Rest is not resistance: Commodification, Capitalism, and the Cult of Self-Care

We have to start using words with intention if we are to fight the battle ahead.

Photo by Chris Mac on Unsplash

As I prepared to write this article, I started and stopped a few times, wondering if it was worthwhile to have this conversation at all. In the years since self-care has been commodified by white feminists, the concept of rest has been entangled and wrapped up in that performance, too.

Nowadays, for so many people, self-care is rooted in the aesthetics: pedicures, manicures, first-class flights to countries in the Global South, and the individualized pleasures of leisure and inactivity. As a Black Feminist, this turn toward the capitalistic, material, and individualistic represents a shift toward white-coded frameworks of the Self, frameworks that were never made for us and surely won’t get us any freer.

I guess the question that everyone has been asking is simply: what is the role of rest in our maintenance of the Self? Better yet, is rest resistance? For me, the answer lies in Black Feminist theorizing.

It was Audre Lorde who said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Folks often cite this quote without noting the broader context within which Lorde shares it.

In 1988, when Lorde wrote the text A Burst of Light, she was working through remission from breast cancer, a refusal of prosthesis, and a reassessment of how she would show up in movements and activism given her changing health. The larger quote says,

“I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

From this excerpt, it's clear that Lorde wasn’t peddling in gimmicks or catchphrases. She was fighting for her life. I think that is why the “rest is resistance” framework rings so hollow for many Black (and disabled) people. If by rest we mean sleeping, lying down, and becoming inactive then that is simply not enough for us to resist a world that is actively trying to kill us. The concept just rings incomplete.

What does it mean to rest?

In 2022, poet and activist Tricia Hersey published the book Rest is Resistance. The instant New York Times bestseller is a “manifesto” on the importance of slowing down, resting, and prioritizing sleep. Hersey, the self-proclaimed “Bishop” of The Nap Ministry, built a large online following and social media community centering rest well before the publication of the book. In those early days and years, I, myself, was drawn to the messages of rest and respite. The Instagram posts encouraging people to slow down and disinvest themselves from capitalistic production resonated with me as a high-functioning neurodivergent Black woman. Also, as someone who is navigating the white-centered logics of academia, the “ministry” felt like a soft place to land. Through her Instagram community, Hersey taught us that it was okay to slow down, take naps, and remove our bodies and labor from systems of oppression and exploitation. Within that media environment, the message resonated and it worked.

The book was gifted to me on three different occasions. Black women everywhere were sharing the text from a place of community and fellowship. I was heartened to see how Black women were embracing rest as a form of liberatory and restorative praxis. However, I was worried that the book itself might not present a genealogical arc from Black Feminists like bell hooks and Audre Lorde. After seeing people online saying they were “members” of The Nap Ministry, as if it were a church or religious faith of some sort, I feared that the concept of rest had taken on another commodified, consumption-based, cult-like framework that was actually antithetical to the inherent teachings of our Black Feminist foremothers. Not only that, reproducing the logics of a patriarchal institution, like the Christian church - which also exploits Black women's (unpaid) labor, felt counterintuitive to me.

In late 2024, I decided to go ahead and give the book a read. I finished the book in a matter of hours. Initially, I was disappointed and surprised to find that the book centered sleeping (actually sleeping) without a deep analysis of the disparate access that people have to sleep based on race, gender, class, and ability.

In particular, it is well-known that a “sleep gap” exists between white and Black Americans. This gap is characterized by Black Americans getting less sleep overall and less restful sleep when they do rest. For Black Americans, research has shown that socioeconomic status also correlates with lower amounts of restful sleep. Further, the persistent lack of access to sleep based on poor and working-class status can result in lower levels of sleep over a lifetime which correlates with higher rates of heart issues, diabetes, and stroke. Poor Black Americans struggle most with sleep and, when they sleep, they still see fewer long-term benefits from it. The issue isn’t lying down and resting. The issue is living in an anti-Black world that is committed to annihilating us.

There are some contemporary texts that make this clear, too. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem is a great example of how racial trauma and discrimination intermingle to affect our bodies. Dr Arline T. Geronimus writes about the concept of “weathering” in her book Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society. “Weathering” is the process by which enduring racial injustice, discrimination, and economic exploitation results in disparate health outcomes for Black people, especially Black women. These two texts work to get at the heart of the problem: racial trauma and oppression.

