Stop & Rest: Black Women,Refusal,and Rest as Praxis in Social Work

Abstract

This article explores the necessity of intentional rest for Black women and Black women social workers in the United States. It examines rest as a Black feminist and Womanist praxis of refusal, resistance, and restoration, highlighting how stopping overwork, divesting from performative equity systems, and prioritizing self-preservation protect our mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. The discussion situates rest within the historical and contemporary context of gendered anti-Black racism, the structural exploitation embedded in the professionalization of social work, and ongoing assaults on civil rights, bodily autonomy, and economic security. The article emphasizes the embodied, creative, communal, and spiritual dimensions of rest, framing it as essential for Black women's survival, health, and collective liberation.

The results of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election became the proverbial “last straw” for many Black women, women who, generations of Black feminist and Womanist scholars remind us, have long been the vanguard of democracy, justice, and equality in this country. Our collective exhaustion was well documented in the weeks that followed, as journalists and organizers noted how Black women once again shouldered the moral and civic labor of saving a nation that rarely safeguards us (Cox, 2025; Hackney, 2024; Mogg, 2024). This was not a moment of resignation but of reckoning, an acute awareness of the unrelenting demands to protect institutions that continue to exploit our faith, bodies, and labor. Now in this moment of collective exhale, amid the rollback of civil rights, assaults on bodily autonomy, and the steady erosion of hard-won freedoms, many of us are choosing ourselves by actively resting. This refusal to be consumed is not indulgence, it is life-giving.

My initial impulse in writing this article was to follow a familiar scholarly convention: begin by “stating the problem.” The problem is gendered anti-Black racism, a structural and enduring form of oppression that I have both researched and personally endured as a mixed Black social worker. It is what allows the profession to depend on Black women's labor, our care, teaching, and mentorship, while denying us rest, recognition, or protection. Misogynoir, as Moya Bailey (2021) describes, helps sustain this system by circulating familiar images of Black women that make exploitation seem ordinary. Whether the mammy in service, the Sapphire or “angry Black woman” deemed unprofessional, the “welfare queen” cast as undeserving, or the “strong Black woman” celebrated for her endurance, these portrayals justify structured gendered anti-Blackness within the profession. They rationalize why Black women's labor is endlessly extracted and rarely replenished, why our exhaustion is unseen, and why our rest is so often read as insubordination. The cumulative weight of gendered anti-Black racism erodes Black women's health, shortening our lives, compromising our quality of care, and leaving our bodies disproportionately vulnerable to both physical and mental health crises.

The Long History of Extraction

The deprivation of Black rest is not new. From the forced sleeplessness of the Middle Passage to the ceaseless labor demanded of enslaved women on plantations, rest was systematically denied as a form of control. Even after emancipation, racial capitalism continued to devalue the rest and wellbeing of Black laborers, particularly women whose domestic and caregiving work remained essential yet unacknowledged (Sweeney, 2020). The struggle for fair pay and humane conditions has always been inseparable from the struggle for rest, a right still contested in our professional and personal lives.

This long history of extraction reverberates in the present through how our experiences are recorded and interpreted within social work scholarship. There remains scant literature naming gendered anti-Black racism or examining the health and wellbeing of Black women in our professional knowledge base (Jackson et al., 2022). What does exist tends to center trauma, foregrounding narratives of dispossession, dehumanization, and exclusion. While such accounts can foster solidarity through affirmation, they also impose a psychological toll, as engaging with them often reactivates personal trauma alongside vicarious or secondary trauma (Shell et al., 2021).

This dynamic is compounded by the relentless circulation of news, the destruction of progressive policies, and media discourses depicting the erosion of civil rights and human dignity for Black and Brown communities, domestically and abroad. The gravitational pull toward centering pain narratives (Mackey, 2025) and their inevitable pairing with discourses of “resilience” reflects a long-standing expectation that Black women's scholarship must serve as both witness and salve for intergenerational racial trauma. Yet the onus to repair the harm of gendered anti-Black racism has never been ours to bear, and the refusal to shoulder this burden could just save our lives.

Rest as Black Feminist and Womanist Praxis

Accordingly, I begin not with a reiteration of harm but with an exploration of rest as a praxis of refusal, resistance, and restoration. Drawing from personal experience and limited scholarship on Black women and rest, I examine its antecedents, forms, and potential health-promoting effects, particularly for Black women in social work whose labor is disproportionately extracted within predominantly white professional contexts (Cooke & Hastings, 2024). This discussion invites Black women social workers into an ongoing conversation about our need for rest—an affirmation that we each hold permission to rest, however it may look, as we embody the very praxis described here.

Beyond the ubiquitous calls for social workers to engage in wellbeing, self-care, and mindfulness, often articulated through a white, middle-class women's gaze (Zuckerwise, 2024), there remains a striking absence of research that examines how Black women rest. More specifically, the embodied act of resting, what it entails, and its potential to repair and sustain our health. Drawing on the intellectual and political traditions of Black feminist and Womanist thought, I am guided by foremothers who unapologetically claimed rest as a necessity for survival.

