In April 2016, Beyoncé released her sixth solo album and I was forever changed. The album was Lemonade, and while its true purpose was to showcase the Black woman’s experience (and to call out her unfaithful husband and his lover, who will forever be known as “Becky with the good hair”), it also served another purpose: it allowed Black women to stand up and state that they were angry. It allowed Black women to claim a feeling that they may have been afraid to claim for years because they didn’t want to seem unbearable or threatening. Watching Beyoncé stroll down that street, smashing car windows at random, with a big smile on her face, was therapeutic. It was refreshing.  

For a race of women that have had our emotions stereotyped and thrown back in our faces for centuries, it was necessary. I feel as though an apology is needed. Why, you ask? Because for every offhanded comment calling a frustrated Black woman “an Angry Black Woman,” there are white women dancing in cowboy boots, singing along to Carrie Underwood as she depicts keying “the side/Of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive.” If we compare the two videos, both Beyoncé and Carrie Underwood are livid that their respective partners are cheating on them. Both resort to violence, although Carrie’s character’s violence is a lot more personal. She’s destroying the actual car of her boyfriend, as opposed to Beyoncé’s character. I use the term “character” here because that’s also important. While we may not know any of these women personally, nothing in the tabloids have shown us that either one of these women would willingly destroy your items. In fact, Beyoncé might prefer you to place “everything you own in a box to the left.”

While Beyoncé and Carrie are feeling the same emotion, and demonstrating their anger in the same unhealthy manner, only Beyoncé receives the label of “Angry Black Woman.” Only her anger will be addressed. I would ask why that is, but a smart aleck would reply that it’s all in the name: Beyoncé is Black, and Carrie Underwood is…well, not, and “Angry White Woman” isn’t a universal trope. The idea that a Black woman sharing her frustrations deserves a term, but not a white woman doing the same thing, is racist.

Think about how Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is treated when she expresses her disgust with Trump, and other members of the Republican party. Her name is dragged through the mud. Trump famously called Waters “an extraordinarily low IQ person” after she publicly called for people to confront White House officials on their immigration policies whenever possible. However, Bill O’Reilly said it best, reducing his feelings towards Waters’ comments about our president back to her appearance: “I didn’t hear a word she said. I was looking at the James Brown wig.” I would like to apologize to Rep. Waters and to every single Black woman who has had their arguments reduced to a punchline about their appearance. It’s a cop out. It’s something that we have all faced. Whenever a man attempts to call me out of my name, I remind him that I was “a fat bitch” before he showed his ass. He’ll continue being an ass and I’ll continue being right.

The idea that a Black woman sharing her frustrations deserves a term, but not a white woman doing the same thing, is racist.
Click To Tweet

Growing up, whenever I expressed my unhappiness with an issue, I would get called an “Angry Black Woman,” even if angry wasn’t the word that I would use to describe my emotions at that time. I tend to be vocal about my feelings, and sometimes, people—usually White people, but not always—believe that I’m acting aggressive towards them, even if my anger isn’t geared towards them.

When Serena Williams was accused of coaching at the U.S. Open, she argued back, calling the umpire, Carlos Ramos, a “thief” and a “liar.” She was tired. She worked hard, and to accuse her of cheating was too much for her. She has kept her mouth closed for years, but no longer. She was ready to speak, and she was angry. But Williams lost, and commenters attacked. A cartoon by Mark Knight that depicted Williams stomping on her racket was called racist, because it depicted Williams as a brute; her opponent, Naomi Osaka, a Haitian-Japanese woman, was depicted as blonde and white. The whole story was a mess, but Williams has been targeted by the media for years. Everything from the fact that she married a white man to her strong, built body have been insulted all over the Internet.  

A Black woman is never supposed to show her anger. In fact, showing her anger outright can lead to her being “objectified and dehumanized” in comparison with her white female counterparts. A Black woman needs to make sure she isn’t seen as a threat. She needs to be “strong” and “independent” but never angry unless it suits a narrative that is being used against her. I’ve had men tell me that they love it when I’m angry, because it makes me seem so sexy. They view my anger as passion because it excites them in ways that they haven’t been excited before. However, that narrative quickly changes when I’m angry at them or angry about something that has affected me in a negative way. Then their tones change, and suddenly I’m acting defensive or I’m being too aggressive. I have been called threatening by a partner before, all because he didn’t like my tone of voice. He had dated Black women before, but he hadn’t dated a Black woman that was so quick to call him out on his shit. Men view my anger as sexy until it doesn’t benefit them in the bedroom.

I’ve had men tell me that they love it when I’m angry, because it makes me seem so sexy.
Click To Tweet

I truly believe that if you ever used the term “Angry Black Woman” to describe a Black woman who wasn’t looking to take your shit anymore, you need to sit back and apologize. Maybe you don’t know how to. It’s not the easiest thing to do because it requires you to eliminate racist and sexist bias, but it can be done. I want you to go back and think about how much garbage this woman has had to put up with before she decided that this was enough. Black women must calculate the risk that will surely present itself when she decides that she is ready to call someone out. In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Ruby Hamad discusses the “strategic tears” that white women use against women of color to make themselves play the part of the damsel in distress. It is seen as a power move, and coupled with men dismissing Black women’s feelings due to their skin color and the issue of likability, it doesn’t make Black women eager to raise their hands and voice their discomfort with an issue. It isn’t as easy as one would think.

