There is so much we can learn from movement leaders who have fought for and achieved change in this country, including the transformative, and largely underrecognized, role that Black women and women of color have played throughout history. This, along with the current political climate threatening to roll back progress and many hard-won rights, makes the new book Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning, by longtime social justice activist and organizer Vanessa Priya Daniel, particularly timely and important in this moment.
Many of the most significant social justice and environmental victories of our time have been spearheaded by women of color leaders. Whether it’s through grassroots organizing and activism, showing up at the polls or serving in Congress, women of color consistently stand up against injustice and boldly advocate for freedom, climate action and human rights. Yet when they pursue or serve in leadership positions, they face persistent and unfair obstacles. In other words, as Daniel posits in the book, the game is “rigged” against them, and we too often end up “benching our most valuable players.”
In Unrig the Game, Daniel articulates the “superpowers” that make many women of color (WOC) such effective leaders, the different ways in which leadership is uniquely treacherous for them, how allies can show up and how having more women of color in leadership benefits us all. “The obstacles that WOC must remove—in order to survive and thrive—are the same ones that keep all people from being free,” Daniel writes. “When WOC fight and win for ourselves and our communities, everyone else benefits by extension.”
Unrig the Game serves as a playbook for both women of color leaders and those who support them. Daniel—a former community and union organizer who founded and served for seventeen years as executive director of Groundswell Fund, a leading funder of women of color-led grassroots and electoral organizing—interviewed over 45 women of color movement leaders for the book, including Alexis McGill Johnson of Planned Parenthood, Dolores Huerta of Dolores Huerta Foundation and Ai-jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, among many other prominent movement leaders. Daniel chronicles these leaders’ stories and insights throughout the book—including “Mini Master Classes” from many of them—along with her own experiences and expertise as a leader, organizer and funder.
In my interview with Daniel, she talks about the three “superpowers” women of color have, the five main obstacles women of color face in leadership, what she wants us to think about during Women’s History Month, what we can all do to help “unrig the game,” and more.
Marianne Schnall: What inspired you to write this book, and what do you hope that readers will take away from it?
Vanessa Daniel: This book is really a call to radically shift how we see and treat women of color leaders in movement. And I wrote it because I want us, and our movements, to win. I have two daughters, a six year old and a thirteen year old, and I want them to have things like self-determination over their bodies and a democracy to live in and a planet to live on. And they don’t get to have those things if movements don’t start winning more of the time.
I’ve been in this work for almost 30 years, and I’m very clear that no team that is serious about winning benches its MVPs for no good reason, especially in the clutch moment of a big game. And we are in the fight of our lives right now against fascism. We need our full strength. Much of our strength comes from our best and brightest leaders in movement, so many of whom are women of color. We know that women of color, and Black women in particular, have always led in our movements. They’ve been the backbone of movements throughout the history of this country. And yet we’ve never had a serious conversation in the public square about how much more we could all be winning if we truly valued the strategic brilliance many of them are bringing and if we stopped making leadership positions so treacherous for them. So this book is cracking open that conversation.
What I want people to do with it—I came up as a community and labor organizer, so I always have an organizing ask—this is very clearly aimed at an organizing ask for people to do two things. One is to really value and notice the superpowers when they’re showing up in leaders. And the second thing is to intervene in what gets in their way, to start understanding what benches women of color leaders and intervening in it.
After writing the book, I felt really hopeful. I know this is a time where a lot of us feel tired and exhausted, but I have to say, I felt so incredibly energized and hopeful and filled with possibility of what we can do—ready to roll my sleeves up after doing these interviews with nearly 50 leaders and putting this book together. So I hope that people can take some of that energy from this because I think it is really possible. We can do this and we can unrig this piece of the game in order to fight with our full strength.
“Boldness… is really the drive to fight for the fullness of what our communities need to thrive, what the planet needs to be livable. And it is such an antidote to this affliction of timidity that fascists really rely on to get us all to obey in advance.”
Schnall: As you just referenced, women of color have been such a highly influential, powerful yet largely unrecognized force that has shaped our country. You talk about them as being our “MVPs” and having various “superpowers.” What do women of color bring to leadership and as change makers?