Black feminism provides a framework for understanding how race, gender, and class intersect to shape Black women's lives and labor. Rooted in the political and intellectual traditions of the Combahee River Collective (1977) and the scholarship of Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and bell hooks (1984) (to name a few), Black feminism insists that personal experience is a site of theory building and resistance. It centers the everyday survival strategies of Black women as knowledge, treating care, creativity, and community as forms of political work. Within this lineage, rest is not an escape from struggle but a necessary condition for it, an act that allows us to sustain ourselves while confronting systems that depend on our depletion.

Alice Walker coined the term “Womanism” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) to describe a praxis extending beyond feminism's boundaries to include the spiritual, communal, and intergenerational dimensions of Black women's lives. Womanism calls for wholeness, healing, and balance within and across communities. Where Black feminism sharpens the critique of intersecting oppressions, Womanism deepens our understanding of care as sacred practice. Together they form the intellectual and ethical ground of this piece, informing my reflection on rest as both a Black feminist and Womanist praxis that affirms our right to exist fully, to refuse exploitation, and to claim our time and bodies as our own.

This includes the prophetic Audre Lorde, who while confronting breast cancer insisted, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” (1988), and contemporary theologian Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, who frames rest as a deliberate refusal of white supremacy and capitalism (2022). This article precipitates a necessary conversation among Black women social workers about rest as praxis—why it is imperative in 2025 and beyond and how it might be theorized, practiced, and prioritized.

Refusal as Self-Preservation

During the syndemic, amid the peak and portended decline of the Black Lives Matter movement, I, like many other Black women faculty navigating the isolating terrain of predominantly white institutions, witnessed my own school's performative approach to anti-racism. In practice, this meant symbolic gestures, carefully worded statements, and cosmetic diversity initiatives designed to protect the institution's reputation rather than dismantle structural inequities. Doing anti-racism means redistributing resources, revising curricula, addressing hiring inequities, and holding those in power accountable—actions that were never on the table. This latest instance of institutional betrayal, wherein institutions publicly position themselves as agents of equity while privately maintaining systems that harm the very communities they claim to serve (Benedict et al., 2024), was the last in a series of disappointments throughout my tenure. My school continues to prioritize appeasing a vocal minority of white students, frequently in anticipation of potential objections, even as the heightened safety needs of our majority-minority student body in this moment remain unaddressed. This pattern is reinforced by the college and university structures in which the school is embedded, reflecting a broader institutional retreat from DEI efforts in response to mounting sociopolitical pressures (McGowan et al., 2025). In alignment with a Black feminist ethic of self-preservation (Lorde, 1988), it was at this time that I divested my labor, time, and energy from a space built to tokenize and diminish me and instead sought rest.

What does rest with intention look like for me? To answer simply, I stopped, and in stopping I, as bell hooks notes, “exercised control over my own actions” (p. 67). I stopped leading DEI-lite initiatives and committees that offered symbolism without substance. I stopped teaching “DEI tourism” courses that nurtured essentialist thinking to make white students feel progressive without challenging their assumptions. I stopped researching and writing for the white gaze, aligning instead with Black feminist/Womanist traditions that privilege the epistemologies, knowledge, and brilliance of Black women and our communities. Perhaps most soul rescuing, I stopped making others comfortable with my presence, stopped speaking up in spaces where my words were weaponized, and most importantly, stopped giving of myself to people invested in my failure.

The choice to stop matters because, for many of us, especially parents and caregivers, accessing self-care is a luxury reserved for a privileged few. In the field as a case worker, I barely had time for a bathroom break between home visits, let alone a meal. Stopping is a deliberate act of refusal, a conscious disassociation from the systems and people that exploit our labor, deplete our energy, and compromise our wellbeing. As Scheyett (2022) observes, even within social work there is growing recognition that exposing and disrupting exploitative overwork is a matter of social justice. Yet for Black women, this refusal is not a new trend but a longstanding strategy of survival, a practice grounded in self-preservation and resistance forged through generations of caregiving and struggle. Grounded in Black feminist/Womanist praxis, stopping is more than pause. It is an active choice to disengage for self-preservation. Stopping is an “off switch” for survival that is within grasp.

Stopping means saying no to voluntold unpaid service, to clandestine invitations that check a box, to cases and committees that exceed our capacity, and to performative events that demand good vibes and silence in the face of harm. Most importantly, stopping means refusing to play respectability politics by conforming to white, middle-class norms of behavior, appearance, and professionalism, which erode our mental, physical, and spiritual health (Lee & Hicken, 2016). To stop can simply mean doing less or just enough to protect our time, energy, and peace, asserting control over our lives in a world designed to deny us that right.

