Black women are enough and deserve the benefit of the doubt
OPINION: From Kamala Harris to Megan Thee Stallion, Black women are confronted with wrenching decisions in the face of sexism and violence
If there were graphs like the ones tracking the coronavirus to measure the disparagement of Black women in American culture, we’d be well beyond the first, second, or even fiftieth wave. In some ways, it feels like we may have plateaued.
I don’t use the analogy lightly. The pernicious blend of racism and misogyny Black women face is every bit as destructive in terms of morbidity and mortality as the deadly virus ripping through the country. So prevalent and deep-seated is the problem that the term misogynoir, conceived by Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey in 2010, has gained wide usage and now appears in several dictionaries.
Sometimes, a plateau can feel deceptively like progress — at least things aren’t getting worse, right? Maybe they’re even getting better. But then you notice something that makes you question whether you’re merely traveling along a flat path at the same level.
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These days, it’s common to see Black women hailed as society’s heroes —loyal and reliable supporters, passionate advocates, moral sentinels. But all too often, the praise is bound up in a tangle of stinging contradictions, like flowers threaded through barbed wire. We are hyper-visible, yet invisible; powerful, yet insignificant; essential, yet disposable.
A recent spate of news stories about Black women reminded me of this. First, there was the historic announcement that Sen. Kamala Harris was joining Joe Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket, becoming both the first Black American and Asian-American vice presidential running mate on a major party ticket.
Like many Black women, I felt a wave of relief when I learned the news because as eminently qualified and electrifying as she is, I feared she’d be overlooked nonetheless. Someone would come up with a narrative — which didn’t even need to make sense, much less be true — and then she’d find herself out of the running.
This wasn’t paranoia, it was a cold-eyed assessment based on a pile of evidentiary fragments I’d collected over a lifetime of experiences and observations, aggressions of both the micro and macro kind.
It isn’t the kind of proof you can layout cleanly, like a litigant pressing a case at trial. Some items are large and unmistakable while others are as fine-grained as dust, liable to being blown off by someone who doesn’t know how to identify them.
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But I knew what I was looking at when I read the insinuations about Harris from some of her detractors, including the complaint that she was “too ambitious” to make a suitable vice president. A huge public outcry condemned the sexism reflected in this sentiment — what man has ever been described as “too ambitious”?
But many Black women, including me, recognized this particular varietal of misogynoir — its potent notes of “uppity” and “aggressive,” with a crisp touch of “conniving.” It pairs well with a slice of “know your place.” For us, surpassing competence is a prerequisite, yet also a threat.
But she made it, and for days, I rode a wave of enthusiasm and hope I hadn’t felt since Barack Obama’s 2008 candidacy. Not even the intensified racist and misogynistic attacks against her could dull the glow of this extraordinary achievement.
Then I began to notice another creeping form of misogynoir gaining traction, the proclamation that “Black women will save us” — flattening us into society’s strong and sturdy laborers, perfectly suited to solve its problems and clean up its messes. As though we lack concerns and aspirations of our own, or at least those worthy of our efforts. You see, though we are burdensome, we are also the burden-lifters.
It should come as no surprise that despite our superhero plaudits, Black women count among the nation’s most marginalized, least protected members. Another news item reinforced that point was the July shooting that left rapper Megan Thee Stallion wounded in both feet. In social media posts, she noted her pain and trauma stemming from the attack, as well as the jokes about her circulating in its aftermath.
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I’d seen some of the callous remarks, which implied that her injuries didn’t warrant concern or grief, or that perhaps she was even responsible for them. “Black women are so unprotected & we hold so many things in to protect the feelings of others w/o considering our own,” she tweeted days after surgery to remove the bullets.
She has since claimed that it was rapper Tory Lanez who shot her, stating, “I didn’t tell the police nothing because I didn’t want us to get in no more trouble.”
Her predicament reflects longstanding tropes about Black women dating back to the days of slavery — that we are malicious, untruthful, unfeeling, deserving of aggression and undeserving of care — and highlights the wrenching decisions we confront in the face of violence. These matters aren’t just upsetting, they can be dangerous or even deadly.
Vicious stereotypes like the ones so visibly applied to Harris and Megan inform Black women’s daily interactions, contributing to the disproportionately high rates of violence we experience. This includes police violence, though our experiences typically aren’t centered in these discussions.
The police killings, with relative impunity, of Breonna Taylor, Korryn Gaines, Sandra Bland, and so many others who never became household names, underscore the point.
So, too, does the spike in murders of Black transgender women, many of which don’t even lead to an arrest. Other kinds of violence like sexual assault and intimate partner violence also disproportionately affect Black women, but many of us are reasonably afraid to involve the police.
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There are 15 Black women who do not report their rapes for every Black woman who does. And when we do speak out, we find our stories doubted, dismissed, erased.
These harmful ideas are killing and injuring us in other ways as well. Studies have tied discrimination against Black women to poor health metrics, including one linking a Black woman’s being born in a Jim Crow state to an elevated risk of a particular type of aggressive breast cancer.
We are likelier to suffer and die from numerous ailments, including HIV/AIDS, heart disease, strokes, and pregnancy and childbirth-related causes — and to be denied appropriate pain management during medical treatment. Yet, we’re overrepresented on the pandemic’s front lines.
One in three of us works in a job deemed essential, facing not only the related health risks but also the challenges of handling childcare and school closures. On top of that, we must contend with the economic violence of being underpaid. On average, those of us working year-round in full-time jobs make 62 cents for every dollar paid to white men—as has been the case for the last 25 years.
I was turning all this over in my mind as I watched Michelle Obama’s speech at the first virtual Democratic National Convention, one of the event’s most thrilling segments. That familiar swell of enthusiasm and hope returned.
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“We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention. But enough of you know me by now,” she said, and I nodded.
We do know her. And many of us see ourselves in her, as we do in Harris and Megan. But we also know that public acclaim for them won’t end misogynoir any more than Barack Obama’s presidency ended racism.
It’s a public matter that’s also deeply personal. I’ve walked the tightrope of competing and contradictory expectations, carefully crafting each move, telling myself I didn’t have the luxury of anything other than excellence. And I’ve paid the price for that in terms of health, and perhaps financially as well.
But it strengthens me to connect with the stories of other Black women — and not just Harris, Megan, and Obama, but a wide array of voices in the many arenas where we devote our time and talents. They remind me I’m not alone, and there’s a name for what we’re battling.
Yes, we are enough, in the fullness of our humanity. We deserve care, respect, even the benefit of the doubt. And we deserve the flowers, too.
Leta McCollough Seletzky is an essayist and memoirist based in Walnut Creek, California. She is the author of the forthcoming father-daughter memoir THE KNEELING MAN. Follow her on Twitter @laseletzky.
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