Daniel: There are three superpowers in particular that I really focus on in the book. The first is 360-degree vision. This is the drive to tackle forces like extractive capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and colonialism—not individually, but simultaneously. Kimberlé Crenshaw talked about the experience of living through those when she coined the term “intersectionality,” the Combahee River Collective talked about it, and women of color have been about that work. When we fight for things, it’s not just for a better wage but for gender and racial equity in pay, not just for healthcare but for reproductive and gender affirming healthcare. I call this 360 vision because it’s viewing the whole playing field and really dismantling these interlocking forces of oppression that are hurting all of us.
The second one is boldness. This is really the drive to fight for the fullness of what our communities need to thrive, what the planet needs to be livable. And it is such an antidote to this affliction of timidity that fascists really rely on to get us all to obey in advance. Boldness looks like The Squad as the left flank in Congress. It looks like Barbara Lee standing up as the only no vote to the Iraq War. It looks like the sisters who were involved in the Green New Deal. We know that Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a Black woman, wrote it; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Latina, was the first champion in Congress; Varshini Prakash, a South Asian woman, galvanized youth in the Sunrise Movement at the grassroots to push for it. And then when it stalled out, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who was the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, locked arms with the grassroots, with folks in Congress, and made sure core elements of that got into the Inflation Reduction Act. So we now see that the largest outlay of resources we have in this country to address climate change includes significant dollars for the most vulnerable communities. So boldness is possible; it matters.
The third superpower is generosity. And this is the conviction to fight in a way that doesn’t throw anyone under the bus in order to win. It really says we are not going to leave immigrants, we’re not going to leave our trans kids, we’re not going to leave pregnant people—anyone—behind. And it jams the gears of the divide and conquer that fascism relies on to advance. This looks like what we saw with women of color in Oregon that passed the Reproductive Health Equity Act and would not budge from that negotiating table until trans and undocumented people were included in the protections of that law.
So these three superpowers are very present in many women of color leaders. I would say they’re not innate in that not every woman of color who’s a leader has them and not every leader who’s not a woman of color lacks them, but we see them disproportionately among women of color leaders because of what we have had to navigate to survive. So these superpowers, we can all adopt them. We can use them, we can learn from them, we can value them. And I’m excited to be able to talk more about them with folks.
Schnall: We need to not just let women of color lead, but also we all need to muster these things in ourselves and learn from their example. In addition to all the strengths and potential of women of color, the book talks a lot about the obstacles that women of color face. What are some of those obstacles, and what can we do to address and overcome them?
Daniel: There are a lot of things that make leadership treacherous for women of color. In the book, I have something called the “Job Description,” which is the subtext of all the things that women of color are expected to both do and put up with in these positions. I’ll just talk about the top five that came up the most in the interviews and also were the most universal, because I have a section of the book called “We Are Not a Monolith,” which talks about some of the differences in the way people come for the necks of Asian women versus Black women versus Native American women. But these are the top five that were very universal. The first is the invitation onto a glass cliff to lead an organization in crisis. The second is the assumption of incompetence. The third is the expectation to mother and mammy. The fourth is being given zero to no margin for error. And the fifth is when you’re attacked, you’re left alone.
Just to share some examples, invitation onto a glass cliff looks like what we saw happen to a leader right here in California. She took a CEO position. A few weeks into the job, the controller comes into her office and says there’s not enough money in the bank to make payroll at the end of the month. No one had told her about this before she took the job. So she works around the clock, weathering her own health in the process, to address this problem, knowing that even though she didn’t create it, more than any of the other leaders, she’s going to be the one blamed for it. So the glass cliff is having to either work your Black or brown girl magic to create a miracle or take the fall for someone else’s mess. It’s also, by the way, like Kamala Harris being invited to mount a campaign with less time than the other candidate. That’s what the glass cliff looks like.
The assumption of incompetence looks like having to work four times as hard to be seen as half as credible and the incredible toll that that takes on our minds, bodies and spirits. One of the most poignant stories I heard was from Amisha Patel, who’s a fantastic organizer and leader out of Chicago, who told me that during her first battle with cancer, she worked through chemo and radiation. She was in the bathroom in New York City outside of a work meeting when her hair started to fall out. And she stood in the bathroom and held clumps of her hair in her hand and wept. And she knew that it was coming, but she didn’t feel like she could slow down. I heard this story again and again.
