It’s hard enough to maintain our wellness and sanity as we balance our day-to-day lives, but with Donald Trump back in the White House, it feels like there’s yet another stressor that Black women must manage.
After Trump won his bid for re-election in November, many Black women across the country—who largely voted to prevent him from serving another term— pronounced they would be stepping back from protests and politics.
Calls for self-care have been warranted, whether that’s making more time for meditation and mindfulness or just turning off the news. But before we retreat into individual silos to escape the madness Trump is rapidly inflicting, it’s important to remember how Black women have historically responded to hostile terrain, which is often through “community care.”
ESSENCE spoke with licensed master social worker and professor Anna Ortega-Williams, PhD, LMSW, about how Black women can navigate the months and years ahead as Trump has directly attacked civil rights and social safety net programs.
Here are some ways we can move beyond a self-care framework to one that addresses “community care” to support each other collectively.
Remember Your History
As Ortega-Williams shares, these circumstances aren’t new for Black people. “If we really think about it, when hasn’t there been hostile terrain?”
In fighting those conditions, Black people never did so with just individual “self-care” actions. In the Black diaspora, Ortega-Williams notes, “We have always had a sense of ‘I am because we are.’ We take that term from Ubuntu, so there’s no me without you. A part of our lineage and our roots is to understand that we’re part of a collective. Individualism has never saved us.”
“We understand what it means to be attacked based on a mass, group level identity [and] we carry that in our blood,” Ortega-Williams adds. “It looks like sickle cell. It looks like disproportionate rates of heart disease. We understand what it does to our bodies when there’s systemic violence. The individual notion of care is never enough. We can have personal goals as well as collective goals. Our wellness is multifold. The personal exists within the collective, and the collective exists within the personal.”
Know You’re Not Alone
Trump’s actions within just the first two weeks of his administration—from ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government to freezing federal aid (before promptly unfreezing it) that reportedly made healthcare portals and other social services inaccessible—directly affect the livelihoods and health of Black workers.
The president’s attack on DEI also had an immediate impact on the private sector, where corporations that once made commitments to diversify announced an end to those programs promptly after he was sworn in. For Black workers who are being laid off under his guidance, Ortega-Williams acknowledges that “it can feel very painful and very isolating.”
Black professionals who may have done all the “right” things to climb the corporate ladder but now find their jobs on the chopping block may feel disoriented and question their own abilities. But, Ortega-Williams notes, “Once we recognize that our individual harms and pain are interlocking…we also get to see that our healing is interlocking. Our actions can be interlocking.”
So, after recognizing that individual self-care isn’t enough to outlast the next four years and beyond, how do you find community?
Ortega-Williams encourages people to think about where they find kinship. “Follow your strengths and your talents. Everybody’s talents and strengths are needed. For example, Girl Trek is an organization where Black women have declared that they want to help Black women’s lifespan increase by 10 years in 10 years. That’s amazing.”
“Just start to tell someone, ‘Hey, I want to get involved.’ [Ask yourself] ‘How do I use what I have towards our collective good? When you ask that question of someone, and the more you ask someone, that’s how you get plugged into a network,” she adds. “Ask the question, and the setting will emerge. It will become clear because then you have someone else listening out for you in the world. Your intention is amplified. Start where you are. There’s always a way to plug in.”
Beyond Trump, we have inherited a country that has harmed Black people collectively. While capitalism encourages us to be in silos, it also hinges on the myth that “All it takes is someone to work hard, and then you’ll make it, and it doesn’t take into account the wealth gap and the roots of those gaps coming from exploited free labor for generations. Trying to [thrive] on our own is a recipe for burnout,” Ortega-Willams asserts.
Challenging those norms can start small. “How do I check in on somebody? Maybe we need to have a rotating pot of food each week where somebody’s cooking, somebody’s sharing. Reject those myths and instead adopt what we have seen growing up,” she says, referring to kinship networks beyond the nuclear family. “It wasn’t called an extended family. It’s just family. We have those roots, and it’s a process of remembering.”
There is an understandable urge to feel despair and helplessness in these times. But, as Ortega-Williams states, “Our ancestors are rooting for us.”