How to Write About Black Women
As a white woman, as a feminist, as a person who is beginning to believe she might be able to breathe normally with the promise of the fog of oppression beginning to lift, I want to know what a Black woman thinks about the distinctions between her and me; her community and mine.
Reading one well-crafted voice and having a few heartfelt interpersonal exchanges may bring more clarity than any generalizations delineated by statistics and trends. There are exceptions to everything and if we all relax about our reactive defenses we are going to get somewhere good and fast. We have to.
Truth is Truth even if it falls on deaf ears. Loud, clear and gorgeous voices like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are among the leading clarion calls. Enough people are mobilized on the streets and on the sheets (of paper…) saying what’s what that the algorithms of obfuscation in the media can no longer cover it up. Thank you baby Jesus and all the higher powers to whom we pray.
So many of us are singing from the same Shut-the-Patriarchy-Down-With-All-It’s-Extractive-Capitalism sheet music that it is now, finally, acceptable to speak up and call bullshit when we see it. White women don’t know that another white woman will have her back, but she can now trust that one will. Yes, the volume of white women up close to the patriarchal powers exceeds the numbers of black women in positional authority — and one doesn’t need to account for population percentages to know that access to power is a huge injustice. But it is only now, with sisterhood in these fought for spaces, that white women can believe she can hold on to her decent job and her partner, and her sanity, while calling bullshit and maybe catalyzing change.
Mikki Kendall, author of Hood Feminism, has a chapter in her new book called, How to Write About Black Women. I jumped straight to this chapter with full, wondrous anticipation. I love the title, the invitation it offers white women and all men. But it took me a bit to cut through the satire. I turned to the introduction for help. Kendall’s admonishment to her local university to do a better job giving back to — by engaging with — the community (and let’s not forget private higher education) is insightful and her contrasting of black and white women’s effectiveness for calling bullshit is a meaty topic worth getting into the weeds about.
I get anger. I have too much of it in my heart and wish I could be more like the monk Thich Naht Hanh writes about in his 1960s journals, Fragrant Palm Leaves, who felt no anger toward a cruel king who’d chopped off his ear and stabbed him with a knife. I’m at least a lifetime away from that. I believe anger serves us by helping us to know what not to do before we can see what to do.
So Mikki tells us not to be so damn full of ourselves and our credentials, not to dismiss a Black woman’s lived experience, to stop fucking trying to profit off her distressed circumstances and stop sitting on the lid of the box she’s been stuffed into. She asks that we get over our worship of useless data-research-statistics, especially our habit of glossing over its age and shadiness.
If we want to write about a Black woman, Kendall will tell us to stop othering and stereotyping her with you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourself-for-using-these tropes like the loud and angry “Sapphire;” and to absolutely cease and desist references to her sexuality. Don’t even think about it.
All women are more economically attractive when they feel unworthy, invisible, and useless which is why the patriarchy preys on and gaslights women in intensely sophisticated ways that have been crafted over decades by the Military Industrial Complex. But what feels to me to be Mikki’s critical distinction between Black and white women has to do with perceived ability.
She infers that Black women have the trust of their community in raising each other’s children but are judged as unfit to raise their own. This seems like the exact opposite assumption about White women because privilege becomes selfish (but that is another topic).
Educational injustice is insane, immoral and inhuman. Having a white child that struggles intensely through every single year of his education in a community that supposedly has adequate resources to leave no child behind, I can barely fathom what weight, pain, and injury lies in the hearts of Black mothers.
In just this one chapter of Hood Feminism I am learning about code-switching woes and respectability politics in Black culture — or the pressure to assimilate and be assimilated into white culture, which I guess can be considered synonymous with capitalism. [Sadly I just searched online for “white culture” and the first response is “here’s what the statistics say”…]. I look forward to the rest of Mikki’s book.
Here are two of my favorite sentences from Kendall’s How to Write About Black Women chapter (referring to the Black community but perhaps also to all who have privilege):
- As feminists we need to take critical, radical measures in listening to women in the poorest communities about what they want and need instead of projecting narratives of ignorance onto them.
- We have to remember that respectability is the poisoned soil white supremacy gave us, not the hood, not being ghetto or ratchet.
I have spent so many hours of my life reflecting on the essence of respectability politics, particularly in collaborative spaces. The values conflict I experience of not wanting to shame someone being ignorant stems from being shamed by others, usually in public, when I have been ignorant. I don’t want to perpetuate “an eye for an eye” behavior so I still bite my tongue (though my non verbal is loud and clear to anyone listening) and then try to create opportunities to talk privately.
Lately I have made more room for one on one reconciliation efforts like this and it feels good; the kind of good that seems to be aligned with co-visioning new norms of interacting across differences. I get reliable and faster feedback about my wrong perceptions and I find myself learning and gaining insights about not only my own growth, but also the broader issue that brings the two (or few) of us together. Real goodness happening.
What goodness are you making happen?
I know nothing about respectability politics from Black women’s perspectives. I appreciate the effort made by writers like Mikki Kendall and so many others who are finally being heard in pivotal spaces, and I appreciate the scales finally tipping toward justice among white perspectives.
