What Your Comfort Costs Us

How Women of Color Reimagine Leadership to Transform Workplace Culture

De: M. Gabriela Alcalde MPH DrPH

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 listening 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.

©2025 M. Gabriela Alcalde (P)2025 North Atlantic Books

Reseñas de la Crítica

"This book provides necessary assistance with clarity and compassion."
—Booklist starred review

“Gabriela opened her heart to deliver a deeply personal and reflective journey through the experiences and challenges of women of color in leadership. This book can be particularly instructive to cis-men leaders wanting to foster empathy, deep inclusion, and mutuality in their organizations. By learning about Gabriela and other women leaders’ experiences, men can help dismantle harmful structures that perpetuate inequality and restrict true freedom for all.

Once you see the injustices women of color are experiencing, you can’t unsee them.” —Efraín Gutiérrez, co-founder, Freedom Dreams in Philanthropy

“What Your Comfort Costs Us is part of an emerging and damning narrative about the experiences of women of color in leadership. Though race/ethnicity and gender are key shapers of how much power society thinks women of color should be able to wield, this is a woefully understudied area in leadership.

The last few years saw an opening into leadership as organizations struggling with inequality tapped women of color to lead during extremely tumultuous times, with little support and heightened expectations. Now, a few years later, these leaders have horror stories to tell about their experiences, and they are breaking the rules in telling them. They also tell us what they need to be supported.” —Cyndi Suarez, author of The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics, former president and editor-in-chief of Nonprofit Quarterly

“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?

Dr. Alcalde invites us to take a hard look at the workplaces we have inherited and experiment our way into a future where work looks nothing like it does today.” —Yanique Redwood, PhD, author of White Women Cry and Call Me Angry