sanyal 2019; Wingfield and Taylor 2016). The same racism, sexism, and classism that creates conditions where Black women don’t get their coin working for others has caused problems for us becoming entrepreneurs (Wingfield and Taylor 2016). To overcome that, we do anything from joining professional organizations to finding Black mentors with resources to using money from our other jobs to bankroll (Jackson 2021). Finding resources outside of your current network is incredibly hard, but often necessary to survive starting a business. Plus, if you are looking for new like-minded people, entrepreneurship might really be for you! Black women report networking as a part of Black and Women’s groups in order to take care of entrepreneurial needs (Jackson 2021).
While the cannabis industry is giving us déjà vu of the crazy Silicon Valley boom that left us Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it’s not just for entrepreneurs. Plenty of industrial opportunity has made way and companies are hiring all sort of positions!
3. For all of my ladies in STEM who feel like Hidden Figures: weed is for you!
If you didn’t realize that cannabis is a medicine, a building material, and so much more, you’re not alone. As an engineer, who is interested in using cutting edge science and technology to help tackle the world's deepest problems, I had no idea that the cannabis industry would hire engineers until meeting production facility workers at a Missouri M4MM mixer hosted by the Saint Louis Cannabis Club. They explained that they were hiring people with technical backgrounds in areas such as processing, product development, and testing! Come on, just imagine spending ten years at Johnson and Johnson just to realize you could’ve worked with more novel technology and maybe even get a lil discount on the goods.
Fun fact: We know so little about weed in the research world because the government yanked all its funding out during the War on Drugs in the 70s. This fascinates me as a social scientist, because studying weed can’t cause nearly as much harm as locking people up in jail for it! Also, we know how important it is as researchers to spend time exploring our natural world, or we wouldn’t have antibiotics or other basic medicines. The only thing holding us back is legalization…. and all of the potential ethical harms that we have to carefully think through.
4. Because who knows critique better than us! Call it shade if you want, but Black women actively resist sexism and racism to survive so we pass down valuable wisdom from generation to generation.** Black feminist thinkers develop brilliant social theories explaining the gaps between what America promises and what it is in its reality. We do this at work, at home, in class, on the street, wherever we can use our judgment to make ourselves safer, we do. There is a serious need for critical thinkers in an industry that has yet to establish across the country; we are going to need a lot more than diversity managers to design it equitably.***
**We consider this way of knowing Black Feminist Thought. Read BFT by Patricia Hill Collins if you are interested in learning a new theoretical framework based on Black women’s experiences!
*** As a critical sociologist, I vigorously assess Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) efforts for their performativity and lack of meaningful impact to racial inequality. I study how biomedical laboratories develop products that claim to advance healthcare and technology, but only mirror old biases, biased priorities, and do little to change the disparate health outcomes that we know so well. For other research on critical thought in technology development, see Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin. This book provided me with a framework to critique biotechnology at a systematic level.
5. Because health is wealth! While it’s certainly true that healthcare companies profit off of our illness, we as a Black people have been resilient for hundreds of years in maintaining good health. We use herbs, doulas, and form groups to advocate for ourselves. (Link BWH and other health advocacy groups)
P.S. Did y’all know the Black panthers used acupuncture in order to treat addiction in the War on Drugs?! Check out this documentary and this article if you want to understand how their commitment to Black liberation involved changing the field of healthcare.
6. Because I looooove plants. As a plant mama, I am passionate about growing another form of life and in return I grow. Considering at one point, Black people were in charge of growing all of the food in the country, there’s a good chance green thumbs are in our DNA.* There are numerous (1-2-3-4) plant groups for Black women out there because we love nature! Some of us grow our own vegetable gardens and cook elaborate dinners, while others grow herbs for tea, and some grow plants to clean the air in our homes. I know y’all got mamas and aunties and cousins with houseplants and gardens, so why not grow the good herb??
*I am morally obligated to say that race has no genetic basis, but it does affect our lives at the genetic level.
*In addition to cannabis, you can grow herbs to add to your smoke sesh! Check episode 1 for more.
No green thumb? Well, if you can’t grow plants yourself, it’s probably growing in the middle of your yard or that random lot overgrown with weeds down the road! Black girls are leading the way in foraging too.
7. Because activism is important to me. The War on Drugs is still happening and our government is STILL putting Black and Brown folk in jail for weed. Growing up I had loved ones who supported themselves and the ones around them by selling drugs because it was one of the few careers that would allow them to make decent money.
But not all drug dealers are the same. When people hear the word “drug dealer,” they often think of a Black man who is endangering a community with crack, yet pharmaceutical companies sell the same drugs (fun fact: crack is an opioid) and get government money to do so. And while selling vulnerable people harsh drugs is certainly predatory, there are ethical checks and balances in the streets- communities often drive out predatory drug dealers themselves because of the lack of protection from police. This community policing is one of the many ways Black people protect each other and keep themselves safe. Your average weed man is likely to be respected in the community (unless it’s trash weed LOL).
