Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning

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. Agent: Tanya McKinnon, McKinnon Literary. (Mar.)