They Think We’re Slow Down Here. Let Them.
A note from a Black woman building something LOUD in a city they keep underestimating.
There’s a particular half-smile people give you when they find out you’re from New Orleans. A little tilt of the head. A little aww. Like you told them you’re selling lemonade on your grandma’s porch.
I am not the candy lady. But I get my hustle from the candy lady. IYKYK.
Then you tell them it’s a digital marketing agency and the smile shifts — tightens at the corners — because now the script they prepared doesn’t fit anymore. They don’t know where to put you. That’s been my entire life. As a Black masculine-of-center woman.
And as a Black Southern lesbian. Good. Stay confused. I’ll wait.
The South is slow. That’s the line, right?
I’ve heard it my whole career. On calls with folks from New York, LA, Chicago, DC. That little joke buried in the small talk: Oh y’all move different down there, huh? They mean it like molasses. Like we’re still loading the fax machine. Like the rest of the country is racing ahead and the South is somewhere behind, fanning itself on the porch.
Have they been to the Midwest though? That’s another story for another day.
What they actually mean — and I say this with my whole chest — is that they’ve never bothered to look.
Because slow is not what this city is. Slow is not what we are. Slow is not what the South is.
The South built this country’s sound, its food, its literature, its political movements. The South raised the writers and the preachers and the organizers who changed the shape of America. The South is where Black folks planted, fed, organized, and created generation after generation, under conditions designed to break us, and made beauty anyway. Don’t ever confuse our pace with our power.
New Orleans specifically moves to a rhythm people outside of it cannot hear. Or don’t want to hear. We build in cycles, not sprints. We know the difference between urgency and panic. We know a pot of gumbo takes the time it takes, and that the thing that takes time is usually the thing that lasts. That is not slowness. That is intentionality. Those are not the same word, and I’m tired of pretending they are.
Let’s talk about what Black New Orleans has actually built.
Because the “y’all are slow” crowd doesn’t know their history. So let me give them a little crash course.
This city was built — literally built — by Black hands. When the French founded New Orleans in 1718, the European colonists didn’t have the skill to survive the land they stole. They would have starved. It was enslaved West Africans, many from Senegambia, who knew how to cultivate rice in swampland and fed the colony in those early years.
Hence the many rice dishes we have. Every levee. Every brick. The wrought iron balconies tourists photograph in the French Quarter? Crafted by enslaved West Africans who’d been apprenticed under French and Spanish blacksmiths. That ironwork people call “iconic French architecture” is Black craftsmanship. Say it plain and loud for the people in the back to hear.
Now let’s talk innovation. Business. Culture. The things people pretend only happen on the East or West Coasts.
Tremé is the oldest Black neighborhood in America. Founded in 1783. That’s not a historical footnote — that’s the original blueprint for Black homeownership, Black community, Black economy in this country. Before Tulsa. Before Rosewood. There was Tremé.
Rose Nicaud was an enslaved woman who started the first coffee-selling business in New Orleans in the early 1800s. She built a pushcart, worked the markets, and used her profits to buy her own freedom. She inspired an entire generation of Black women entrepreneurs in this city — they called them Les Vendeuses. That is the original entrepreneurial blueprint. Not Silicon Valley. New Orleans. A Black woman with a cart and a vision.
The first successful transportation boycott in this country? The Star Car Boycott in New Orleans in 1867 — almost a full century before Montgomery.
Master P and No Limit took an independent record company and went international. Cash Money followed in his footsteps and got that reported $30 million distribution deal with Universal in the late ’90s, bringing New Orleans to the world and unleashing Lil Wayne on the globe. Independent. Southern. Black-owned. Writing the playbook the industry now pretends it invented.
Second lines. Social aid and pleasure clubs. Mardi Gras Indians. Jazz funerals. These aren’t quaint “traditions” for tourists to gawk at — they’re institutions. Mutual aid networks. Insurance systems. Art forms. Community infrastructure Black New Orleanians built because the country wouldn’t build it for us.
So when somebody tells me the South is slow, or that New Orleans is some cute little sleepy market — I think about all of that. I think about how this city, and this region, has been setting the cultural and economic pace of America for over three hundred years while the rest of the country pretended not to notice.
And I laugh.
Black-owned. In this city. Right now.
Let me say the quiet part.
Black-owned business in New Orleans is not a trend piece. It is not a hashtag that got hot in 2020. It is a lineage. It is a debt paid forward by every woman who ran a lunch counter, every man who ran a barbershop, every auntie who sold pralines at a second line, every cousin with a lawn care truck and a dream. We have always been building. The “big business” folks just weren’t writing about us.
And when they did write about us, they wrote us small.
A “local” shop. A “mom-and-pop.” A “community staple.” All coded to mean: sweet, but not serious. Keep your expectations low. Don’t scare them.
I’m done with that sentence.
So let me tell you what The Curated Misfits is.
It’s a digital marketing agency run out of New Orleans by a Black masculine-of-center woman who knows exactly what she’s doing and has the receipts to prove it. Not a side hustle. Not a vibe. A company. Strategy, systems, a point of view, the works.
The name is the thesis. Curated — because everything we touch is chosen with intention. Misfits — because we’re not trying to fit into the mold the industry built without us in mind. We’re the agency for the brands that were told they were too niche, too regional, too loud, too Southern, too Black, too something to scale. I hear “too” and I hear opportunity.
We do the work that the “big” agencies charge six figures for and dress up in slide decks. We do it sharper, because we had to learn it sharper. We do it with a relationship to our clients that a shop in a glass tower can’t manufacture. We pick up the phone. We remember your launch date. We know your kid’s name.
And here’s the part that keeps the doubters awake: we’re good at it. Not scrappy-good. Not good-for-down-here. Good, period. Measured against any market in the country. I will stand on that.
What they miss about Southerners in business
Here’s what the “y’all are slow” crowd doesn’t understand. When a Southern business owner commits to you, they commit. When we say we’re going to do something, we do it. When we build relationships, they last for decades, not quarters. When we deliver, we don’t have to caveat it with a case study and a podcast appearance — the work speaks, and the people we’ve served vouch for us for life.
That’s the Southern way. The Black Southern way. Your word is your bond. Your table stays open. Your people stay fed. You take care of your own — and then you take care of somebody else’s, because somebody did that for you.
You want to call that slow? Be my guest. I call that durable.
I call that how you build something that outlives the trend cycle. The same way Dooky Chase’s has outlived every trend restaurant in Manhattan. The same way jazz outlived every music critic who said it was a fad.
To the folks watching
To my fellow Black business owners in this city, and all across the South: we come from Rose Nicaud. We come from Congo Square. We come from a people who built something out of nothing more times than this country can count. They’re going to keep underestimating us until we make it impossible. So let’s make it impossible.
To the clients wondering if a New Orleans agency can hang with the big coastal shops: bring me your hardest problem. I want it. We want it. I have a team of consultants who are resilient, brilliant, and we know we got that work.
To everyone who smiled that little smile at me: I saw it. I’m going to remember it. And I’m going to keep building — on my own timeline, with my own team, in my own city, rooted in a South that raised me and a lineage that prepared me.
We’re not slow.
We’re just not performing for you.
The Curated Misfits. Curated, but not tamed. Misfit by design.