There’s so much work to be done on developing a weed industry that doesn’t harm our people. It isn’t just DEI in white-owned companies, but truly the opportunity for us to make a living for ourselves connecting with weed. There’s a similar path with psychedelics, where cities are creating policy in order to open the door for a legal shroom market.
8. It’s the culture! We know our faves- Coi Leray, Lil Kim, Quinta Brunson, Sha’Carri Richardson, Rachel True and Kamala Harris (ok not my fave for political reasons, but she still is the Vice President of the United States!!!) smoke weed after a long day of being total bosses. Shoot, Serena Williams’s baby daddy probably rolled her a fat j before and after she won the 2020 Auckland Open. Okay, there’s no proof of that, but I chuckle thinking that it’s possible. But the point IS, Black women are out here consuming! And if we are consumers, shouldn’t we be selling too? If the industry can get our coin, we should determine what it looks like.
Bonus: For HBO’s Insecure Fans: https://www.leafly.com/news/strains-products/cannabis-strains-for-insecure-issa-rae and representation in television: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/04/10395441/black-women-weed-pop-culture-representation-stoners
9. Because we love alternative medicine. A 2010 study showed 1 in 5 Black Americans use alternative medicine for treating illness (Barner et al. 2010). Because health insurance is expensive and doesn’t cover everything, not everyone has the luxury of going to the doctor (Hargraves and Hadley 2003). And even when we do go to the doctor our pain is ignored and our data is sold for profit, and we still don’t get the treatment we need (Charles et al. 2015; Strand et al. 2021; Volpe et al. 2021; Wood 2020). So what do we do? We do what we have always done and make do with what we have. Black folk healing is a system of alternative health, argues anthropologist Stephanie Y. Mitchem, that we have developed using our community, practical resources such as herbs and personal power-such as the power of prayer. While alternative medicine often is marketed to white middle class hippies, Black people have deep histories using acupuncture, herbs, yoga, and prayer to heal our communities. I mean, even Rosa Parks did yoga.
10. Because I want to heal myself. 2 years ago I received a diagnosis for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. While the diagnosis itself wasn’t a huge shock, considering I had lost a parent and step-parent in my teens and spent most of my childhood in unsafe homes, there wasn’t a clear remedy to my problem. There are a few medicines people take for PTSD, but my therapist and I started with self-awareness to figure out what triggered my episodes. Self-awareness was difficult because I had been so used to zoning out to avoid painful memories and experiences, but with weed I was able to slow down and sit mindfully. I started journaling my experiences and realized that I had so much control in my adult life that I didn’t have as a child or teenager. I started untangling the behavior that I actively brought into my adult life and stopped ruminating so much on my anxieties. Weed helped me breathe, and while my relationship has evolved into both medicinal and causal uses, I am so thankful for it. I started connecting with weed when I wanted to heal myself, and now want to use it to help others do the same.
I wish that I had 30 studies to back up this anecdotal evidence, but often marijuana consumption is not studied for its potential to generate self-awareness! Instead, we have a bunch of cautionary research that is definitely useful, but fails to draw a full description of the plant.
So if you’ve read this and wondered “hey Rene, what are the ways I can get involved with cannabis,” I have 3 opportunities for you!
Tune into the Joint Highpothesis podcast if you are looking for inspiration to enter the industry! Each episode we bring on a guest who speaks on their connection to cannabis. The podcast also highlights marginalized voices, who often have their voices overshadowed by big corporations.
Connect with Minorities for Medical Marijuana and other organizations that support Black people in cannabis! I’ve recently joined the Missouri chapter doing regional ambassador work for this season and have absolutely loved the culture of the organization. We have monthly mixers hosted by the Saint Louis Cannabis Club that are free and open to the public and there are even free snacks! If you are in Saint Louis, come network with me and other professionals who design products, create experiences, and do everything from engineering to media to contract work in cannabis!
Collaborate with me for research! I am a sociology PhD student studying Black cannabis activism in the development of Saint Louis. Connect with me if you are interested in research collaboration around Black health, racial justice, and cannabis science!
Which point do you feel drawn to? Click the links throughout the post for resources to gain access into the cannabis space!
Rene Canady is a bioengineer, sociology PhD student, writer, public speaker, and creative based in the Saint Louis area. She’s passionate about Black liberation, science communication, and obviously, weed. Rene’s research interests include Black cannabis activism and the pharmaceuticalization of marijuana. She will receive her master’s in December 2022 writing on the racial dynamics of bioengineering laboratories and will continue writing new theories around bioethics.
Here’s a few successful entrepreneurs in Cannabis for inspiration!
Already in cannabis and looking to connect? Email Rene at aquajrock@gmail.com for requests!