There comes a moment when you stop asking. You stop waiting for the green light. You stop hoping that someone in a corner office will recognize your worth, extend the offer, or finally give you the permanent role you’ve already been performing.

For me, that moment didn’t arrive in one dramatic flash — it built slowly, across four consecutive assignments as a Tech Project Manager. Each one followed a pattern so familiar it felt scripted: I stepped into chaos, brought structure and momentum, delivered results everyone praised — and then, just when it seemed like the breakthrough was near, the rug was pulled.

Each time, the explanation was the same: budget shifts. Each time, the promise dangled: a full-time role just ahead. Each time, the feedback was glowing. And yet, the ending never changed.

Eventually, I realized this wasn’t coincidence. It was design.

I’ve worked across San Diego and Orange Counties, in healthcare and tech organizations where senior management skewed heavily white and upper-middle-class. On the surface, people were “polite” — professional, cordial, always keeping it clean. But beneath that veneer was the kind of discrimination that never makes headlines but cuts just as deep.

These weren’t subtle slights. They were veiled just enough for plausible deniability, but pointed enough to make the message clear: I didn’t belong, and I wouldn’t last.

I’m a Black man in tech. That fact, unspoken but always present, shaped every interaction. Too assertive? Hostile. Push too hard for clarity? “Overreacting.” Refuse to be rolled over? “Difficult.” It was a tightrope — one slip from confident to cocky, from professional to “a problem.”

And still, I delivered. Every time.

There’s a name for what I kept running into: the glass cliff. It’s when organizations place a woman or person of color in charge of a project already on the verge of failure. If it falls apart, they take the blame. If it succeeds, the credit is quietly passed to someone else.

That was the pattern.

One example: the Data Management Framework workstream. By the time they gave me ownership, it was already coded red. Yet my name was attached to it as if I had been steering it from the start. No explanation, no context, just: here’s the fire, it’s yours now.

This wasn’t leadership. It was scapegoating sold as opportunity.

My most recent assignment made the pattern undeniable. I was told a permanent Project Manager role would open in a couple of months, and it was mine if I wanted it.

That was the carrot.

But as priorities shifted, I was moved into a vendor management role — visible but powerless — caught in crosscurrents that had little to do with my skills and everything to do with the corporate “game.”

Still, I adapted. I untangled the chaos. I delivered stability. I received glowing feedback, again and again. Recruiters, managers, colleagues — all telling me how much value I brought.

And then, with no warning, I got the call: two weeks left on your contract. Same script. Same excuse. Same outcome.

Four times in a row.

Finally, I’d had enough.

Stay in Corporate long enough and you learn it. Wait for the promotion. Wait for the recognition. Wait for the budget. Wait for someone to “let” you advance.

But permission is a leash. It binds you to other people’s decisions, priorities, and biases.

The only way forward was to cut through it. If I wanted ownership of my future, I had to claim it.

After three decades in corporate, I knew my value: turning chaos into order, delivering under pressure, building systems that worked.

So why keep renting those skills to companies that treated me as disposable?

Entrepreneurship wasn’t optional. It was inevitable — the place to stop waiting, stop asking, and start building on my own terms.

If you’re reading this and you feel the same undercurrent — the dangling promises, the quiet undermining, the grind of always performing but never advancing — hear me clearly:

Stop waiting for permission.

The day you’ve had enough isn’t collapse. It’s a turning point. It’s the moment you see the ladder was never built for you to reach the top — and you choose to build something higher.

Because the only permission that matters is the one you give yourself.

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