Earlier this month, I attended a conference called Let’s Talk About Sex. I expected to spend three days talking about reproductive justice, sexual health, organizing, and the political threats facing Black communities.
I did not expect to cry.
But by the end of the conference, during an interfaith service filled with song and dance, I found myself bawling.
I had spent three days witnessing a contradiction that felt almost impossible to hold: immense pain alongside immense joy and exhaustion alongside extraordinary leadership. A community that has been repeatedly failed by America and yet continues to build, create, organize, care for one another, and fight.
And I came away thinking ONCE AGAIN that the reproductive rights movement would be a lot better off if we let Black women lead.
I came to listen
For three days, I mostly listened. I was in a space centered on Black women and their experiences in the reproductive justice movement. I listened to women who are leading some of the most innovative work in reproductive justice. Women who are developing strategies, building organizations, caring for communities, and imagining new ways forward in the face of political hostility and institutional failure.
And frankly, I found myself wondering why the broader reproductive rights movement is not doing more to cede power to them. Black women have been doing this work for a long time. And they have been doing it while navigating racism, sexism, and institutions that routinely ask for their labor without offering them the same resources, protection, or power. They have been doing it while carrying burdens that many of the people working alongside them will never fully understand.
And they are still fighting.
You may have noticed I talk about both the reproductive rights movement and the reproductive justice movement. These are related but distinct movements. Reproductive rights focuses on the legal right to make decisions about our reproductive lives, while reproductive justice takes a broader view, asking whether people actually have the freedom, resources, and support to make those choices.
The exhausting calculations Black women are asked to make
One of the conversations I kept thinking about afterward was about the calculations Black women are forced to make in everyday interactions. A woman described listening to a male colleague talk about his gym routine. Based on her own experience, she offered a recommendation. He responded by asking whether she had ever tried to lose weight. When she said no, he replied abruptly, “Then how would you know?”
What stayed with me here was what she said about having to process it afterward. She wasn’t simply deciding whether he had been rude. She was also considering: Was this sexism? Racism? Both? What would happen if she called him out?
I remember thinking about how rarely I have had to do that same calculation. I can experience someone’s comment as rude or dismissive without also having to consider whether their treatment of me is shaped by my race. That uncertainty is a burden in itself for Black women.
The conference also made me think about how often Black women are praised for their resilience without enough attention to what has required that resilience in the first place. We call Black women resilient as a compliment but resilience can also become an expectation. We admire their ability to withstand what should never have been imposed on them and we celebrate their capacity to keep going while failing to ask why they are so often required to.
Black women should not have to be this resilient. And yet, despite the weight of what so many women described, there was also extraordinary joy in the room.
Joy is not the absence of pain
The conference ended with an interfaith service where there was music, dance and celebration.
After spending three days hearing about political threats, racism, institutional failures, and the emotional labor of surviving in America as a Black woman, the room closed in collective joy.
I do not mean that joy erased the pain. It was actually almost the opposite. The joy existed alongside it.
So often, people who are not part of a community encounter its pain and assume that pain is the whole story. But the conference reminded me that community can be both a response to suffering and something much larger than it.
The conference also had laughter and creativity and faith and music (Chloe Bailey performed!) and friendship and care. There was community.
Trust cannot be demanded
Speaking of community, one thing I was reminded of throughout the conference is that shared gender does not erase the history of racism.
White people, including white women, have a long history of exploiting, excluding, and causing harm to Black communities. That history does not disappear because an individual white woman considers herself progressive, feminist, or committed to reproductive justice. It follows us everywhere.
The work of white women allies like myself is not convincing people that you are “one of the good ones.” The actual work is understanding that trust is earned through action, and taking that action, often over time by examining the ways you might participate in harmful systems even when you have good intentions. And it means accepting that you may not be entitled to access or friendship with someone simply because you believe in the same cause. Not every space has to center you and not every person has to make you feel comfortable.
Community is how people survive
I kept returning to the idea that community is not incidental to the Black experience in America, rather community has been essential to survival.
When institutions fail people, people build systems to care for one another and when governments abandon communities, communities organize. Alternatively, when people are excluded from existing structures of power, they build their own.
That is not unique to Black communities, of course. But there is something the reproductive rights movement should learn from the ways Black women have built networks of care, trust, knowledge, and collective power despite generations of exclusion. Black women are already leading. The question is whether the rest of us are willing to follow.
What I am taking with me
I left Let’s Talk About Sex thinking about the difference between inclusion and power.
Our rights movement is including Black women without allowing them to lead it. What do I mean? I mean that an organization can hire Black women without giving them authority. A conference can invite Black women to speak while the real decisions are still being made somewhere else. Representation is not the same thing as power.
If we genuinely believe in reproductive justice, then we have to be willing to ask who has power, who is making decisions, whose expertise is treated as expertise, and who is being asked to carry the emotional and practical labor of a movement without receiving the same authority or resources in return.
For those of us who are white, being an ally cannot be about gaining access to Black spaces or receiving validation for having the right politics. It also cannot be about proving that we are different from other white people.
It has to be about what we are willing to do with the power and privilege we have which includes listening and also giving up space. And sometimes, it has to include recognizing that we are not the people best positioned to lead.
That does not mean disengaging, but it does mean understanding the difference between participating in a movement and needing to be at its center.
I spent three days witnessing women carry burdens they should never have been asked to carry. I watched them turn pain into strategy, isolation into community, and exhaustion into collective care. And I watched them make room for joy anyway. Maybe that is ultimately why I cried.
The reproductive justice movement has understood something that the rest of us should take more seriously: Justice is not only about what we are fighting against. It is also about what we are building together.
Have you had a moment like this bring you to tears?
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Agreed. We have made the unfamiliar familiar. Our joy being coupled with resilience is only a marker for our greatness. Yet, in the act, it feels overwhelming. Reading your writing about it however, makes the experience seem beautiful. Although it is not an experience others would want to have.