I went through it myself with having a terribly herniated disc in my back. I would not slow down. I facilitated my board retreat from the floor. I stood up on cross country flights over and over again. But underneath it really was this fear that if I didn’t continue to deliver excellence, that I would be discarded by movement, that the work I cared so much about would disintegrate, that I wouldn’t potentially be able to provide for my family with this work I dedicated my life to. So this assumption of incompetence really weathers us.
The expectation of mother and mammy is the single biggest lightning-rod issue of anything that came up in the interviews. This is being cast as aggressive or mean anytime you exercise a regular level of assertiveness that would be accepted from any other leader. It’s being told you’re cold and unfeeling anytime you say no. It is being expected not just to produce a work environment that is fair and sustainable, but one that is a utopia where no one ever feels discomfort or a trigger. And then the punishment that is meted out oftentimes in the public square if you fail to deliver on that impossible standard. It is the demand that you perform vulnerability, so that people feel less threatened by the specter of a woman of color standing in her power.
One of the leaders I talked to, Silvia Henriquez, an incredible leader out of the reproductive justice movement, shared that one of the reasons she left leadership altogether was because her staff kept clamoring for her to be more vulnerable. So her annual reviews were filled with comments that were like, “Silvia’s visionary, she’s an excellent fundraiser, she’s a great strategist, she’s a fair manager, but you know what? She never cries.” It wasn’t enough that she was doing her job. People needed her to get emotionally naked in order to feel comfortable with her. Purvi Shah, who leads Movement Law Lab that’s a national organization based in LA, she talks about a previous job where she was trying to hold a staff member accountable who was just combative beyond any level of decorum, only to be told by her boss, “Well, maybe you need to nurture them more.” So this kind of expectation of mother and mammy, it really slows us down. It drains our energy.
Zero margin for error looks like Claudine Gay, what we saw happen at Harvard. It doesn’t need to be a real error; it can be a perceived error. And the kind of punishment that comes down, the attacks that come down, and then being abandoned when attacked. That looks like what happened to the four leaders of the Women’s March, but especially the three who were women of color [Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez]. They were the only three who were singled out by the NRA for attack ads that incited people to threaten their lives. And they were also dragged across the internet behind all these false accusations and rumors. And when they reached out to people in movement, people treated them like they were radioactive; they wouldn’t return their calls. They said, “We were treated like we were guilty or hysterical or both.” And then come to find out a year later, the New York Times breaks the story that, in fact, all that dragging happened from Russian bots, that it was Russian bots doing that to cleave the women’s movement.
So this level of abandonment, it was so painful to hear these stories over and over again. And we as human beings are hardwired to have a visceral fear of being left out on the hill to die. So the impact this has on people emotionally, physiologically. I talked to sisters who checked themselves into inpatient treatment centers for PTSD. I talked to people who didn’t leave their house for the better part of a year. People who were struggling with suicidal ideation. When I read that New York Times article, I immediately texted Linda, and she texted me back, “Tamika and I are sitting here saying, ‘See, we weren’t crazy. People tried to make us feel like we were crazy.’” And I just kept thinking of the words of the feminist writer Carolyn Jess-Cooke who has this incredible quote that says, “Why were we taught to fear the witches instead of the people who burned them alive?”
So these are the things that bench us. And the book is full of concrete ways that we can unrig these things, so that we are able to use our full strength.
“We don’t fight by being timid. We don’t fight by obeying in advance, by being bystanders while our neighbors are persecuted. We get bold. We are undeterred, and we fight by standing with the most vulnerable communities.”
Schnall: We are in an environment that is making that even more difficult than it already was with the rolling back of DEI programs and initiatives. What are some of the misconceptions about DEI and what are we going to need to do to make up for these rollbacks on DEI efforts and programs?
