Solidarity is Reciprocal: Black American Women Are Allowed to Ask What Comes Back Across the Bridge (podcast episode)

Where did people get this bizarre idea that solidarity doesn’t require respect and reciprocity…at a minimum?

Affirmations

I can love people, support people, defend people and still tell them when something they are doing harms me.

I am not required to absorb unlimited harm simply because I have survived harm before.

I can be generous without making myself endlessly available.

I can serve without becoming servile.

I can offer grace without surrendering discernment.

I can leave spaces that welcome my labor but reject my dignity.

I am allowed to expect respect from the people who ask for my solidarity.

I can carry concern for people across the world while keeping my own people in my work and conscience.

There is room in my heart for more than one grief.

I do not have to choose between humanity and self-respect.

I can cross the bridge for others and still ask who is willing to cross it for me.

My humanity does not become negotiable because someone else’s need is urgent.

I am allowed to notice when reciprocity is missing.

I can stand in solidarity without surrendering my dignity.

I do not have to accept disrespect to prove that my heart is good.

Another person’s emergency does not erase my humanity.

I can hear someone else’s pain without silencing my own.

I will not mistake being needed for being cherished.

I will not mistake endurance for obligation.

I will not mistake silence for solidarity.

My boundary is not a betrayal.

My refusal to accept degradation is not a failure of compassion.

I am allowed to ask whether the care I give is also being extended to me.

I can care about you without disappearing from myself.

What does solidarity actually require—and what happens when only one side is expected to practice it?

In this episode, Tonya GJ Prince begins with a principle that gets lost in conversations about war, injustice and coalition: solidarity is reciprocal. Caring about another community’s suffering should not require ignoring racism directed at your own. Compassion is not supposed to demand self-erasure.

And Black women have encountered this bargain before. During World War I, Black educators Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson crossed the Atlantic to serve Black American troops. But when Johnson sought to work among those soldiers, she encountered an astonishing contradiction: Black men could be sent overseas to fight a world war, yet they could still be characterized as too “rough” for a Black woman sent there to serve them.

Johnson did not simply accept that judgment. Her story opens a much larger conversation about Black women, service, racial stereotypes, boundaries, coalition politics—and what happens when people eagerly accept what Black women provide while becoming uncomfortable when we ask how we and the people we love are being treated.

We can mourn children thousands of miles away and speak about anti-Black racism at the same time. We can stand against atrocities without surrendering our dignity. We can care deeply about another people without disappearing from our own conscience. Because solidarity that only travels in one direction has another name

.And Black women are allowed to ask what comes back across the bridge.