Angela Yee is a morning radio mainstay. The Breakfast Club host is a daily part of people’s lives, hitting them with the Rumor Report, interviewing their favorite celebrities, and breaking some of the biggest stories. Angela may sometimes seem like the quietest person in the room when compared to the much larger personalities of Charlamagne Tha God or DJ Envy, but according to her, she is the hardest working of the bunch.
Yee recently spoke with Black Enterprise’s digital magazine about her career. Yee opened up about her struggles as a female of color in male-dominated industries like radio and hip-hop. For Yee, she says she’s rolled with the punches for years. She has been overlooked and underpaid and given positions well below her level of talent. Angela says that she has struggled with imposter syndrome as a result of this and that sometimes she believes that she is not smart enough or talented enough for the rooms she is in. This comes after years of her being looked at as a sidekick to the bigger personalities in the room.
Angela Yee says that for a long time, people considered her to be an assistant. While it upset her, it also motivated her to prove she is so much more than just an accessory to a show. Angela says as the sole woman at most of her jobs including The Breakfast Club, she has had to work the most to prove herself and feels like if she was a man, this would not have been the case. “I feel that I have to be more prepared than anyone else, yet I still don’t get the same respect. I do all of this work just to be considered equal,” she told the magazine.
The Brooklyn-born radio star has definitely proven herself and then some. Angela Yee got her start on Eminem’s SiriusXM Channel “Shade 45” when it first started. She got the job through fellow radio host icon Peter Rosenberg. Following her success on that channel, she would pitch and score her own platform called “Lip Service.” The relationship and sex show has been a hit ever since.
Yee also hosted “The Morning After With Angela Yee” and became a force behind the scenes working in marketing for Nile Rodgers, Wu-Tang Clan, and Eminem. Yee is praised for the balance she brings to The Breakfast Club. She is also a gifted writer who admits her first dream was to become an author. She used to write fiction stories as a kid and aspired to write horror novels and biographies. She is also a serial entrepreneur with several businesses to her name. Yee owns a juice bar in Brooklyn and a hair store in Detroit. Last year she launched a coffee company called CUP, Coffee Uplifts People, after she discovered that there are discriminatory practices occurring in the countries where coffee beans are being harvested by primarily marginalized people. “Coffee beans come from all these different places [like] Ethiopia, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Guyana, Jamaica,” Yee told Black Enterprise. “I do feel like it’s something that is really ours, but we don’t get to partake in the fruits of that labor as much.”
