5 Questions For… Ifeoma Ike
Ifeoma Ike, MA, JD, LLM is Founder & Equity Weaver at Pink Cornrows, a Black-femme led social impact, policy and equity firm that weaves formal and cultural strategies to solve problems. She is also the author of “The Equity Mindset: Designing Human Spaces Through Journeys, Reflections, and Practices”, a #1 new release available in September 2023. What’s Next Health reached out to ask Ms. Ike about her Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded project that explores rest — or radical sabbaticals — as a rite of deservedness, the beginning of long-term healing, and a new social contract with Black women.
This interview is part of our 5 Questions For…Series, where we learn about the ways RWJF’s Pioneering Ideas for an Equitable Future grantees are helping us get to a healthier tomorrow — today.
Q: What do you hope to learn through this work?
A: The concept of a Radical Sabbatical was born out of exhaustion. It came from my own experience of being involved in social justice movements year after year without rest and seeing others experience burnout too. We maybe didn’t know it, but we all needed a break — a chance to recharge and recalibrate.
But breaks are not for people like me whose work is rooted in social justice. They’re not for people like my mother who came to this country from Nigeria with only a sixth-grade education and got her first job cleaning toilets at a hospital before she was upgraded to making beds, and then upgraded to cooking in the kitchen.
Sabbaticals and other formalized ways of rest, such as paid leave or retirement, are reserved for people working in academia or corporate executives. They’re elitist. Somebody is determining who gets a break, and who deserves rest. Somebody is determining that our type of labor — the type of labor that more often falls to Black and Brown women — does not qualify as worthy of getting a break. And the historical context of all of this is racialized capitalism, which is the formation of our society and is still the bloodline of our society.
If more industries adopt sabbaticals and offer them as a part of the standard benefits package for all employees, they will actually be making the choice to help people to live longer.
What makes a radical sabbatical different from a sabbatical has a lot to do with who qualifies for the participation. I started to imagine what it would take to formalize rest for everyone, and the different ways a radical sabbatical might play out — whether you’re working the 6pm-12am shift in the service industry, or orchestrating a march in Ferguson, or even working an office job that offers family medical leave but you hesitate to take those days, which we know is common among Black and Brown women.
We’ll be spending the next 12 months observing how formal rest is implemented across labor sectors and hearing from people working in different labor markets where formal rest does not exist to understand what desires and solutions they have around rest. From there, we can begin to think about what workplace policies or legislation would look like and how it could be implemented to provide formal rest.
Q: What signals of the future or emerging trends were you noticing that led you to want to do this project?
A: There’s a lot of unaddressed trauma from individuals who risked it all to be out in the street when George Floyd was killed, or were in danger of losing their jobs or their livelihood just because they said, “Trayvon Martin deserves justice.” During this time, we saw an influx of money from philanthropy for social justice work. More money was going to communities to do more of this disruptive work, but there was no money going to communities to rest and deal with the grief of doing this work. So, there was this trend of our justice work becoming just another commodity.
And during the pandemic, we saw the troubling trend of clapping for essential workers but not necessarily thinking about the policies to sustain them as the backbone of our communities. The majority of essential workers are Black and Brown women and also people from immigrant communities, especially in the food and delivery industries. These individuals literally kept us alive during the pandemic but were left without access to rest and recovery. I don’t think many of the essential workers have even had the luxury to think about what they’ve gone through.
Q: Looking ahead five, ten, fifteen years from now, how do you see this work contributing to a healthier, more equitable future?
A: I hope that this work contributes to adding more years to the lives of Black and Brown people. The average life expectancy of Black women compared to our counterparts is at least 11 to 12 years shorter for an array of reasons. Scientific evidence shows that rest has important benefits for our mental and physical health and our livelihood — and it also benefits the institution that provides it. If more industries adopt sabbaticals and offer them as a part of the standard benefits package for all employees, they will actually be making the choice to help people to live longer.
Q: What one thing should people read, watch or listen to that will help them understand more about your ideas?
A: Tricia Hersey’s book “Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto” is a great one. “Killing the Black Body” by Dorothy E. Roberts is another. There’s also a lot of inspiring healing justice work out there that takes on a reproductive justice angle, for example Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy Monument is a 15 foot monument display in Alabama that honors both the intersection of labor and the reproductive journeys of enslaved Black women. And while it’s not about rest, Medical Apartheid is a book that I use with my students as a way of really discussing the concept of deservedness.
For me personally, the books that inspire me don’t necessarily go deep into rest as much as into the creative self. So, that includes Quest Love’s The Creative Quest, which helps me identify ways that I can steal moments to be artistic or steal time to create a different version of myself. I think those are some of the things that have helped me personally develop.
Q: What didn’t we ask you?
A: We recognize that a prerequisite to a radical sabbatical is acknowledging social justice work as labor. In our society, it is expected that when things aren’t going well for all of humanity, those who are on the margins have to take on the toll of fighting for justice. We’ve all benefited from these social movements and disruptions that have shined a light on injustice and brought attention to systemic racism — it’s not one historical moment that has gotten us to this point. But those who do justice work, whether on the ground or behind the scenes, have in many ways been forgotten. Our society doesn’t see their labor as work and there has been this kind of lack of reward for how they have shown up. So, a part of what we need to do is bring more awareness to the labor of social justice workers, to the exploitation of their labor and their deservingness of rest.
The views expressed are those of the interviewee(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
