Olivia Pope. Annalise Keating. Joan Clayton. Molly Carter. Mary Jane Paul. When I think about the television I’ve watched that depicts the journey of the successful Black woman character, she’s always struggling to balance her career with her responsibility to care for others. She’s the mother figure, she’s the girlfriend, she’s the wife, or she’s trying to be, all while building her dreams.
Black women are known to step into the caretaker role on screen, and in real life. But not Harper Stern.
I’ve been a fan of HBO’s Industry since the first season, but in season four we saw Harper Stern, played by Myha’la, reach the peak of her villain era, and it made something so clear to me. Never before had I seen a Black woman on a TV show who was so unbothered by the idea of taking care of someone else, and who was actually selfishly putting herself before everything.
Harper’s story has always been a complex and anxiety-inducing one. By running purely on fumes and tunnel vision, she took “move fast and break things” to another level. She knew she was entering a space where a lot was already against her, having not graduated college, coming from a dysfunctional family, and being both Black and a woman in a white male financial world.
For most Black women we see on screen, this is usually the kind of story that turns them into caregivers who would do anything for stability, acceptance, or love. Harper instead saw her story as something she could flip into success that went beyond anything she saw mirrored in her real life.
She wasn’t trying to just be the typical girl boss, she was trying to dominate everything at the cost of everything. She was full of imperfections, but her choice to be the villain when needed says something about what it actually takes to be a Black woman building something in spaces not built for you.
Harper knew she didn’t have time to ask for permission
Harper’s delusional, unhinged self-belief nearly made me pass out each episode when she took a risk that didn’t work. But she knew what the bigger picture was. She saw a world where non-Black people were openly failing upward and building institutions off of their ability to take risks and said… Well, why not me too?
And that’s a feeling I know personally. As a founder, it often feels like there’s very limited space to fail, and that everything will be taken from you if you make one wrong decision. Meanwhile, everyone else is able to turn mistakes or inadequacies into opportunity. At some point, you have to be relentless in your belief that you belong and that your instincts are right, even while you’re still figuring it out. Because even when you’re wrong, it at least shows your ability to be confident.
This is also what separates Harper from nearly every other Black woman character I’ve seen before. She did not wait for a seat at the table, she saw what she wanted, mapped out how to get it, and moved like the outcome was already decided in her favor. That kind of ruthlessness is something we rarely get to see Black women embody on television. (Honorable mention to The Boys’ Sister Sage, she was also about that life.)
Compare her to characters like Henry Muck or Whitney Halberstram, her white male counterparts on the show this season, and it’s clear who gets to profit off of appearing confident (even when they don’t know wtf they’re doing) and who doesn’t.
For each of those characters, the insatiable need for achievement and greed is almost treated as a given. Harper moves with that same energy, but we feel every inch of the risk, because we know that panic as a Black woman being one wrong move away from losing everything.
It’s not just how she chased, it’s how she moved
So let’s bring this back down to Earth, remembering that Harper is a fictional character on a fictional show. Clearly, the message here is not to put yourself at risk for the sake of success. But what we can take from Harper is the idea that at some point, success is about hard sacrifice, confidence, and playing the game of who you know.
Beyond Harper’s sheer work ethic, at every turn she used her network to get what she wanted. Many of us enter building careers with the idea that we have to do everything alone, and Harper instead showed us why that won’t work. She was ruthless in how she used others. However, her first step in many of the decisions she made was to remember who she already knew and to put that relationship to work.
She didn’t start a business with just herself. She started it with her past colleagues, mentors, and even clients she met through her first job at Pierpoint. While she trusted her instincts to build and lead something, she knew that eventually she would only be as good as the people who were backing her or on her team.
As someone building a media company in public, I’ve learned that vision is simply not enough. You need allies and people who will bet on you even when the numbers say they shouldn’t. We needed to see her move and build like that.
At the end of the day, Harper is still a girls girl with a soul
What makes all of this even more important is the fact that Harper is not soulless like her white male counterparts. She’s actually not even a villain at heart.
Her relationship with Eric Tao gave us the Harper that lives underneath all of the tactics. She does want to be loved. She does want to build with people she cares about. She does want to be guided, even though she knows she can operate alone. She does want to understand what a romantic relationship can mean, even though she doesn’t feel wired for one. She’s struggling to heal from deep mother wounds, and the complicated grief that comes with it. She isn’t chasing power for the sake of power, she’s chasing the kind of security and protection that no one in her early life ever gave her. She is self-aware in the way that Black women have to be.
She also cares for her friendship with Yasmin Hanani, although Yasmin’s access to power has fully corrupted her. For a split second, Harper does extend her hand to be that caregiver to save Yasmin from her own destruction, but soon learns that in the end she still has to choose herself. Because she’s the only person that will.
What is Harper telling us in real life though?
Harper’s story hits deep for Black women who are building without guidance or representation. How many rooms have we entered that have openly told us we don’t belong? How many spaces have we been in where we were shown that we weren’t enough? How many of us have turned rejection into sheer willpower to build something bigger than ourselves, even when we push it a little too far?
That is what lies behind the statistic that Black women earn degrees and start businesses at a higher rate than any other demographic. We have always known how to take a closed door and build our own. So watching Harper end up the biggest winner (well as much of a winner as anyone can be in the Industry universe) feels right and deserved.
Harper’s not the caregiver, but she’s also not really the villain, she just knows how to embody one to play the game. As a founder, I see her as a reminder that building something meaningful will require seasons where you’re misunderstood or called selfish. It will require times where you are obsessed with protecting what you’re creating more than you’re worried about people’s feelings about it. It’s a constant line you have to keep drawing with yourself.
And that’s okay.