Daniel: First of all, we shouldn’t be surprised that this backlash is happening. This is a pattern in this country. I mean, we saw Emancipation followed by Reconstruction in that blowback. We saw the Civil Rights Movement followed by Jim Crow. There’s no way we were going to get through the largest protest movement this country has ever seen in the uprisings after the murder of George Floyd without this kind of blowback. Every time there’s this blowback, there is a contingent of liberals, usually led by white liberals, that say, “The way we are going to deal with this is by throwing people in communities under the bus and compromising and bending our backbone in order to appease,” whether it’s the Confederacy, whether it’s the Bull Connors, whether it’s now the people who are attacking DEI.
And what we have to learn is that the blowback is expected, and the way we make progress is by steeling our spines and staying the course. And no person of color is surprised by this blowback. I think it’s mainly white folks who are surprised and reacting with timidity to what’s happening. DEI is a term that we’re using in modern days to describe what people have been fighting for in this country for hundreds of years, which is to tell the truth about the origins of the history of this country, to actually clean out the wound that’s been festering and hurting all of us around the oppression and marginalization of certain groups. I mean, there are poor white folks who are suffering and in pain in this country because we don’t have universal healthcare because people were able to convince folks that we didn’t want Black and brown people to have a handout. We are behind the rest of the industrialized world. This stuff is hurting all of us.
So this is a moment to not backstep and get timid. When we look at authoritarianism and fascism, we can look at how it rolls out around the world. The first thing is, it’s often paved with the eroded rights of three groups: women, LGBTQ people, and oppressed racial and ethnic groups. Every woman of color in this country is a member of at least two of those groups. Those of us who are queer, which is a lot of us in movement, are members of all three. We are under very few illusions that the way to get through this is by keeping our heads down and following orders.
We are highly motivated to fight, and we also have a lot of experience fighting this kind of threat because what fascism essentially is, is the worst of America—it’s that three-headed monster of patriarchy and white supremacy and extractive capitalism on steroids. So it makes sense that women of color, who have been fighting all three heads of that monster for hundreds of years in this country in order to survive, actually have something to teach America about how to fight.
So when we see Fatima Goss Graves make a public statement a couple weeks ago as she did, saying the National Women’s Law Center will never abandon transgender women; when we see Jasmine Crockett or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez be uncowed; when we see trans women like Bamby Salcedo and her sisters fighting with so much ferocity, but joy and celebration, the message is, in this moment with DEI and anything else that people are trying to roll back, we don’t fight by being timid. We don’t fight by obeying in advance, by being bystanders while our neighbors are persecuted. We get bold. We are undeterred, and we fight by standing with the most vulnerable communities. So that I think is the message around DEI and anything else that people are struggling to find a backbone around in this moment.
Schnall: At a time where the Trump administration is trying to erase Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and others from the calendars, it feels like a good time for us to look back at our history. You talked a little bit about this, but how can history give us strength and wisdom now? And what do you think we should be thinking about this Women’s History Month?
Daniel: I think this is a time to remember that so many of the points that progressives count on our side of the scoreboard exist because they were put there by women of color. As we think about Women’s History Month, let’s look at the fact that we have 30 million kids in this country who don’t learn hungry because Black women started the Black Panther Breakfast Program, which ended up catalyzing free and reduced breakfast and lunch in our nation’s public schools. We need to look at these moments of history.
And then for the feminist movement, I think we really need to understand that the Achilles heel has been the inability to really just completely release the shackles of white supremacy to be able to be in unity with each other. And there are many examples of this. When we look at women like Glennon Doyle, when we look at sisters like Jane Fonda, we see examples of Gloria Steinem, of women who understand what it is to be in true solidarity, to come together. Being a feminist also includes fighting for immigrant rights. It includes fighting for racial justice. It includes fighting for the rights of trans and gender nonconforming people. And I think that ethos, which women of color really lead on, is something critical to remember and is another reason that we want to really look to the wisdom of women of color in this moment and how we build that kind of solidarity.
When I think about the people who I love most—my dad’s people are Sri Lankan immigrants who came here fleeing a war; my mom’s people are white military folks from Selma, Alabama; I have two daughters who are a mix of Black, Arab, Native American and Irish; my co-parent is a Jamaican woman; I am part of this vibrant LGBT community, which includes so many of my transgender loved ones—women of color are light-years ahead of anyone in fighting for the kind of world in which every single person I love can be free. And I think that kind of ethos of solidarity, boldness, and focus is what we can all take to heart and what every single woman can take to heart as we think about Women’s History Month and the legacy that we’re going to leave for our daughters.
