Women's History Month

Last month, I introduced you to Troi Mckenzie, a young Black female Social Work intern from Stony Brook University, who is working with me this year. She wrote a powerful and heartfelt essay about being a Social Work graduate student and the need for commitment to social justice. This month in honor of Women’s History Month, Troi has shared deeply of herself yet again. If we are to celebrate Women, we must acknowledge the unequal labor of Black Women and other Women of Color. This is a MUST READ!! If you feel moved or shaken or uplifted (if you feel anything), thank Troi for her gift of her emotional and physical labor. I will be more than happy to share your messages with her. If you don’t feel anything, please read it again!

See you on the journey,

Robin

An Acknowledgement of the Unequal Labor of Women of Color and a Fight against Disembodiment

By: Troi McKenzie
 

“We’ve been trained to believe the lie that ignoring and neglecting the body is somehow necessary for survival or success. But in a world that is more interested in using our bodies than caring for them, disembodiment is a curse. Exhaustion won’t save us. Remember your breath.” - From “Staying Human” a 10-part meditative audio series from Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley.

What is it like to exist in a body of color? I often wonder what other people think when they see a question like that. Do they think it's hard? Is it dangerous? Is it beautiful? Is it revered? Is it considered such a nonsensical irrelevant question that it’s just dismissed? After all, no one is going to know what it is like to exist in a body of color unless you do. 

What is it like to exist in not only a body of color, but in a female body of color? I couldn’t explain it to you to be completely honest. If you ask, you’d likely not get a consistent answer. Perhaps some women would talk about their physical appearance or characteristics, or maybe some would talk about the spiritual or religious experience of being a woman. But if someone asked me, I’m not quite sure what I would say. If someone asked me, “what does it mean to be a Black woman?”. I think that I’d have to think long and hard. In the last years of my life, especially in my activist life, I have started to feel disembodied. In the psychological sense there is this awareness of detachment from my body and I often feel like I just… exist. Now maybe that has to do with mental illness but a lot of it comes with the territory of being a Black woman. This world but, specifically, the United States has made using bodies of color a standard practice. Whether it is building the infrastructure we stand on or raising the children of slave owners, bodies of color have always been a commodity. I mean there was a time when Black people were considered 3/5ths of a human being. This dehumanization has never ended and is the reason we are where we are in terms of racial conversations and relations. This insidious aspect of social justice movements, in my opinion, is that just as slave owners of the past and corporations of the modern day used bodies of color for cheap labor, social justice movements of the current era have done and do the same. Using bodies of color, and specifically female bodies of color for unpaid emotional and physical labor with no acknowledgment and no gratitude. 

It is no secret that behind many movements, there is a woman. And often it is not just any woman but a BIPOC. Though history may not uplift these women, I felt it important to hold space for them. As a form of gratitude and as a way to ground their bodies as well as my own. 

Note: I will often specify Black women because that is my lived experience but make no mistake that these expectations of dealing with all that comes with a smile is not unique to just us. 

On instinct, I would love to name every single Black, Latina, Indigenous, and Asian woman that has ever built up or supported a movement, but what I want to do is more so have a dialogue about women of color in movements (I’ll include resources to learn about specific women of color in history and present day that have been involved in social justice movements for people to read up on because names are just as important as the conversation at hand). I mentioned before that ironically and nefariously, social justice movements often employ the same dehumanizing tactics of using bodies of color for labor that the evils that they are supposedly fighting against also do. What a charged statement, I know. What else can you do except call a spade a spade. Now in theory, I can understand why one would be inclined to follow the lead of women of color. After all, wouldn’t victims of marginalization know how to organize better than anyone else? Wouldn’t they have more resilience than others? And, in many ways these sentiments are true. I recall a conversation with my parents where they stated that they felt that because Black people have always been in these types of situations, we are equipped to handle them and find our way through them in ways that other races may not be. I agree in many ways; however, there is a stark difference in how people of color view their resilience and how other races view it.  

Resilience is usually a trait that people find admirable. The ability to bounce back from adversity, is a skill that not many people develop until later in life. Most people applaud this trait, especially in children who are typically most known for their resilience. Women of color have always been labeled as resilient for better or for worse. Perhaps that is why people think we have such a high pain tolerance, and perhaps that is why people think that we can shoulder the weight of the world better than anyone else. Though there seems to be an infinite number of stereotypes of women of color, Black women specifically, have had the “strong black woman” stereotype for who knows how long. How admirable the strength of Black women. They can deal with so much hate and vitriol from both inside and outside their communities, and still come back to start the next protest. Yes, how admirable of a trait. A trait that was born out of pure necessity. If Black women weren’t resilient then what would we have done? We never had the privilege of sitting idle and doing nothing because if we didn’t do it then who would? Who would protect our children? Who would protect our parents and partners? Who would ensure there was food on the table and electricity on? Who would protect us? This resilience that was created out of pure survival instinct is so admirable, admirable to the point of exploitation. Women are so strong, Women of color are so strong that we can use that strength to our advantage. They are so strong that they can do the heavy lifting for us and so strong that even when they are drowning, with outstretched arms, desperate for air, we place more work in their hands to sink them instead of pulling them up. 

