The email arrived at five in the morning on the first of April, 2025, and with it ended twenty-four years of a life. Sharon Davis, then associate director for operations and quality management at the Food and Drug Administration, read that she had been fired, and felt anger, disbelief, and — most prominently, and least deservedly — shame. “It was a gut punch,” Davis, 55, told MindSite News, in a collaboration with Capital B, The 19th and The Nation. “I’ve never been fired before. This is the first time I haven’t had a job in my life.”

She was one of more than 95,000 Black women fired or laid off from the federal government under the massive job cuts implemented by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, alongside the elimination of diversity programs. Empires rarely announce what they are undoing; they announce efficiency. But the numbers, when the economists finally sorted them, described a targeted storm. By September 2025, unemployment among Black women had surged to 7.5%, against 4.4% for all U.S. workers. Valerie Wilson, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, found the net loss was driven entirely by the public sector, mostly federal jobs; across the public sector as a whole, more than 155,000 Black women lost their jobs between 2024 and 2025.

The go-to person, waiting by the inbox

Davis grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, ran track in high school, managed the girls’ basketball team, read teen fiction. Her role model was her grandmother, a college professor. “I always remember her being very big on education, on being polished, presentable, and professional,” Davis said. “When I saw her, I knew I was going to go to college and make her proud.” She took her mathematics degree from Jackson State University — a historically Black college in Jackson — worked for the state of Mississippi and a nuclear waste facility in Memphis, and in 2002 moved to Washington, D.C., and the FDA.

In her department she had been, by her own account, the “go-to person.” So for weeks after the firing she waited to be called back. She checked her email, expecting questions — where things were kept, what to do next. No questions came. And when the state does not explain itself, the citizen interrogates herself. “I didn’t deserve this. Why did this happen to me?” ran the refrain in her head.

Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist who founded and hosts the podcast Therapy for Black Girls, has a name for that reflex. “When you don’t have answers and there’s not a clear thing to point to, we typically point the finger on ourselves, and oftentimes that looks like shame,” she said. “‘Maybe I did something to deserve this. Was this about my performance?’ ... we know that that was not the case here.” The civil service, Bradford noted, had been a “path to stability” for more than 200,000 Black people. “You get this job and you never have to worry about it, right? So for it to be snatched was incredibly disruptive.”

Riffed

There is a word in Washington for what was done to Davis — she was “riffed,” reduced in force — and a story told about the riffed: that they were not working, not necessary. “It was all in the way it was done and the things that were said about the people who were ‘riffed,’” Davis said. “It was degrading.”

Because she was over 50 with more than 20 years of service, the firing became a forced retirement under Discontinued Service rules. Her health insurance was cut off; her age and tenure disqualified her from severance pay. A pension was supposed to arrive the month after her dismissal. But so many had been fired that too few remained to process the paperwork — the machine had dismissed its own clerks — and Davis saw no payment until July 2026, more than a year after the axe fell. “Some days I just laid there not knowing what to do next,” she said. “My job was everything. It was what I did. Now I don’t have that.” She hid the firing from her family for months. Some neighbors still do not know.

Christy L. Erving, an associate professor of sociology and population research at the University of Texas at Austin, studies what such a blow does to the mind. Black women who climbed to important federal posts, she said, often carried a strong sense of mastery — control over one’s life and direction. “After their job loss, their sense of mastery was reduced,” Erving said. “When you feel that you don’t have a sense of control over your future, that you can get fired at will, there’s an increased risk of poor mental health.”

The Superwoman’s fall

Like many successful Black women, Davis had presented strength, resisted vulnerability, swallowed anger — tools forged against the old racist trope of the “Angry Black Woman.” Cheryl Woods Giscombé, a psychiatric nurse practitioner and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, calls the pattern the Superwoman Schema: the obligation to be strong, to suppress emotion, to succeed, to carry others. Women who endorse it, Erving said, “actually experience greater risk for clinically diagnosed depression and also depressive symptoms” — sadness, a feeling of failure, crying, lost interest, broken sleep, fatigue. Giscombé, author of the 2024 book The Black Woman’s Guide to Coping with Stress, found the armor itself can deepen the fall.

Bradford’s counsel cuts against the whole arrangement. “When our value only comes as a function of the roles that we serve, we forget that our value is inherent,” she said. “We are worthy and deserving just because we’re human.” The firings, she added, are a reminder to be “involved in other things that give us value and allow us to be restored that aren’t actually a function of our career or our role.” A government may take back its badge. It is a harder thing — this is the old lesson of those who watch regimes devour their servants — to take back what a person gave the work, year upon year, believing the work was hers.