Women of Color in AA
I walked into my first meeting already exhausted, and I hadn’t even sat down yet.
I was carrying a drinking problem that had finally gotten loud enough that I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I was also carrying the weight of being the strong one in my family, the one who had it together, the one who didn’t ask for help because we didn’t do that. I was carrying cultural expectations that told me to stay quiet and keep struggling alone rather than admit I couldn’t handle my life. I was carrying the question every woman of color asks when walking into a new space: will there be anyone here who looks like me?
The meeting was in a church basement. Fluorescent lights. Folding chairs arranged in a circle. A table with coffee that had been sitting too long and cookies that looked like someone’s grandmother made them. I stood in the doorway doing what I always did in new spaces—scanning the room to see where I fit, if I fit.
Twelve people. Eleven of them white. One Black woman who nodded at me like she knew exactly what I was doing standing there calculating whether to stay or leave.
I stayed. Not because the room felt welcoming in some abstract sense, but because I was desperate enough that the math didn’t matter anymore. I needed to stop drinking more than I needed to feel comfortable. That’s the calculation that gets most of us through the door the first time.
The Weight We Carry Into Recovery Spaces
Most women of color don’t walk into AA meetings just carrying addiction. We carry specific cultural contexts that shaped both our drinking and our resistance to asking for help. We carry family dynamics where showing weakness can have real consequences. We carry survival strategies developed in communities where admitting you can’t handle something might mean losing the respect that protects you.
For me, it was the cultural expectation that strength meant silence. I came from a family where you handled your problems privately, where asking for help outside the family felt like betrayal, where addiction carried shame that reflected on everyone who shared your last name. Getting sober meant breaking that silence in a room full of strangers, most of whom had never navigated that particular weight.
The program asks for honesty. Rigorous honesty, the literature says. But honesty in predominantly white recovery spaces often requires translation work that other members don’t have to do. I couldn’t just talk about why I drank. I had to explain the cultural context that made drinking feel like the only way to quiet the pressure of trying to be enough in spaces that weren’t built for me. I had to explain family dynamics that didn’t match the assumptions baked into step work designed by and for people whose experiences looked nothing like mine.
Some days I shared my story in full detail, doing the emotional labor of explaining cultural references and systemic pressures that white members took for granted in their own narratives. Other days I edited myself down to the parts that wouldn’t require a sociology lesson, which meant leaving out pieces of my story that mattered.
Both approaches cost something. Full honesty meant extra work. Edited honesty meant holding back parts of myself that needed air.
Cultural Shame Meets Program Shame
The program talks about shame. Step work addresses the shame of things we did while using, the people we hurt, the ways we betrayed our own values. That shame is real and needs attention in recovery.
But women of color often carry an additional layer – cultural shame about needing help at all. Shame about confirming stereotypes. Shame about letting down our families and communities. Shame about struggling visibly when we’ve spent our lives trying to be twice as good to get half as far.
When I worked Step Four – the searching and fearless moral inventory – my sponsor, a white woman who genuinely cared about my recovery, kept asking me to dig deeper into my resentments and fears. She wanted me to name what I was really afraid of. When I finally told her I was afraid of confirming every negative assumption people made about women like me, afraid of giving anyone ammunition to say I couldn’t handle the pressure, afraid of being visible in my struggle when invisibility had been my protection – she nodded and said that sounded hard, but I could tell she didn’t fully understand the specific weight of it.
She wasn’t wrong to push me toward honesty. Step work requires looking at the truth of our lives. But the framework she was using assumed shame worked the same way for everyone. It didn’t account for the difference between personal shame and shame that’s tied to your identity in systems that already see you as less than.
I learned to do my own translation. I took what was useful from her guidance and adapted it to fit the reality of my life. I found another woman of color in a different meeting and asked her to be my secondary sponsor for the parts my primary sponsor couldn’t fully hold. That dual support system helped me work the steps without abandoning the truth of my experience.
The Invisible Labor of Belonging
Recovery requires showing up. The program says ninety meetings in ninety days. Get a sponsor. Work the steps. Build a sober network. All of that is true and necessary.
What the program doesn’t always name is the additional work required when you’re building recovery in spaces where you’re consistently one of the only women of color in the room. The mental calculation becomes automatic: will sharing this story require too much context? Will anyone understand the family dynamics I’m describing? Will I spend my share explaining rather than actually processing?
I started keeping track of which meetings felt safer for full honesty and which ones required more careful navigation. Tuesday night downtown had three other women of color who showed up regularly. Thursday night in the suburbs was all white, mostly older, and I learned to share the broad strokes without the cultural specifics. Sunday morning had a woman who’d been sober twenty years and actually asked questions when she didn’t understand something rather than making assumptions.
That navigation work is real labor. It’s the tax you pay for getting sober in spaces that weren’t originally built with you in mind. Some days I resented it. Some days I was too tired to do it and just stayed quiet. Some days I found ways to make it work that felt less like compromise and more like strategy.
The program saved my life. I’m clear about that. But I’m also clear that the path to saving my life included extra steps that many of my white peers never had to take.
