Black Women Said

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Now imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.

It’s the invisibility that burns. Amazing writing from all kinds of people is only a search box away – yet, since we are not filed under “listen to,” we are ignored. And we are ignored in favor of people who will admit to not being experts on the topic or not having certain types of experiences. This is when we start moving into erasure territory. It isn’t that we are not out there, putting work into the public consciousness. It’s that our words don’t count until they fall from the lips of a white girl.

…if I didn’t know what it was to lose all of my friends and have to make new ones, if I didn’t know what it felt like to be an outsider, I wouldn’t have left my dark bedroom of fear. If I knew what it was to be skinny and perfect and seen as such and to be just plucked out of the ether for my beauty from an early age and if I didn’t have to find it for myself and know that pain and struggle of creating your own identity, I wouldn’t be Afrobella.

I’m learning how important it is to be self-defining and self-affirming. I want, one day, to not need my worth validated by someone else- not my mother, or the lover who falls asleep unexpectedly, or my thesis advisor. I NEED to feel that I am awesome, sincerely, and not disingenuously. I also, beloveds, want that feeling for you.

If ever your rights are threatened, know that I will roar for you–and that sound that will escape this bodily cage where I’ve kept it corralled, will be like nothing you have heard or are likely to hear again.

Words are everything. Words are empires; they are ruins. Words are the fiery dragon and the watery balm that extinguishes. They rouse the beast and tame the serpent. Words impress and belittle. They mock and exhort and destroy.