Unrig the Game
What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A much-needed playbook to supporting and retaining women of color in leadership roles to create lasting change in the world, from a former labor and community organizer and founder of one of the nation’s premier funders of women of color-led organizations.
“A balm and an inspiration.”—Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and director of Caring Across Generations
In the U.S., many of the most significant social justice victories of our time have been spearheaded by women of color leaders. From the streets, to the ballot box, to elected office, no other demographic group stands up more consistently and unequivocally for human rights, democracy, and the planet. Remarkably, they’ve accomplished this despite conditions—in their fields and organizations—that make leadership uniquely treacherous for them. For women of color leaders, the game is rigged. How much more could humanity be winning if we unrigged it? What might be possible, in this clutch moment of history, with so much on the line, if movements stopped benching our best in ways that negatively impact the scoreboard for everybody?
Unrig the Game equips us to support effective women of color leaders so we can all win. A former community and union organizer who started one of the largest foundations to resource women of color-led organizing, Vanessa Priya Daniel draws on candid interviews with forty-five prominent women of color movement leaders, along with her own experience at the helm of an organization, to offer an on-the-ground perspective of the obstacles leaders face, how they navigate them, and how allies can show up. Daniel highlights the unique strengths and “superpowers” these leaders bring to the fight for social change, while debunking the myth that identity alone makes a transformative leader.
For women of color leaders, this book is a balm, a sister circle, and a master class. For everyone, it is an essential tool to realize the world we all deserve.
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Daniel—founder of the Groundswell Fund, which provides resources to social justice community organizers—debuts with a sharp examination of the challenges women of color face in leadership roles. Distilling advice from her experiences at Groundswell, Daniel cautions against pushing oneself beyond one's limits and recounts how the "enormous pressure I felt as a woman of color to be four times as good as my white counterparts" spurred her to keep a demanding schedule that resulted in a herniated disk, which forced her to slow down. Daniel also includes the perspectives of other women of color pushing for social change. For instance, she suggests a "mothering and mammying expectation" can lead white coworkers to feel entitled to women of color's emotional labor and describes how Silvia Henriquez left her position as executive director at an abortion rights organization after colleagues criticized her for being insufficiently "vulnerable." To navigate such challenges, Daniel encourages women of color to lift up others, demand meaningful change from people in power, and bring an intersectional lens to uprooting oppression. The dispiriting anecdotes highlight the quotidian harms exacted upon female leaders of color, but Daniel brings some hard-earned hope to the proceedings, finding solidarity and resilience in women of color's "wellspring of knowledge and wisdom." This outrages even as it inspires.