Finding Yourself Reflected
Six months into sobriety, I found a women of color recovery meeting across town. It met once a week on Wednesday nights in a community center. I walked in and saw twelve women, all of us Black, Latina, Asian, Indigenous – carrying our own versions of the same dual navigation.
The difference was immediate. I could talk about my mother’s expectations without explaining the cultural weight of disappointing her. I could reference the specific pressure of being the first in my family to go to college and how that intersected with my drinking without translating. I could name the ways systemic racism shaped my stress levels without anyone getting defensive or asking me to explain what I meant.
That meeting became my anchor. I still went to other meetings throughout the week—I needed the structure and the variety of perspectives. But Wednesday nights were where I could breathe fully, where my whole story made sense without editing, where the women in the room understood both the addiction and the context surrounding it.
One of the women there told me she’d been sober fifteen years. She said the first five years she tried to make it work in predominantly white meetings only, bending herself to fit the spaces available. Then she started this meeting because she was tired and because she knew other women needed it too. She said creating that space saved her sobriety because it gave her somewhere to be whole instead of constantly translating.
Her honesty gave me permission to need what I needed. I didn’t have to pretend that any meeting was as good as any other meeting. I could acknowledge that representation mattered, that cultural understanding mattered, that having people in the room who got it without explanation made the work of recovery more sustainable.
Building Trust Across Difference
My primary sponsor remained a white woman. We learned to work across our differences, though it required honesty from both of us. I had to tell her when her advice didn’t account for my reality. She had to be willing to listen without getting defensive, to sit with not understanding everything about my experience, to trust me when I said something worked differently in my world than in hers.
She got better at asking instead of assuming. I got better at naming what I needed without apologizing for it. The relationship worked because she was humble enough to acknowledge the limits of her understanding and committed enough to my recovery to work with me anyway.
Not every cross-cultural sponsor relationship works that way. I watched other women struggle with sponsors who couldn’t hear feedback, who gave advice that ignored systemic realities, who told them their concerns about race were resentments they needed to let go of. Some of those women left AA entirely. Others switched sponsors until they found someone who could hold complexity.
The program works when trust exists between sponsor and sponsee. Building that trust across cultural difference requires both people to show up honestly. The person being sponsored has to be willing to speak up about what doesn’t fit. The sponsor has to be willing to learn and adapt rather than insisting their way is the only way.
When that mutual work happens, cross-cultural sponsorship can be powerful. When it doesn’t, it becomes another barrier to recovery for women who already face too many.
What Makes Recovery Possible Despite the Gaps
I’m still sober. That matters more than anything else in this story. I found a way to make the program work for me even though it required more work than it asks of some others.
What made it possible:
The Wednesday night meeting where I could show up whole. The secondary sponsor who understood cultural context without explanation. The willingness to take what was useful from primarily white meetings and leave what didn’t fit. The decision to stop apologizing for needing what I needed. The other women of color I met along the way who nodded in recognition when I named things that often went unsaid.
I learned to assess meetings and sponsors and recovery spaces the same way I’d learned to assess every other space in my life – by watching who held power, who got listened to, whose stories were centered, and whether there was room for mine. I learned to trust my instincts about where I could be honest and where I needed to protect myself. I learned that recovery was possible even in imperfect spaces, but I didn’t have to pretend the spaces were better than they were.
The program gave me tools. The steps gave me structure. The community gave me connection. All of that is true. Also true: I had to adapt those tools to fit my life. I had to find my own version of structure that accounted for cultural context. I had to build community intentionally because it wasn’t automatically available in every meeting I walked into.
Speaking Up for Women Who Come After
I speak up now in meetings when I’m the only woman of color in the room. Not to educate or perform, but because staying silent means the next woman who walks in will face the same isolation I did. I make space for conversations about how race and culture shape our experiences of addiction and recovery. I push back when people suggest we should only focus on similarities and ignore difference.
Some people get uncomfortable. That’s not my problem to fix. My job is to protect my sobriety and make the path a little clearer for women who come after me.
I also started showing up early to meetings to be the person who makes eye contact with women of color standing in the doorway doing their own calculations about whether to stay. I remember what that nod from the Black woman in my first meeting meant to me. I want to be that for someone else.
Recovery is possible for women of color in AA. But the path includes labor that needs naming, gaps that need acknowledging, and work that shouldn’t fall only on those of us navigating them. The program asks us to be rigorously honest. Part of that honesty is saying clearly: these spaces weren’t built for us, and we’re making them work anyway because our sobriety matters more than perfect comfort.
I protect my sobriety fiercely. I also protect my right to name what it actually takes to build recovery while carrying identities that aren’t always seen or understood in the rooms. Both can be true. Both are necessary.
If you’re standing in that doorway right now, doing the math about whether to walk in, know this: you’re not the only one who’s had to calculate. You’re not wrong to notice what’s missing. And recovery is still possible, even when the path requires more from you than it asks of others.
Your sobriety matters. The fullness of who you are matters. You don’t have to choose between them.