What Your Comfort Costs Us: How Women of Color Reimagine Leadership to Transform Workplace Culture

Leading for survival, leading for liberation--how to uplift women of color, transform cultures of complicity, and upend white supremacy culture at work

Workplace leaders: white comfort comes at the safety of women of color--and it costs lives and livelihoods. Microaggressions, structural barriers, unpaid emotional labor: WOC in leadership disproportionately bear the burdens of white supremacist work cultures, even as they're expected to take charge of reforms. But building better workplaces--less toxic, racist, and misogynistic workplaces--is everyone's responsibility and for everyone's benefit. And letting it fall solely to women of color is causing real harm. The stakes are high, and it's past time for change.

What Your Comfort Costs Us offers essential reading and transparent advice for leaders who are ready to address structural inequity at work. With chapters like "Talking About Racism is Hard," "Checking the Boxes," and "Uncovering the Added Burden and Toll of Unpaid and Unseen Emotional Labor," anti-supremacist philanthropic and nonprofit leader and author M. Gabriela Alcalde challenges us to rethink how we engage power--and take radical action toward reorienting it toward collective liberation.

You'll learn:

• Research-backed analysis and practical solutions to transform workplace culture
  
• How systemic racism and structural violence shows up at work (in ways you may not expect)
  
• What happens when workplaces shift to prioritizing WOC's material safety over white comfort
  
• Real stories and insights from 10 women of color in leadership
  
• How white allies and accomplices can show up and step up authentically
  

Interwoven with Alcalde's own experiences, professional expertise, and proven recommendations on how to do better, this book is a necessary guide to nurturing empathy, challenging complacency, and activating meaningful allyship. Alcalde awakens your potential to transform workplace cultures beyond business-as-usual bandaids, offering critical wisdom for systemic change and authentic collective empowerment at work.

Author: M. Gabriela Alcalde
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 03/11/2025
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9798889842132


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 03/01/2025 pg. 26

About the Author
M. Gabriela Alcalde is a public health leader with nearly 3 decades of experience and commitment to equity and social justice. She has worked in the philanthropic, academic, government, nonprofit, and grassroots sectors throughout her career and served in various volunteer capacities. Since 2019, Alcalde has led the Sewall Foundation, a private, independent foundation, as executive director through radical culture change and the integration of environmental, human, and animal wellbeing as the foundation works to center equity and community voices in all their work and strategies. Alcalde regularly speaks and writes locally, nationally, and internationally about shifting the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors, racial equity and justice, and the experience of women of color in leadership. A native of Lima, Peru, she currently lives in Maine with her partner, children, and dog.