A Playbook for All

Vanessa Priya Daniel ’00 is clear: Her new book,Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning, isn’t just for women of color. Using a sports metaphor, she explains, “No team worth its salt puts its MVPs on the bench for no good reason because doing that negatively affects the scoreboard for everybody.”

In the same way, she argues, social movements and organizations need to ensure leadership roles are less fraught for women of color. The book speaks to multiple audiences: It celebrates the brilliance of women of color change makers, offers practical strategies for thriving despite systemic barriers, and encourages others to “step up and make leadership a less treacherous place.”

Daniel also emphasizes the book’s broader relevance. “The strategies that women of color are using to surmount these [challenges] are really helpful additions to any leader’s toolbox,” she says. In this excerpt, Daniel shares why she wrote the book, who it’s for, and how it has the potential to “unrig the game” for everyone.

—April Simpson ’06

[The following is an excerpt from the book Unrig the Game: Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning by Vanessa Priya Daniel, to be published on March 4, 2025, by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC.]

When I was a young leader in my midtwenties, I wished for a book that would remind me that I was not alone, that others faced the same challenges I was confronting, and that they had found a way through—­and that I would too. I longed for a resource that shared the wisdom of WOC [women of color] in movement, of how they thrived as leaders—­making meaningful contributions to a better world—­amid so many obstacles. I want this to be that book. I think of it as my gift to my movement sisters, who I love dearly, and I offer it with the heartfelt hope that it will help our superpowers shine.

There is one comfort I hope every woman of color leader who reads this book will take away: You are not alone. For us, this book does three things: It affirms our brilliance, names the obstacles in our way, and collectivizes our wisdom on how to navigate them. It is a balm for the painful challenges we often encounter as we dare to lead. It is a reminder that there is a wellspring of knowledge and wisdom among us for how to lead in ways that transform the world while honoring our own well-­being and the well-­being of others. It is also a reminder that the responsibility for changing the systemic oppression we face does not rest with us alone.

One day, I was at my daughter Kwali’s swim meet when I spotted a middle-­aged woman in the crowd, likely a fellow mother, sitting in a folding chair apart from most of the parents. She had fallen asleep with her mouth open. She was clearly exhausted. Resting on her chest was a book titled What to Do When He Won’t Change. It struck me as a perfect metaphor for what often happens in movement. The fact that those who participate in and benefit from systems that exhaust WOC leaders to their core are allowed to not change—­while we study up on how to work around them and somehow survive—­is bullshit. The notion that WOC leaders can escape our predicament by just trying harder at leadership is magical thinking. It makes about as much sense as telling Black folks during Jim Crow to try harder to vote when literacy tests and poll taxes were making that impossible.

WOC leaders can lift our voices to speak out about what needs changing, but those who work with us must also take collective responsibility to change norms and unrig the game.

For WOC who are not in leadership positions, and for non-WOC and white folks, this book presents two opportunities. First, to strengthen your own praxis by learning from the creative innovations WOC leaders are bringing to social change strategy and organizational leadership. Not all, but many of the challenges WOC leaders face are supersized versions of those being felt by leaders of all races and genders in these times. The strategies WOC use to surmount these are helpful additions to any leader’s toolbox. Second, this book is an opportunity to more deeply understand the experience of WOC leaders so that you can, in the interest of all of us, step up to help make leadership a less treacherous place. As the great Maya Angelou reminds us, “When you know better, you do better.” The responsibility lies largely with you.

My most fervent intent is that this book opens a conversation in the public square that radically shifts how people view and treat WOC leaders. May the leaders of today—­and those in my daughters’ generation—­have a clearer, less obstructed runway from which to take flight with their best strategies and ideas. My vision is that we meet these end-­of-­times challenges with the radical imagination and confidence that is so needed to save our democracy and the planet. If either of my daughters decides to lead, shoulder to shoulder with grassroots communities, toward a better world, I want to be able to tell them honestly that enough people will see them, protect them, and unrig the game of the barriers that attempt to block their light. I want them, with their remarkable empathy and confidence, to have the best possible shot at taking us to the never-­before-­seen-­places, the metaphorical Saturns: the new ways of being that humanity must reach to evolve and thrive.

Copyright © 2025 by Vanessa Priya Daniel.