Where We Started: Our Story
When people tell you to make lemons into lemonade, the lemons they’re referring to probably aren’t a sickly sour bag of racism, discrimination, and abuse. Yet, that’s where The Melanin Collective came from: the lemons we collected from two years of experiencing workplace harassment together.
We first met and started working together at a reproductive health association—Doris, a seasoned veteran of the nonprofit field, and Kaitlyn, a nonprofit newcomer with predictably hopeful expectations of changing the world. But while the mission to transform reproductive health care and access through training and advocacy that brought us to the organization was right-minded, our day to day experience was anything but.
In the span of two years but what felt like twenty, we were treated to a cacophony of racism, sexism, and ableism. There was the gaslighting and violations of our personal space. There were the objects tossed and the screaming and physical entrapment. There were the hilariously obvious campaigns to sabotage our careers and publicly humiliate us. There were the xenophobic remarks and comments on our English. There were the questions about our sexual lives and paternalistic reminders to be on birth control. There were the unethical things they asked us to do in our jobs, which, if we refused, were met with anger or covert threats about losing our jobs. There was the silence as these things happened to us and others.
Having had enough, we decided to take action. The two of us organized a collective effort to corral past and present BIWOC employees of the organization, as well as an ally, to track, document, and write a joint letter to the board of directors relaying stories of abuse that had been allowed to happen in our time and well before we both were employees. The trends were astonishing. While the women of color from different races and ethnicities came and went, we were all tied together through a singular experience of abuse at the hand of the white male executive director and his enabling white female director of development. We thought this joint letter, combined with our personal letters, would be enough to stir the board of directors into immediate action. But it wasn’t.
Intention is a hard thing to speak on. But after only two members of the board reached out to us, it was easy to wonder if they had known about these behaviors in the 20+ years the executive director had served in his role and just chose to look the other way. Instead of taking us at our word and acknowledging our role in surfacing the abuses, the executive director was allowed to remain until his graceful exit maybe a year later, his excuse being he was going back to graduate school. Then, after 50 years—25 of those under the executive director’s leadership—the organization closed. While we demanded action as a collective, the organization continued to demonstrate its preference of saving face and controlling the narrative rather than seeking justice for the BIWOC who were harmed. It's not okay, but we're used to not receiving the accolades for the fruits of our labor.
This experience gave us clarity into the reality of the workplace for BIWOC: white supremacy works hard and the people who enable white supremacy culture work even harder. Rarely is abuse and racism and sexism a product of a bad apple; bad behavior is entrenched within our workplaces and those who benefit have it in their best interest to maintain systems of oppression.
These were our lemons: the stinging knowledge that our stories were not unique and —for as long as white supremacy culture still ruled the workplace—BIWOC, from all backgrounds and ages and locations, would continue to face discrimination and oppression, often without justice. Armed with the time and the self-funded resources (because no one would fund this work at the time or now, if we're being honest) to do something about it, we launched The Melanin Collective with a mission to revolutionize the lived experiences of women and gender non-conforming people of color through holistic community, facilitated institutional healing, and authentic partnerships.
Our vision from the get-go was to weed out, through small-group workshops and organizational trainings, the institutional conditions that set BIWOC up to fail in the workplace. We had witnessed how far white supremacy culture would go to protect itself and our approach was to unapologetically center the experiences of BIWOC in our—at the time—radically honest conversations. After our own trauma was swept under the rug, our organizational trainings would demand accountability and awareness of one’s own defensiveness in hard discussions.
From our beginnings to the present, the power of collectivity is what drives us forward. We confronted the racism we experienced in that workplace as womxn of color, standing together, not apart. We gathered BIWOC together for community healing, rooted in our shared experiences, not differences. We navigate the diversity, equity, and inclusion space armed with the knowledge and insights and voices of BIWOC from our collective, not as tokens.
And today, in the midst of all the trauma and the pain, we enjoy sisterhood lemonade.
