Defying Gravity: The Elphaba-Glinda Dynamic in Black-White Women’s Workplace Relationships

In November 2025, we found ourselves wondering aloud about the cultural obsession with Wicked—specifically, the sight of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande circulating across talk show stages, holding hands, their friendship treated as remarkable. We are not particular fans of the film franchise. But something in that dynamic—in the public hunger for evidence that a Black woman and a white woman could be genuinely close—kept pulling at us.

It was recognition.

We met twenty years ago as doctoral students, Black and white women drawn together by a shared experience of gravitating towards heavy racial truths in a way that often cost us in our workplaces. We developed the kind of friendship that required no performance, no translation—deep conversations about being othered, exhaustion, the particular loneliness of being visible in ways you never chose.

Then gravity happened. Not deliberately. Inevitably. Elder care, children, collapsed economies, collapsed marriages. A decade of dormancy.

And then, through alignment—of disappointments, vulnerabilities, defiance—we found each other again. Both carrying lived experience and rigorous credentials in racialized workplace trauma. Both asking: What does it actually take to show up authentically across the racial line when every institution is built to keep us apart?

The obsession with Erivo and Grande, aka Elphaba and Glinda, isn’t just about these two women. It’s about rarity. Black women and white women in genuine solidarity are remarkable enough to be consumed as content. Remarkable enough that the public cannot quite believe they’re real.

We write as co-authors and co-facilitators—one white, one Black—with different proximities to institutional power but aligned commitment to naming what authentic cross-racial solidarity requires. Our collaboration is itself evidence of the defiance this piece describes.

What the Numbers Tell Us

Friendship follows predictable patterns. Research shows that 81% of white women and 70% of Black women report that most of their close friends share their race. We gravitate toward homophily—sameness. It reduces friction.

Black women and white women are constructed as opposites, making friendship across race feel like a contradiction in terms. The racial binary, of course, is a grave myth. We do not for a moment want to make invisible the range and complexity of racial and cultural identities, but see an examination of Black/white professional friendships as a portal into what it takes for real cross-racial, cross-cultural connection in all of its messiness.

Deep friendships across social identities may not be the norm, but they exist. And increasingly, in today’s workplaces, they matter.

The stakes become clearer when you look at power. According to recent research on women in the workplace, white women advance to managerial positions at nearly twice the rate of Black women. They are more likely to be hired, promoted, believed, and protected. This disparity has roots in over 300 years of racialized labor extraction—from enslavement through domestic work to segregated professional positions. The machinery has changed. The fundamental extraction has not.

In workplaces today, Black women bring sophisticated analyses of power, institutional logic, and risk. They bring knowledge forged through necessity and intention. And then the extraction begins: diversity committees, mentoring women of color, educating white colleagues about racism, translating culture for decision-makers. Uncompensated labor. Unrecognized expertise. The infrastructure of “diversity work.”

But here is what happens when authentic friendship develops: the extraction stops being invisible. It becomes a site of reckoning.

What Changes When It’s Real

Authentic cross-racial friendship in workplace contexts that is not performative allyship requires:

First: Mutuality. Vulnerability has different meanings across different social identities. When a white woman shows vulnerability in professional spaces, she is often rewarded for her honesty, her humanity. When a Black woman shows vulnerability, she risks confirming suspicions that she’s not capable, not equipped, not ready to lead. For mutuality to exist, a white woman must understand this asymmetry, and be able to discern the disparate impact.

Second: Reciprocity. Friendship is an exchange—generative, not extractive. Power is not fixed; it is dynamic. We can resist the zero-sum mythology of traditional capitalist work models. In workplace relationships across race, reciprocity across racial difference threatens and weakens the baked-in power differentials that institutions depend on. Authentic friendship requires that both women consider what they are willing to give up and risk. Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Third: Named difference. Not false sameness, but explicit acknowledgment of how racialization has treated them differently. How the same institution has treated them differently. How their vulnerabilities, while both real, are not equivalent in terms of existential threat– impact on life, career, and generations to come.

Why Now

In the landscape of our upended economy, Black women are bearing the brunt of layoffs and long-term unemployment more than any other identity group in America. From this wreckage, Black women are leaving traditional workplaces behind to defy gravity and chart their own entrepreneurial paths at a higher rate than white women. One thread is consistent: they are tired of bearing the emotional and intellectual labor of extraction without reciprocity.

Organizations need to confront truths:

1. The protective bubble is not equally distributed. Glinda’s bubble—the permission to fail, learn, experiment, grow— is not available to Black women leaders. When we celebrate “diverse” leadership teams without examining whether women of color have access to the same safety, mentorship, and runway for failure that many white women take for granted, we are celebrating containment, not inclusion.
2. Leaders with racial privilege have still not stepped aside; they have only shifted positions. Stepping aside means more than creating a seat at the table. It means white women leaders being willing to follow, to be corrected, to amplify rather than explain, to advocate for Black women’s advancement even when it costs them visibility or influence. It means becoming the infrastructure, not the center.
3. Cross-racial friendship in your company is not necessarily evidence of organizational health– it may be evidence of individual courage. When Black and white women leaders develop authentic solidarity, they are often doing so against institutional gravity. That extra work should not be required in order for everyone to belong or succeed.

We are not perfect models. We are not here to preach. We are here to be the main characters of our story and to present a bold vision: to show that cross-racial friendship is possible, and that it matters for the workplace.

It matters because it suggests that the structures we have built are not inevitable. That we are capable of something other than separation and extraction. That when two people refuse the gravity that pulls them apart, they can experience something like freedom—and in experiencing it, offer that possibility to others. But solidarity is not a destination. It is not a competency to be acquired. It is a practice—daily, relentless, costly—of choosing to stay in relationship with someone different from yourself, especially when institutional forces require that you defy gravity to do so.