Embodied Rest and Reclamation

What is gained from stopping? Time, energy, clarity, and most importantly, agency over how we decide to use them. While some might label stopping avoidance or withdrawal, this deficit framing conciliates to gendered anti-Black assumptions of tokenism that it is our job to conform to white supremacy and perform unpaid anti-racist labor. Tricia Hersey (2022) calls rest a resistance practice that disrupts white supremacy and capitalism's exploitation of Black bodies. In that lineage, stopping is not withdrawal, it is strategic refusal. It is a coping skill grounded in self-preservation and freedom work, one that has preserved my mental health, protected my physical wellbeing, and created space for rest as a daily act, not a rare reward.

My reclaimed time has opened space for relationships that nourish my spirit and affirm my work. Foremost among these gains has been the purposeful cultivation of community and intellectual fellowship with other Black women. Recent studies deepen this claim: “sistah circle” spaces and Black-women-centered networks build belonging, reduce stress, and buffer the harms of gendered anti-Black racism in predominantly white environments (Jones et al., 2023). As Gamble-Lomax (2024) affirms, the sisterhood of other Black women offers a vital space for honesty, recognition, and restoration in professional settings that rarely see or understand us. The rich cultural traditions cultivated by Black feminist and Womanist scholars position community with other Black women as essential to our survival, framing self-care as an embodied, collective practice (Ward, 2021). Being in community and having access to mentorship with other Black women is a known protective factor against the negative effects of gendered anti-Black racism within predominantly white environments (Grier-Reed et al., 2021; Quezada-Horne et al., 2025).

Resting has also reawakened my creativity, allowing time to re-immerse myself in art and other generative practices that bring purpose, joy, and a sense of accomplishment needed in these devastating times. When I put paint to canvas, it becomes a therapeutic act of release and renewal, allowing me to transform pain, memory, and trauma into color and form that affirm my healing, my ancestry, and my possibility. Creative art expression is a vital health-promoting practice for Black women, functioning not only as a tool for stress reduction and emotional regulation but also as an embodied act of political resistance rooted in Black feminist and Womanist traditions (Drake-Burnette et al., 2016). Powell (2022) underscores how Black women's artistic production has historically been intertwined with Black politics, serving as a medium through which cultural survival, collective memory, and liberation are enacted. Community-embedded art can nurture collective grief, imaginative truth-telling, and emancipatory care (Jackson, 2025).

While some scholars have advanced the idea of “slow scholarship” as a form of resistance to the neoliberal demands of the academy (Shahjahan, 2015; Wahab et al., 2022), my call is not for slowness but for sovereignty. For Black women, rest and creativity are not oppositional to productivity but integral to our survival and self-definition. Writing often becomes both a site of restoration and resistance, a space where we name ourselves and the worlds we build. Our challenge is not to slow down for its own sake but to write, rest, and create on our own terms, in defiance of systems that would rather consume our labor based on their terms than honor our brilliance.

Engaging rest intentionally has permitted me lucidity to attune to my body during perimenopause, a critical stage that brings unique physical and emotional challenges especially for Black women (Myers, 2025). As noted by Bailey (2021), Black women's bodies have been central to medical and scientific progress, yet our own health and wellbeing remain neglected. This reality reflects how misogynoir continues to shape systems that depend on our bodies while disregarding our care. Rest, in this sense, becomes an embodied act of reclamation, a way to restore what has long been extracted and to insist that our bodies are worthy of tending, protection, and peace. I have come to honor my body as a sacred vessel, carrying the traumas and hopes of my ancestors, and deservedly the center of my self-care.

This means prioritizing my health as a spiritual necessity by attending numerous doctors’ appointments, exercising, researching the latest treatment options, and engaging in open dialogue with other Black women about this transitory time. More broadly, spirituality serves as a central component of survival and wellbeing for Black women social workers, encompassing beliefs, practices, and worldviews that provide meaning, purpose, and connection to something larger than oneself (Bacchus & Holley, 2004). Beyond organized religion, spirituality often includes reflection, prayer, meditation, ritual, and engagement with cultural traditions that affirm identity and collective resistance (Spates et al., 2020). Building on this foundation, empirical research highlights spirituality as a crucial protective factor for Black women and girls, supporting psychological wellbeing and buffering against racialized and gendered stressors (Zinobia & Taylor, 2022).

Conclusion

Today, as we confront attacks on our civil rights, bodily autonomy, and economic security, Black women must unapologetically rest. This need is especially urgent for Black women social workers, whose labor disproportionately sustains the profession due to our overrepresentation in its ranks, yet who continue to be overlooked, underprotected, and structurally neglected by the very field we uphold. As Hall and Bell (2022) state, “the violent and toxic conditions shaping our daily lives require Black women to unapologetically prioritize our wellness and healing so that we can embrace a more effective pedagogical practice” (p.10). By intentionally stopping and refusing to overperform for systems designed to exploit us, we reclaim our time, energy, and professional agency. Rest as Black feminist and Womanist praxis is not a retreat from the struggle but a radical reclaiming of our bodies, spirits, and futures. In resting we are actively creating a life where our time is ours and where our energy is directed toward what sustains us.