“Some people’s work is going to have to be loud, and we’re going to have to be on a megaphone to keep people bold in philanthropy. Other people, their work is going to be more subterranean. But figure out how to be like water and get money to the front lines.”
Schnall: You’ve done so many important and impactful things, one being founding Groundswell Fund. What did you learn through that work, and what do you see as the role of philanthropy in this moment?
Daniel: I think what Groundswell did is, we came into a sector that was giving less than 3% to organizing, 0.6% to work led by women of color, that thought multi-issue work was a dilution and that single issue fighting was the way to go, that treated reproductive issues like the political third rail, and we said, “We’re going to be bold, and we’re going to raise money for reproductive justice work led by women of color that’s multi-issue and that’s using grassroots organizing as the primary tool.” And we did that. We raised a hundred million dollars for the work. And I think the lesson in that for me is, it is possible when you don’t just do the easy thing that’s popular but the right thing that’s hard, to win, to make progress, and that people will step forward in that kind of beloved community.
One of the things I’m proudest of is that we had a community that really showed the possibility of folks from wealthy white inheritors locking arms with grassroots organizers on the rez or just deep in our communities—people of color, women of color, and gender nonconforming people of color—to support them in fighting for their freedom and understanding that our freedom is all bound up together. So that was a wonderful experience.
When we think about what philanthropy needs to do, philanthropy suffers from a culture of timidity. It suffers from a culture that puts comfort at the center of everything. And we need to break with that. Instead of accepting that cultural norm, we need to align with the norm of people who have been bold throughout history. And I say this even to white folks in philanthropy: find the ancestors who rode on buses as part of the Freedom Rides, find the ancestors who sheltered people on the Underground Railroad. We need that level of fight. We need to figure out how to be like water in these times. We need to figure out how not to just go and ask the financial advisors who have no political orientation or no moral compass or just the lawyers who are playing it safe. What we should do, I mean, cover your bases, but get folks in your corner who can talk to you, who actually have some core values at the end of the day. There’s this meme going around that says, “The people who sheltered Anne Frank were breaking the law. The people who killed her were following it.”
So at the end of the day, we all have to look ourselves in the mirror and say, what did we do in this moment? Did we just play it safe and be timid and allow ourselves to be harmed, thinking that that was going to keep us safe? Because it’s not. Or did we get bold and strategic and play our lane? And everyone’s not in the same lane. Some people’s work is going to have to be loud, and we’re going to have to be on a megaphone to keep people bold in philanthropy. Other people, their work is going to be more subterranean. But figure out how to be like water and get money to the front lines. And, Lord knows, people in philanthropy know how to get creative when it comes to tax shelters and everything else. So let us get creative in having the back of the people who are really risking something. Because risking a lawsuit is one thing, but think about the level of risk the folks on the front lines—immigrants, trans people—are facing. So I’m just calling on folks in philanthropy to show up with some strength.
Schnall: There’s so much happening right now, it’s hard to even keep track. And people are at risk of being so overwhelmed that they could just tune out or feel like nothing they can do is going to make a difference. What would be your advice or call to action?
Daniel: First of all, understand that that is by design. We need to be cognizant of that and not play into it. So don’t get overwhelmed by a million things; pick the things that you have capacity to work on, that you are in the best position to work on, and do those to the absolute fullest with courage. And I think reading books like Unrig the Game, and there are others out there, that help us to gather our strength. Coming together in community, places we can gather our strength together and be reminded our ancestors made it through worse than this, we will make it through this. There’s an abundance of things available to us to remind us of who we are, of who our ancestors are and of who we want our daughters to have the chance to be in the world that we’re fighting for and trying to create.
To learn more about Vanessa Priya Daniel and her work, visit her website.
Portions of this interview originally appeared at ForbesWomen.
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Marianne Schnall is a widely-published interviewer and journalist and author of What Will It Take to Make a Woman President?, Leading the Way, and Dare to Be You: Inspirational Advice for Girls. She is also the founder of Feminist.com and What Will It Take Movements and the host of the podcast ShiftMakers.
You can find out more about her work and writings at www.marianneschnall.com.