Photo by Clarke Sanders on Unsplash
Crumbling under the weight of trying to meet countless external and internal expectations, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the legacy of strength I was born into. From my ancestors who survived the horrors of slavery to the mother in the church who never seems to have an off day, I carry a kinship with women of remarkable fortitude. Women who embody the gospel of the Strong Black Woman.
In response to White racist depictions of African Americans as sexual and moral deviants, submissive servants, and sharp tongued usurpers of the masculine role, they publicly reimagined authentic Black womanhood. As twin arms of the racial uplift movement, Black clubwomen and churchwomen developed, embodied and disseminated a model of Black womanhood that emphasized moral respectability, duty to the race, and affective strength. A “real” Black woman was a StrongBlackWoman – autonomous, industrious, reliable, and capable, a devoted and selfless worker on behalf of Black families, churches, and communities, always emotionally composed and prepared to serve as a representative for the race.
Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength
March 9, 2019, we laid my grandmother, Mary Jane White, to rest and said our last goodbyes. In my eyes, she was the model of the Strong Black Woman, an image she held in my mind until the end. All I had ever seen was that façade of perfection and when it began to crack as her sunset drew near, I found myself facing a woman I barely recognized in her frailness and confusion, having lost the sharp edge of her wit.
My grandmother’s legendary strength seemed to me to be a mantle I was hardly worth carrying. I’m squishy, prone to fits of depression, and find it utterly impossible to conceal whatever storm of emotions is currently brewing inside of me from showing up on my face. And like many women of my ancestry, forced to wear the armor of the Strong Black Woman as a matter of survival, I wonder if the woman I met at the end was closer to the real Mary Jane White. Who was she when she didn’t have to be strong for everyone? When she didn’t have to carry everyone’s burdens and stifle her feelings under an image of constant calm and control? How would things have been different for me if I had seen the armor slip from time to time, would I have been so hard on myself?
All these questions that will now never be answered.
In the midst of an extremely hostile racial environment in which African-American women were widely depicted as deficient as women, and consequently as human beings, the “race women” at the turn of the century embarked upon the evangelical mission of spreading the gospel of the StrongBlackWoman. In doing so, they inadvertently locked Black women’s identities in the grips of yet another, albeit seemingly positive controlling image.
Chanequa Walker-Barnes, Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength
The Strong Black Woman is just an image, it’s like trying on a costume, it’s not something to be internalized and claimed as a singular identity. (I think it’s important to note here that there’s a distinct difference between a Black woman who is strong and the myth of the Strong Black Woman.) And here’s the thing that I take issue with, I’m wholly against being told one must be one way and one way only, all the time. So, although a multitude can be said about the harmful effects of the cultural trap of the Strong Black Woman, especially on Black women’s mental and physical health, I think what’s needed more than a call to discard it is balanced instruction on when to armor up and when to cast it aside.
As I prepare to send my daughter out into a world that could never deserve her, my natural inclination is to train her in the way of the Strong Black Woman. I want her to armor up and protect herself from a culture that refuses to see the beauty in her beautiful brown skin and tightly coiled hair. A culture that will want to socialize her to believe she laughs too loud and too easily. That she’s too opinionated and that she needs to restrain her desire to run wild and play sports while also wearing glitter ballet flats and a tutu. My girl who tells me that she doesn’t want to be a girl scout because that’s just what other girls do and prefers to play soccer instead.
But how can I teach her when to take up her armor and when to put it down? How can I teach her to be strong while showing her it’s OK not to be sometimes?
On this day, as the memories of my grandmother bubble close to the surface of my heart and I treasure the legacy she has left for me, I reimagine a world where Black women are unboxed, free to shake off who the world says they should be. In this liberated state, Black women are both strong and vulnerable, independent and interconnected, calm and sometimes not so much, free to express all the range of identities and emotions as the human beings we are.
Black women are dynamic. We can be sexy and tomboy and radical and church girl and visionary with wizardry.
Joan Morgan, She Begat This: 20 Years of the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Reading List:
Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength by Chanequa Walker-Barnes
Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America by Charisse Jones and Kumea Shorter-Gooden
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America by Melissa Harris-Perry
Must see (if you’re in Detroit):
Queen: Celebrating Black Womanhood at the Charles H. Wright