K, bye.

I no longer accept childcare or domestic service placement. Not because I hate my job (or kids or families), it’s not because I'm “burned-out” (I literally only worked for 6 weeks last year), and definitely not due to a lack of belief in self (I’m literally the best at what I do), but because I refuse to participate in a system that depends on extracted care, silence, and disposability.

The modern service industry, especially private childcare (with special attention to high and ultra high net worth homes), domestic labor, and household management, did not emerge in a vacuum. It descends directly from systems that treated care as something to be taken from Black women’s bodies without protection, reciprocity, or regard for cost.

Slavery was not only forced labor.

It was forced intimacy.

Forced caregiving.

Forced emotional regulation.

Forced devotion without consent.

That legacy did not disappear- it professionalized.

Today, Black women in service roles are still expected to:

Give endlessly while asking for nothing.

Anticipate needs before they’re spoken.

Regulate everyone else’s emotions.

Absorb instability quietly.

Remain grateful, pleasant, and “professional” no matter the conditions.

And when we name harm, set boundaries, or insist on dignity, we are framed as difficult.
Ungrateful. 

Unprofessional. 

Unsafe. 

Replaceable.

This is not accidental. It is structural.

The service industry relies on a familiar logic: 

“Care should be intimate, but the caregiver should be invisible”

Essential, but not protected.

Trusted with children, but not trusted with power.

Close enough to give everything, never close enough to matter.

The philosophy I practice with children is built on foresight, safety, and guaranteed repair. I teach that support does not disappear when mistakes happen. I teach that power must be used carefully. I teach that bodies deserve dignity while learning.

I cannot teach that truth to children while standing inside an industry that violates it daily. 

I was expected to model emotional steadiness while being destabilized.

To teach choice while having none.

To guarantee repair while being disposable.

To offer continuity while living under constant threat of removal- of income, housing, reputation, and safety.

That is not care. That is extraction.

This industry asks Black women to reproduce the same labor we were historically forced into- only now with Placement Agencies as overseers (but rarely advocacy or support), contracts, NDAs, polite language, and a smile. It asks us to perform healing work inside systems that refuse to heal themselves.

I am no longer willing to do that.

Leaving placements is not quitting.

It’s refusal.

Refusal to normalize a system that still treats Black women’s care as an endlessly renewable resource.

Refusal to confuse access to wealth with safety or ethics.

Refusal to offer my body, my intuition, my regulation, my knowledge and my foresight to structures that cannot, or simply will not, reciprocate them.

I am not walking away from care.

I am withdrawing it from places that only know how to take.

Care without dignity is not noble.

It’s exploitation with better lighting.

And I am done participating in it.