What Your Comfort Costs Us

How Women of Color Reimagine Leadership to Transform Workplace Culture

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Pub Date 11 Mar 2025 | Archive Date 11 Mar 2025

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Description

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.
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...

A Note From the Publisher

For more information or for a physical copy, please email publicity@northatlanticbooks.com.

For more information or for a physical copy, please email publicity@northatlanticbooks.com.


Advance Praise

“What Your Comfort Costs Us is part personal story, part collective witnessing, and a challenge to workplaces—particularly those in the third sector—to step up. Dr. Alcalde adds an important critique to the growing literature on white supremacy in the workplace. Yet this book is for all of us who work, regardless of our racial background or gender expression, regardless of whether we have harmed others or been harmed. Most compelling is Dr. Alcalde’s interrogation of workplace infrastructure itself and the invitation to dream up new models for getting things done. Can we imagine self-managed workplaces without hierarchy? Can we imagine workplaces rooted in Indigenous wisdom alive in social philosophies like buen vivir?"

—YANIQUE REDWOOD, PhD, author of White Women Cry and Call Me Angry


“Not only does this book challenge us to critically examine traditional organizational structures and workplace culture, but it invites us to reimagine them, and to entertain new concepts of power and leadership that are not tied to capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.”

—ESTRELLA DAWSON, personal and executive coach, emotional intelligence trainer

“What Your Comfort Costs Us is part personal story, part collective witnessing, and a challenge to workplaces—particularly those in the third sector—to step up. Dr. Alcalde adds an important critique...


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Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9798889842132
PRICE US$20.95 (USD)
PAGES 240

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