The self-care industrial complex has a lot to answer for. Somewhere between the face masks and the "treat yourself" culture, the concept of self-care was stripped of its radical origins and repackaged as a consumer product. Buy this candle. Book this spa day. Download this meditation app. You will feel better.
For communities of color, this version of self-care has always felt a little off. Not because rest and pleasure are not important — they are — but because the marketed version rarely addresses the specific, structural exhaustion that BIPOC people carry. You cannot bubble-bath your way out of racial trauma.
The Origins of Self-Care as Resistance
The phrase "self-care" was not invented by wellness brands. It was popularized by Audre Lorde, the Black feminist poet and activist, who wrote in 1988: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."
Lorde was writing in the context of her own battle with cancer, and in the broader context of being a Black, queer woman in a society that was actively hostile to her existence. Self-care, for her, was not about luxury. It was about survival. It was about refusing to be consumed by systems designed to exhaust and diminish you.
That framing changes everything.
What Exhausts BIPOC Communities Specifically
Before we can talk about rest, we have to name what we are resting from. For people of color, exhaustion often comes from sources that standard wellness advice does not address:
- Code-switching — the cognitive and emotional labor of adjusting your language, behavior, and presentation to navigate predominantly white spaces
- Hypervigilance — the constant low-level alertness that comes from navigating a world where your safety is not guaranteed
- Emotional labor — being expected to educate, explain, or comfort others about your own oppression
- Survivor guilt — the weight of having "made it" when others in your community have not
- Intergenerational pressure — carrying the hopes, sacrifices, and sometimes the unprocessed trauma of those who came before you
A bubble bath does not address any of these. Real rest does.
What Real Rest Looks Like
Rest researcher Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, identifies seven types of rest: physical, mental, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and spiritual. For BIPOC communities, I would add an eighth: identity rest — time spent in spaces where you do not have to explain, defend, or perform your identity.
Real rest might look like:
- Spending time with people who share your cultural background, where you can relax the vigilance of being "the only one"
- Setting a boundary with a family member or colleague who consistently drains your energy
- Saying no to an obligation that serves everyone except you
- Consuming media that reflects and affirms your experience, rather than media that requires you to translate yourself
- Sleeping — actually sleeping, without guilt — because your body needs it and you deserve it
- Therapy — because processing the weight you carry is one of the most restorative things you can do
The Permission Problem
For many people of color, the hardest part of self-care is not knowing what to do. It is giving yourself permission to do it. In communities where survival has required constant productivity, where rest has been associated with laziness or privilege, where "strong" has been the only acceptable identity — stopping feels dangerous.
It is not. Rest is not a reward for productivity. It is a prerequisite for it. And more fundamentally, it is something you deserve simply because you are human — not because you have earned it.
Start Small, Start Now
You do not have to overhaul your life to begin resting. Start with one thing this week: one boundary, one hour of unstructured time, one conversation you do not have to manage. Notice what it feels like. Let it be imperfect.
And if you find that rest feels impossible — if the guilt, the anxiety, or the weight of what you are carrying makes it hard to stop — that is information. It might be time to talk to someone. Not because something is wrong with you, but because you deserve support in learning how to take care of yourself.
You have been strong for a long time. You are allowed to rest now.