Rather than creating poetic and catchy phrases to build pseudo-churches, amass followers, or commodify our racial oppression, Menakem and Geronimus, two researchers whose professions are rooted in healing justice, offer us deep historical frameworks for the issues keeping us from rest. That’s important work.

I am currently reading Bloom How You Must: A Black Woman’s Guide to Self-Care and Generational Healing, by Tara Pringle Jefferson. This book is another example of how critical it is to connect our self-care praxis to our genealogical, ancestral, and biological lineages. Jefferson writes about what she calls “self-care inheritance” and the ways that Black women are taught to care for their bodies and mental health. In effect, without acknowledging the historical and continuing effects of anti-Black racism, we cannot properly locate our resistance to it.

Years ago, my coparent and I hosted an episode of our podcast That Black Couple detailing the disparities in rest and sleep within Black communities. In it, we discuss the ways that the “sleep gap” exacerbates existing racial disparities especially considering that white Americans, even those of lower economic status, still have longer life expectancies than Black Americans. This relationship must be a part of the conversation if we are to truly understand the relationship between rest and resistance.

What does it mean to resist?

The other critical part of this conversation is how we define resistance. This is something that also remains unanswered by Hersey's text and continues to confound many organizers who engage it. In a recent article for the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships called “A Revolution (Un)Televised: On Misogynoir and the Limits of Our Imaginations,” I write, “resistance is rooted in intention rather than merely existing outside of normative boundaries set forth by the status quo” (79). Citing the work of Black Feminist, Cathy Cohen, I explain why resistance requires direction and strategy. In other words, simply doing something that deviates from the norm is not resistance on its own.

I think this is what Black organizer and movement-maker Leslie Mac meant a few weeks ago when she posted on Threads, “Unpopular Opinion: Rest IS NOT Resistance. Rest is rest. Resistance is resistance. I'm confused how we got here TBH.” Instead of listening to her, many commenters simply told her rest WAS resistance because resting is denied most Black people. They sent her to Hersey’s book, never engaging with the ways that this real-life organizer might have intrinsic knowledge and expertise that contributed to this conversation.

In response to Mac, Hersey wrote on Threads, “Girl, we are living under a facism [sic] regime and you over here worried about a global movement that is actually saving people. Very weird and odd. Read my books and tap in. Sad.” There was no guidance. There was no callback to Lorde and hooks. There was no explanation of the ways that organizers, like Mac, have first-hand and frontline knowledge of the struggles we face each day. Just “read my books” and capitalistic language of creating a “global movement that is actually saving people.”

Audre Lorde would never.

One thing that organizers know is that, when we resist, we work on identifying root causes of problems so that we can properly identify solutions to those concerns. We organize people to strategize around the specific regional, national, and contextual issues they are facing. We don’t try to “save people.” Instead, we try to teach them how to save themselves.

We need rest to live. Rest is required to survive. If we do not rest, we die. As such, that cannot be the site of our resistance. Likewise, eating is not resistance. Drinking water is not resistance. And, we all seem to agree that those things are basic human rights. These human necessities are our birthrights. We need to be clear about that.

We have never located our resistance struggles at the most basic of human rights because, when we do, we forget the larger and broader systemic institutions like white heteropatriarchal capitalism that created the conditions that are slowly killing us.

Audre Lorde couldn’t be clearer about this.

In A Burst of Light, Lorde writes, “I am saving my life by using my life in the service of what must be done. I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes – everywhere.”

Lorde wasn’t telling anyone to lie down and go to sleep. She had no vested interests in building “global movements” to save people. Lorde was teaching us how to save ourselves so that we could show up better in community. She was teaching us that self-care and self-love are one in the same. Self-care is not resistance but us living might be. Rest is not resistance but our survival can be revolutionary.

Who we are when we get up from our rest matters. How we dismantle systems of oppression and anti-Blackness matters much more than lying down. Why? Because resting is only denied us because of the systems seeking to exploit and erase us. And, if we don’t dismantle those systems, we will never get the rest that we seek.