In the wake of backlash against racial equity in tech and intensifying authoritarianism, what can an Audre Lorde-inspired reading group teach us about the care practices necessary to turn grief and rage into collective power?
For many of us, the world has been especially heavy and damaging over the last year. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s work emphasizing the ways that capitalism intentionally disconnects us from ourselves, each other, and our feelings as a source of power, One of us (Selene) recently created an “Audre Lorde Reading Group” in LA meant for Women of Color to come together, grieve, and hold ourselves accountable to the immense power of our deepest sense of feeling. In one of the first gatherings, Selene asked people to share why meeting and reading together are important practices when someone said, “I don’t have many spaces to be a full human. I work in a tech company that has had multiple layoffs in the past few years. As a Black woman, I cannot allow myself to grieve or to let go. I’m afraid that if I do, I will unravel, and that it will make me more of a target in the next round of layoffs.”
Our coming together, connecting, and holding each other through our grief and rage is a radical act. As Lorde writes, “as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.” We grieve and rage and hold each other lovingly as we live through intensifying white supremacy and authoritarianism domestically and internationally.
We have both been lucky enough to speak about our grief at work, with friends, and in organizing spaces. And as we do, we have realized the critical importance of community spaces where women of color can feel held, unravel, and practice feeling together as necessary to our collective survival. As we navigate the impacts of US imperialism on us and on our communities within the US and globally, we also continue to work, showing up to financially and emotionally support our families and those who count on us. In the broad landscape of politics, empire, and racism, hope often feels out of grasp. Yet, we know that building connections and tending our community ties are how we survive.]
For 9 years and 11 years, respectively, we worked at Code2040, a nonprofit that sought to advance racial equity in tech by supporting Black and Latinx Computer Science majors as they navigated college, secured internships, and entered careers in the tech industry. Our work there prioritized building pathways of economic mobility for Black and Latinx college students, including through connection with DEI and HR departments at tech companies around the country, supporting them to grow and shift their racial equity practices. That work was challenging from the very founding of the organization in 2012, but it had become exponentially more difficult as DEI was centered in a strategically orchestrated web of attacks against anti-racist work. As the Trump administration threatened federal funding for educational and cultural institutions with racial equity initiatives, and philanthropy wrestled with how to fund explicitly anti-racist organizations, fundraising became impossible. It is within that context that we announced our organization’s closure.
As we approached the potentiality and then inevitability of this closure in the context of the greater political moment, we found we needed to be more intentional about taking care than before. We want to share what we, our loved ones, and community members are doing right now to support ourselves and others as we face relentless assaults on our work, our lives, our loved ones. We want to name and affirm the everyday, too-easily forgotten practices of keeping each other going. We are reminding each other that we know how to survive, know how to thrive under terrible conditions, know how to find joy, pleasure, and sweetness. We remember that we cannot do this alone; survival is made possible collectively. We learned from our mothers, both immigrants, that tending our social responsibilities to each other will create more possibility. We draw on the teachings of feminist leaders, including Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Octavia Butler, as we participate in networks of mutual aid, create webs of support, and continue to disrupt the systems that harm us through interwoven practices of care.
Growing up in families of strong women who survived migration, economic insecurity, and the isolating, white supremacist emphasis on individualism within US culture, we learned that community is how we survive. Community is how our mother’s mother survived and how hers did, and it’s how we will continue to survive. We grew up knowing that childcare is a community act. Dinners at aunts and uncles were ways that reproductive labor was shared. Our elder relatives’ first jobs as immigrants were through referrals and connections made by their friends or other immigrants.
In our positions of leadership, we recognize the workplace as a community of people and develop relationships with one another at work. The final iteration of Code2040 was designed by six women of color between 2018-2020 based on the ways that we’ve learned from our own work experiences as chronically ill, disabled, sometimes sad, first-born daughters. Some of the ways we built a supportive company are:
- We prioritized checking in at the beginning of meetings, sharing about our weekends, exciting outings, maybe a book we’re reading.
- We told one another if we’re having a hard week, and made emotional space and room in the agenda to share limitations we might be bringing to our time together. There are varying levels of desire to share or hear outside-work-life, and that’s respected.
