Beth Kowitt ’07, a senior editor at Fortune magazine, has won a 2021 New York Press Club Journalism Award for business reporting.
The award honors her reporting and writing in the article, “America’s Black Brain Drain,” which appeared in the August/September 2020 issue of Fortune and online.
In it, Kowitt examines why African-American professionals are moving abroad and staying there.
An excerpt:
The decision to work and live abroad has been brought into sharp relief for many Black American expats this spring and summer as they watch a national movement take hold back home in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd. There’s a sense of guilt at not being on the front lines, mixed with affirmation of why they did not want to return.
Working abroad, these executives say they left behind the fatigue that many described as routine for Black people in corporate America: the exhaustion brought about by being asked to solve your company’s diversity issues; living by the unwritten rules that dictate how you present yourself at work; having to prove every day that you deserve to be in your role. Once abroad, with the weight of their companies behind them, many Black expatriates said they felt instantly valued and treated with a level of respect and deference from their colleagues they had not known in the U.S.
Read the full article.
