Nicole Cardoza had big plans for 2020. She just wrote a children’s book and was working on an outline for another story; she had made it her personal dedication to write more this year. But what she couldn’t have anticipated is that this summer would be the start of her most popular project, a daily anti-racism newsletter, aptly named Anti-Racism Daily.
Amid the nation’s protests, Cardoza began emailing current event explainers and action items to what ended up becoming thousands of subscribers, many looking for information and guidance in a year marked by sickness and brutality. Each newsletter goes in-depth about a specific topic related to systemic racism and dismantling white supremacy, complete with sourcing and key takeaways.
And that 2020 goal to write more? “So fucking ironic,” she says.
Cardoza has been working consistently in the wellness space, running a non-profit called Yoga Foster, which provides yoga and mindfulness resources to elementary school classrooms. She’s also the founder of Reclamation Ventures, a fund that invests in “underestimated entrepreneurs” working to make wellness more accessible.
But it’s been the newsletter that’s snowballed in recent months: There are now 5,000 paying Patreon subscribers and about 100,000 general subscribers who get it for free. Cardoza has around 25 writers who help with the emails; she’s looking for her first part-time hire, and she recently launched corporate subscriptions, which gives companies and schools an easy way to get the newsletters along with weekly discussion guides. (And soon she’ll be launching a podcast.) On Monday, Cardoza was quick to publish resources on how to demand justice for Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old who was shot in the back by police officers several times in Wisconsin; the accompanying Instagram post garnered over half a million likes in a day.
“I see writing this newsletter as a form of self-care,” she tells ELLE.com. “And not just self-care for me, but self-care as community care. I hope that I can write things and explain things that will prevent other communities of color from being harmed through microaggressions or tokenization.”
Below, Cardoza discusses how she first started the newsletter and why wellness actually starts in the voting booth.
How did this newsletter get started? Why was that the next step you wanted to take in your own activism?
It was by accident. I didn’t start a newsletter by accident, but I certainly did not think that we’d be talking about it right now. For the past few years, I’ve been pretty vocal about racism in the wellness industry. Around the protests, a lot of people started sharing me as an anti-racism educator or scholar. At the time, I never considered myself as one. It’s just, as I show up as an entrepreneur, that’s what I have to talk about. I don’t really get a choice not to. A lot of people were sharing me, and they were like, “Oh, how can I help? What can I do?” I think a lot of Black women were getting tweets or texts from other white people being like, “What can I do to help? What should I do?”
After a glass of wine one night, honestly, I posted on my Instagram, and I said, look, I’ll just send an email every single day to everybody with one action that we can take. Something that’s always bothered me is, in the wellness community, people get really agitated around racism after there’s been a death or a protest, but the wellness community knows how to practice, we know how to do shit every day. They wake up in the morning and they meditate for 15 minutes. I figured I’ll just send one email a day with actions. Then I had about 10,000 people sign up in the next three days.
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How do you approach putting together this daily newsletter without ever feeling like you’re giving too much of yourself?
I write about things that I’m really interested in learning more about. I really think about this as: How can I help contextualize things that are happening for me? I’m still learning about our history and how deep and pervasive racism is.
The other thing is, I write this for my grandkids one day. I think it’s really important that we have a world that reflects the pain and the trauma of my ancestors in the policies and practices that we set. I don’t think about it as I’m writing for white people because racism is white people’s problem, and they have to deal with it however they can. This information and this processing is really for me to leave a mark for those who come after me.
What has the response been like from readers?
We’re launching a podcast, and part of the reason why I decided to do it is because of how many stories we get of people taking action. Our community has raised tens of thousands of dollars for mutual aid funds, taken down Confederate statues or renamed schools, worked with the local sanitation department to make sure that workers are paid fairly and have proper PPE protection. So many people, when they email me with those stories, they always say, “I didn’t know I could do this.” To me, that’s the kind of energy that we need to remember, that we are so inherently powerful, if we’re persistent.
I read that you’d been planning to leave the wellness industry for a few years, but then felt like you had a responsibility to stay and create change. Why did you want to leave?
I felt like, a lot of times, my work in wellness has been in response and in relationship to whiteness and catering to what white people need. When you’re operating a non-profit and you’re looking for philanthropic contributions, I was always in places where I was trying to raise money from financial institutions and corporations that are run by white people and are also perpetuating harmful stereotypes and systemic oppression, both in the industry and society as a whole. I’ve been really passionate about getting myself to a place where I can reclaim my voice and build something that makes me feel more connected to my Blackness and that part of my identity.
I had a very public controversy with Yoga Journal magazine. When that happened, me standing up against them and speaking about it publicly really brought me back into the spotlight of this work. I don’t take the privilege that I have for granted. I’m still a light-skinned Black woman. I have academic privilege. I have able-bodied privilege, which is a big thing in wellness in particular. I’m a size zero—I look good in all of the leggings, right? So for me, it’s really important that now that I have a platform, I use it, and I keep rallying to dismantle some of these stereotypes that have caused so much harm to me personally and to other people.
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You speak a lot about the goal of making wellness accessible to everyone. How has that goal changed or expanded with the pandemic?
It’s just become more pressing and more urgent for me. People will often try to understand why I’m working on an anti-racism newsletter and I work in wellness, but I don’t see us being well in a racist society. A lot of wellness talks about the breath and the power of the breath. We’re also operating in a system where the police have the opportunity to take away the breath of Black men whenever they choose. I don’t think we can have Black men on the pavement saying, “I can’t breathe,” and pretend like the wellness industry is fair and equitable.
I talk a lot about the wellness gap, who deserves the right to be well. I don’t think the wellness gap has been any wider than it has in the past few months, when you see who’s being disproportionately impacted by this pandemic.
Do you have hope that the gap will close?
So much of it has to do with this election. Wellness doesn’t start at the studio. It starts at the polls, and I don’t think many people realize that. It starts with how we fund our schools, it starts with how we view our prison systems, and how people are treated when they walk into a hospital. This election is pivotal for that. I feel really confident that we’ll make the right decision. I think it’s very clear that this system is not working for everybody. It’s working the way it was designed, but it’s not working for everybody, and it’s hard to look away from that now.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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