- We had a budget to send food, flowers, or a gift card when someone was struggling.
- We would move meetings, keep cameras off, summarize pre-read documents, repeat information, and allocate time for processing data before discussion.
- We had a detailed and generous disability policy.
- We had unlimited PTO and would encourage each other (sometimes insistently) to take time off.
Financial uncertainty at work has compounded what we and our staff are experiencing outside of work: the onslaught of racist, homophobic, and transphobic policies across the country, an ongoing US-backed genocide in Palestine, the incarceration and kidnapping of undocumented people as well as documented activists, the criminalization of houselessness, restricted and ever-shrinking access to abortion and reproductive healthcare. Facing ceaseless violence against the most vulnerable among us, it’s hard to concentrate at work, find the motivation to come to meetings, or feel like work is meaningful.
Yet, the constraints of racial capitalism require that every single one of us must work. We have bills to pay, families to support, and commitments to one another to share the labor of our organizations. Like many other women of color leaders, we aren’t committed to the company as acolytes to capitalism or fidelity to the nonprofit industrial complex’s belief in itself to change the world. We have different reasons for showing up: some of us are driven by accountability to our colleagues, some of us simply appreciate being busy with work as a respite from the rest of our lives, and many of us feel like our work makes a small difference in a world filled with despair. It’s the ways we arrive and interact that matter: what we create with and for one another and ourselves is grounded in the ancestral ways of being we’ve learned from our predecessors that inform how we survive at work. It’s what we do outside of work that feeds us and enables us to offer care and support in the office.
Even as we’ve prepared to close the organization in a very challenging job market, we have often come into weekly meetings giggling and feeling happy about our weekends and positive about the week ahead. These glimpses of connection and laughter have served as reminders to what we and many other women of color know intrinsically: connection and collectivity keep us going. In the 5 years we’ve worked together, we’ve learned that we both invest time and imagination in cultivating joy and pleasure. Mimi is currently going to see small comedy shows and visiting hole-in-the-wall eateries in the Bay Area with a lover while filling her home with art she makes. Selene is performing poetry, organizing the queer POC Audre Lorde reading group in LA, and working remotely from CDMX. We both grow gardens, travel, sit in the sun, and cook for loved ones. As active organizers and leaders of a nonprofit, we prioritize cultivating joy, intimacy, and aliveness. We extend an invitation into this practice to others. We know so many other women of color, our friends, colleagues, mentors, and co-workers who are similarly rooting in relationships, shoring them up, mending them, exploring new ones.
As we’ve doom scrolled, cried, and felt anxious these past few years about the political wreckage of this moment, we remember that we have each other, and that even when we feel hopeless, we have a responsibility in our connections with our community outside of work.
- We host book clubs and dinners, donate to organizers planning direct actions, and plan direct actions ourselves.
- We check in with people we haven’t heard from, sometimes repeatedly until they reach back.
- Our friends also reach out when they haven’t heard from us (and we answer the phone, most of the time); which reminds us that even when we feel alone, we are not.
- We reject cycles of endless productivity and the sense that we must always be doing something. Our commitment to our community, both close and extended, is enough.
- We show up for each other. Showing up with love for our friends, family, and ourselves is enough.
Relying on each other is how our ancestors survived the ends of worlds before us. We, as women of color, have made it through to this moment and will continue to survive by finding rest and strength in one another. These acts are practices of our commitment to each other’s survival.
Having worked in an organization dedicated to advancing racial equity in tech, we feel the financial insecurity brought on by the political backlash against racial justice work. We know we’re not alone. We’re writing because we are trying to witness the truth of the world around us without being consumed by its grief. We acknowledge the heartache we are feeling and the devastating violence being committed against people here and abroad. We recognize a sense of instability, insecurity, and hopelessness, and we are resisting the temptation to stay quiet, to be with our feelings in isolation, and to succumb to despair. We remind ourselves, and want to remind you, that it’s necessary to lean on each other even more deeply now and to practice being in relationship with one another. We can navigate our feelings of rage, anxiety, and grief together, and in our deepening connections with each other, we can generate collective power.
