"It Has Been Two Minutes": How This Season Became Women's Reasonings
My mother is my most loyal Saltwater Reasonings follower. When I skip a Wednesday New Episode post, there is a message from her by midday: Tracie, where is the episode? And I know better than to leave that unanswered.
So about three episodes into Season 1, the phone rang.
My mother.
I picked up.
No warm-up. No small talk.
Just one question: "Tracie, where are the men?"
My biggest supporter wanted to know when the balancing act would begin.
I did not originally imagine Season 1 as a season that would only feature women. I began with a wider vision. But as the conversations unfolded, and especially after speaking with Esther Armah, I became clearer about what this first season needed to do.
At one point in our conversation, Esther said something that stayed with me.
We were speaking about the emotional labour carried by Black women, and about the ways recognition of that labour is often met with discomfort. The moment Black women begin to be visible, the moment their work is celebrated or centred, there is often a quick pivot to questioning whether the attention has gone too far.
Esther paused and said:
Watch the full episode with Esther Armah - Emotional Justice: A Language for Racial Healing and Global Black Solidarity
“People talk about the noise of Black women being celebrated. And I'm like, it's been two minutes. It's been two minutes. What are we talking about?”
That line landed with force.
It named the impatience that so often surfaces when women’s work receives focused attention. As though even a brief moment of centring women is already excessive, already in danger of becoming unfair.
But why should highlighting women’s work be treated as a problem to solve?
There is a particular kind of anxiety that emerges when women are centred; an immediate reach for reassurance that men have also been considered. I am not interested in that logic. Highlighting women’s work is an act of attention. A necessary one. It is generative, and long overdue.
That became one of the quiet but firm commitments of Season 1.
I wanted to create a season that lingered with women's thinking without apology. A season that trusted that women's voices, analyses, memories, and visions were more than enough to hold our attention. In a world where women are so often expected to carry, nurture, explain, and support without being fully centred, there is something politically important about refusing the demand for immediate correction.
This was about saying: women matter enough to be the focus.
And that focus clarifies rather than closes.
Season 2 of Saltwater Reasonings will turn its attention to men's reasonings, purposefully and with care for what that space needs to hold. That matters too. And it belongs in its own moment, on its own terms. Thoughtful curation is intention, not competition. Different seasons can hold different emphases. It is design, not imbalance.
What I am resisting is the idea that women can only be centred if men are simultaneously reassured.
Women's work does not need to justify itself through comparison before it is allowed to be visible.
Here is the serendipitous thing. The conversations shaped themselves, the archive assembled itself, and the timing arrived on its own. But perhaps that is the nature of work that is true to something. It finds its moment.
Season 1 was always going to be this.
And today, of all days, feels like exactly the right time to say so.
Sometimes the most political act is simply to pause and say:
Let us stay here a little longer. Let us listen to women. Let us learn from women. Let us build an archive that takes women seriously.
That is what Season 1 became.
