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The first video was so exciting. This was 2018, and I had no idea that there were going to be so many people watching the video. It got to like a half a million views at a certain point. And suddenly all these people were following me on Instagram and emailing me, and I kind of realized like, oh, this channel is like a thing. And I mean, it was super cool. It felt incredibly validating.

Probably after the second or third video, I realized that while I wasn’t getting paid, it was a lot of work for me. It’s really exhausting to do a three- or four-hour video shoot. The opportunity was specifically framed as a PR opportunity for my new cookbook, and I feel like when someone utters the word “PR opportunity,” there’s no payment involved. But then I was like, “No, I’m filming a video for their YouTube channel that they’re making money on. I need to get paid.” So at the beginning of 2019, I emailed and said I’d like to be paid.

Still, in the back of my mind, I had this nagging, sinking feeling, not only about what I was getting paid but just the way I was being framed in videos—like how I was pulled in to be a taster in certain videos where it was a white person making Indian food, or pulled in to be a taster in videos where it was very clear it was just a lot of white people and they needed a person of color. A lot of videos were going up without me being able to approve them and they would go out with wrong information and I would get bombarded on social media from people from my own community who were really upset at me.

It kind of got to the point where I couldn’t even watch the videos; they constantly made me feel like I just wasn’t a valuable member of a team. I pitched all of these video series that didn’t center on my Indianness but on my abilities as a journalist to report my curiosity about food. And those were pretty much ignored. It got to a point where I told myself I just have to grin and bear it. Quitting this would be walking away from one of the biggest things of my career; I was just sort of stuck.

Then, after George Floyd, I think Adam Rapoport started to realize his complacency with people of color being marginalized across all aspects of the brand, including video.

I didn’t think this would be a moment to quit video, but maybe to really change it. I was like, if there’s a chance to do it, now is the time. So most of the people on the Test Kitchen team started sharing, including what their compensation was. We saw there was a jaw-dropping difference between what the white members were making versus non-white members. I remember looking at those numbers and literally just being in shock, because I feel like I am privileged enough to have a number of steady gigs that pay the bills. I wasn’t dependent on video to pay the bills. But seeing how much I could have been paid was just so shocking. It was so disheartening.

So the people of color on video started a kind of pod where we were just information sharing. We teamed up with the production side. We made a list of demands. We said, here are the concrete changes we’d like to see in video. And then leadership had a meeting with us where they’re like, we see all the work you’ve been doing, we appreciate it. And then they presented us with this new pay structure that allowed the white staffers who already had lucrative contracts to keep those lucrative contracts, and it gave us yet another shitty rate. And I remember thinking, maybe there’s a catch, maybe there’s something else. But the saving grace never came. We were being offered essentially the same crappy deal that essentially treated us as if we hadn’t already contributed to the platform’s success.

By the end of it, some of us were keeping each other abreast of how our negotiations were going and even sending each other the contracts that we were offered. We wanted to make this a 100 percent transparent zone so that we could understand what they were offering to each of us. And we could see Condé was just not budging. My agent called me and said, “I have never negotiated with people like this.” It literally felt like we were negotiating with movie villains.

At that point, it wasn’t even just a question of the money; we were all just exhausted and didn’t want to be a part of a system that’s going to continue to marginalize us and to do so in such a painfully obvious way. It was frankly dehumanizing and demoralizing.

Then I suddenly realized that I had the power to walk away. I remember having a conversation and being like, a group of us walking away is not us closing the door on an opportunity, but opening the door to all these new opportunities that are gonna come our way. We will be fine. We have a platform. We are people of color who have been privileged enough to be given opportunities that other people of color have not. We’re hopefully doing this so that other people of color can help to better understand their worth and negotiate accordingly.

I think that’s really, really important to note here: A big part of walking away is privilege. Luckily, I felt like it was going to be fine if I left this particular opportunity.

On the day I quit, my partner made me a giant peach-mango smoothie. It was honestly one of the best smoothies. I sent the tweet saying I quit, and I was like, “Okay, now I’m going to work on the other six stories that I have to do while I drink my smoothie.”

The reason I am in this industry is not to be an “Indian cook.” I genuinely hope that my legacy in food is that I lift it up as many people as possible and help people of color get the platforms that I got. Because I have been tremendously privileged and quite frankly lucky in my career. And I feel really excited about the opportunities I have ahead of me, but I feel less interested in building the “Priya Brand” than helping others get platforms.

I see it like wealth distribution: There shouldn’t be billionaires; instead, there should just be a bunch of people who can make a great living for themselves. I would like to see the same thing happen in food. Instead of there being a bunch of megawatt stars, there’s a range of people cooking all different kinds of food, who’ve achieved a really high level of success.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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