One cannot imagine, unless you live it, how tiring it is to be a Black woman. There is this expectation that we are supposed to shoulder the burden of change, with no thank you and no support except from our own sisters. That burden is heavier than anyone can even imagine, truly. That expectation is just the start of our collective disembodiment. You feel like you're on autopilot sometimes, making the same points over and over, fighting to explain why you should be treated as a human over and over. It must be some form of purgatory on earth. When does it end, no one knows. I do know that this cycle leads to nothing but burnout. We talk and talk, protest and protest, lobby and lobby, only for seemingly nothing to happen. Sure we get our win in court here and policy changes there. The greater cultural shift that we need to happen seems outside of our reach. We get frustrated, angry, hopeless, and tired. These feelings are the reason that so many women of color, particularly Black women, have decided to throw their hands up and say, “if you want change, do it yourself, cause we’ve done enough”. If people of color, if women of color, aren’t doing anything then no one will and if white women do decide to do something it probably won’t be productive like dressing up as characters from the Handmaid's Tale to most recently donning blue bracelets (allegedly meant to symbolize that they aren’t republicans or something) and putting a United States flag emoji next to an SOS emoji in their usernames. Doing things like this is a semi-decent form of symbolism that looks nice in pictures, but what is the end goal? It seems that people of color are the only ones looking at the end goal because we know that if anyone will feel the effects of systemic racism or misogyny it will be women of color first and most violently. 

People’s knee jerk reaction to any expression of these feelings is usually to invalidate them of course. Say we are being dramatic, no one told us to do that, tell us we have a victim mentality, cry that they are doing the best that they can and what more could we want. I really want to talk about the last one because it is the one that bothers me the most. Until you have exhausted every option, how can you say you’ve done enough? I don’t say I’ve done all I can because I know that I haven’t, so why do you as a white woman say that? Why would anyone say that, who knows they haven’t done all that they can? To me, that type of rhetoric just sounds like weaponized incompetence. If you pretend that you don’t know how to do something, then the other person will eventually just get frustrated and do it for you. What a succinct explanation for how white women and, frankly sometimes other women of color, do when in the face of the question, “why aren’t you doing enough?”. Such behavior is why the term “womanism” and “Black feminism” were created in order to create a space for Black women and other women of color, where needs are taken seriously and activism is intersectional. It is the reason why some women of color refuse to even be in community with white women, and why some Black women don’t even like the term “POC” and choose to distance themselves from it because they don’t feel solidarity even with other women of color. The phrase, “who keeps us safe, we keep us safe”, has been a battle cry in social justice movements for years. Amongst people of color, it is not just a rallying cry against over policing. For example, it is an admission of the reality of this country which is that in the world of activism and the world in general. No one will keep people of color safe but other people of color, and frankly no one will keep Black people safe, like other Black people.  

Now at the end of this, I’m sure that depending on your identity, you might be feeling many things. Perhaps if you are an organizer of color, you understand and if you are a white person maybe you feel defensive or full of shame as you reckon with this reality. I’m here to say that making people feel shame is not my goal and never will be. I only speak for myself, and while the reasons my fellow Black people and other people of color do not want to share activist spaces with white people are completely valid, I feel that in the fight against inequality we all will have to stand next to each other in some capacity. I know some people may disagree of course, but as we saw in the most recent election, the Black vote clearly is not enough to ensure our protection so we must rally together in one way or another. My advice to white people is simple: always strive to do more and more, find ways to organize. If you are tired then imagine how the rest of us feel. That resilience of ours that everyone admires is a skill that we learned from previous generations and continue to hone in modern day because we need to and after all, we have no choice. The key word here is that it was learned. Just like we learned it, so can you. Having access to this blog means that you’ve taken the first step, so don’t belittle yourself and think you cannot do it. If you saw someone you care about struggling, you’d ask them what you can do to help, you’d ask what you can do to support them, and ask what they need. The same logic applies to women of color as well. If you claim to care about these social justice movements then make the effort to ask not out of guilt or obligation because you are empathetic and truly care. It will take time to make the people of color around you comfortable enough to trust you and I want to note here though that you have to be mindful of not simply doing things just to get a pat on the back from people of color this is about doing things out of a deep love and care for other human beings. Wallowing in self pity does nothing, but being able to acknowledge that there is more that you can do and making the little steps to doing it, means more than you will ever know. So during this Women’s History Month, remember to uplift the women who carry a burden much heavier than most and remember that if you see them struggling try to take some of the weight off their back, so they can stand up just a little straighter and smile a bit more. And, to my fellow Black women and women of color, I hear you and I see you. Remember that you don’t have to do this on your own. You must remember that in order to save other people, you must first save yourself. We are not everyone's saviors, we are human and we deserve rest, peace, and love. We deserve a soft life. Yes, we will likely be fighting for a long time, but we must not lose ourselves in sorrow, we must not be outside of our bodies, for that is a curse and a death sentence. Feel your emotions, continue to fight, but know you don’t have to do it alone because even though no one may protect you like you protect you, you are still a human that needs a community and shoulders to cry on.

“We live in a nation that does everything to induce our rage, while simultaneously doing everything to deny that we have the right to feel it.” -Brittney Cooper

RESOURCES:

Essay and above resources shared by Troi McKenzie.


OTHER RESOURCES: 

The People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond:  Undoing Racism/Community Organizing Workshop

CSWAC (The Center for the Study of White American Culture)  Free Workshop:

Robin Schlenger