Activists are leaving us every day. A woman well-known, beloved, and sought out in communities of care, struggle, and collective imagining died recently–her name is Celeste Scott.
As the Program Officer/Repair for Opportunity Fund, I offer the term “activist” here in its most expansive definition to include those who daily, in their spheres of influence and energetic presence, act on behalf of people, including themselves, who experience a gross imbalance of resources within systems designed to do harm. One resource, grievously and consistently denied to Black women, is rest.
Onika Reigns, of Black Dream Escape in Pittsburgh, shares this remembrance of Celeste Scott. “In my conversations about rest with Celeste, we talked about how we both often felt sucked dry. Dehydrated from doing organizing work that failed to meet our needs for a particular kind of intimacy. Intimacy that warmed us. Intimacy that propelled us into the future. We both agreed that Black femmes resting together would fulfill that need. Black femmes finding their own sense of rest would nourish us.”
Celeste Scott reached out to Opportunity Fund in 2021 to ask that this organization and other foundations in the area support a group of Black women in getting away and getting some rest. Opportunity Fund engaged in that conversation and spoke with a few others in the foundation community. Everyone knew (and knows), from reading the white paper, Pittsburgh’s Inequality Across Gender and Race, about mental and physical health outcomes of Black people in this city, that the conditions here, particularly for many Black women, were (and are) horrendous. The Respite for Black Women initiative at Opportunity Fund was born.
Please note that rest for Black women is not a concept developed by Opportunity Fund—Black women have been talking about this among ourselves for generations. Today, I am thinking about Respite for Black Women (#r4Blw) rooted in an abolitionist framework of acknowledgment, access and accountability, education, truth-telling, healing and love. Likewise, the initiative acts from a place of repair-ations, envisioning and asking what it looks like when we center people, not systems and organizations? Dustin Gibson, Director of Access, Disability and Language Justice at People’s Hub, has said that he learned from Celeste Scott in the way she and other femmes moved through the world that is not separate from their politics. They strive to be more accessible, always—in all the ways.
Brenda Harris, the Aunt of Celeste Scott, offers this adaptation of a popular wisdom about what nourishes life: “You can teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime, but teach a woman to fish she’ll feed her whole community for a lifetime.”
We failed Celeste and we will continue to fail Black women by celebrating them only in death. Celeste Scott was born on December 7. I wonder, what would it mean if December 7 was dedicated to become a Day of Rest for Black Women in Pittsburgh? Do we dare to imagine?
Black women in North America are exhausted from carrying the weight of too many for far too long–what would it look like to acknowledge this burden? To have a day where Black women turn inward toward their care, wellbeing, and rest? A day that generates awareness about the necessity for rest for Black women? And what would it look like for a city to experience, for the first time ever, the absence of Black women across every industry? I think it would shut the city down. Perhaps then we would recognize how important it is to make sure that Black women have what we need ongoing. This would not be a day to catch up, rather a day to let things fall to the side (or apart!).
On this day, in the name of grace and courage, with love for ourselves and each other, we could come together to share a meal, daydream, nap, rest, sleep. “Our collective rest will not be easy,” says Tricia Hersey. She goes on to say, “All of culture is collaborating for us not to rest.”
One question that comes to mind, how do we incorporate care into Black women’s lives so that we have the capacity to care for the beings right beside us who are doing this work? Perhaps, we could come together – because we are rested enough to do so – and make a commitment to protect the lives of Black women to breathe deeply and live freely long past 46 years old. Death is inevitable, impermanence is the way of life, but to go on allowing death by exhaustion and relentless heartbreak – which is normalized for Black women – would be criminal.
Let’s start where we are. We at Opportunity Fund don’t have the answers. Collectively we have many experiences and knowledge. Even with that, we don’t know all there is to know. The practice of “we don’t know” invites a freedom and sense of ease to our exploration. We are, however, listening to Black women who have long dreamed, explored, experimented, and expanded into this vision of respite and rest for Black women–with our ancestors at our backs, our lineages alongside us, and looking toward future generations, we are prepared to try something. Each effort and everything we try is a practice toward our liberatory future.
The rest is unknown.
For now, the Opportunity Fund acknowledges the loss of Celeste Scott who uplifted the voices of so many trying to survive and who were denied the time to even think about resting.
To learn more about the Respite for Black Women (#r4Blw) initiative, click here and feel free to contact yshipman@theopportunityfund.org.