Give this woman the chance to express herself and listen to her. If you listen closely, most of the time, she isn’t attacking you personally; she’s most likely asking you to treat her with empathy. Stop touching her hair. She is not a Chia Pet. If she isn’t being physically or emotionally abusive, let her be angry. Let her scream from the mountain tops if that’s what she needs to do. Let her take a walk around the block or take a long car ride if that’s what she needs. Confront your own issues with her before you attempt to confront her personality. Now, take a deep breath and let the fear wash over you. You owe her an apology. She deserves it.

When Netflix dropped the trailer for its latest romantic comedy Nappily Ever After over a month ago, I was slightly enamored and reasonably wary. Amid a robust wave of traditional rom-coms with diverse casts, Nappily felt like a purposeful throwback to the popular black films of ‘90s and early aughts—The Best Man, Brown Sugar and Love And Basketball—all of which cemented the film’s star, Sanaa Lathan, as a notable romantic lead. In the first minute of the trailer, we see Lathan as a glamorous, professional woman confined to a life of perfection, and jaded by a lifelong, emotionally fraught relationship with her hair.

Framed as a woman’s path to love and liberation, the plot seemed charming, specific and, to an extent, relatable. Cut to the end of the trailer where a mature-looking gentleman, presumably a love interest, looks into Lathan’s eyes and says, “brothers like women that are real.” She smiles, affirmed by his counsel. Cut to me rolling my eyes.

I held onto that inkling as I watched the film, hoping for fully-fleshed out ideas about black womanhood, intra-racial trauma, and society’s treatment of our hair. Like any projection of marginal struggles, there’s equal opportunity for completely nailing it or getting it all wrong. But stories about black female protagonists can’t be that hard to nail in 2018, right? Wrong.

The 90-minute film follows the main character Violet on a path to self-acceptance through various stages of her hair journey. In the opening scene, she recalls the stringent hair routine her mother inflicted on her as a child—washed, conditioned, and hot combed once a week. When we catch up to her adult life, Violet is a successful marketing executive obsessed with maintaining a perfect but ultimately shallow life, not to mention her straight, shiny locks.

Things quickly go awry when her boyfriend Clint doesn’t propose to her as expected, causing her life to unravel. This leads to Violet breaking up with Clint, attempting (and failing) to makeover her image, shaving her head, and sparking a relationship with a male hairdresser, Will a.k.a Mr. “Brothers Like Women That Are Real.”

We first meet Will in a hair salon where he’s comforting a woman whose appointment gets bumped when Violet snags an emergency walk-in. Staring disappointedly in a mirror at her short, natural hair, the woman bemoans, “brothers like long hair.” Will responds with the same line, “Brothers like women that are real.”

But stories about black female protagonists can’t be that hard to nail in 2018, right? Wrong.
Click To Tweet

Cut to me rolling my eyes again. It’s a remark that’s both completely hollow and fully loaded at the same time. Are all “brothers” the same? What is “real” and “not real”? Does it matter what “brothers” think of black women’s hair? Does it matter what Will thinks? The film would argue yes. Unfortunately, this moment encapsulates Will’s entire presence on screen and the false wisdom he provides Violet as a love interest.

While he’s positioned as the antidote to her fragile, insecure life with Clint, he becomes her guiding male figure who somehow knows more about black women’s hair and what they should do with it than the black women in the film. Furthermore, he symbolizes a condescension that many black men retain when it comes to the false perception of black womanhood.

The concept of Will, as a character, feels like a joke. He’s a natural hair guru who considers himself a revolutionary at a time when the natural hair product industry is booming. Despite being a hairdresser, he doesn’t style his daughter Zoe’s hair. It isn’t until Violet strikes up an unlikely companionship with Zoe that she steps in to cornrow her hair in a maternal bonding moment, despite having no experience with natural styles, as if all black women are born knowing how to braid. None of it makes sense. But it’s the black-womanly thing to do, so she magically fills the space with no explanation.

Additionally, Will is a mansplainer. In one scene, Will and Violet get into a brief back and forth about the pervasiveness of perms in the black community, which are becoming less pervasive. When Will asks why black people, who comprise 12% of the American population, purchase 70% of all wigs and weaves. Violet replies that we, black women, hate our hair. Will agrees and argues that black women need to challenge society’s beauty norms instead of reflecting them. The conversation ends there. No talk of who created these beauty norms, no recognition of the pressure on black women to adhere to them. It’s just black women’s fault for buying into the system.

Just like Will’s character, the film assumes that black women are uniquely self-loathing. This false notion has birthed the dichotomy of the Black Queen and the Basic Female that is often touted by straight, black men in our community. A Black Queen, a rare breed, is humble, modest and embraces her natural beauty.

The latter, the majority of black women, is suffering from chronic low self-esteem and wears makeup, weaves, and risqué clothing as a result. Nappily suggests that self-hate among black women is pandemic without offering any historical and political context regarding the way our natural looks are constantly degraded under white supremacy. It does, however, offer a solution to our pain: self-love.

In her recently released book Eloquent Rage, Dr. Brittney Cooper dispels this phenomenon that is often used as a means to advise black women.

Self-help gurus, pastors and poets love to point to women’s ‘low self-esteem’ as the cause for all Black-girl problems. Just learn to love yourself, we are told. But patriarchy is nothing if not the structurally induced hatred of women. If every women and girl learned to love herself fiercely, the patriarchy would still be intact.

Additionally, the polarity of Nappily’s two love interests implies another false notion, like other black romantic films, that financially successful men are bad for black women. Violet’s relationship with Clint, a doctor, is vapid and unsatisfying while her relationship with Will, a working-class man who can’t afford a car, is spiritually fulfilling and helps her embrace “realness.” We see this trend in Tyler Perry’s work frequently.

His 2013 drama Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor is a fable about a woman who leaves her less-than-satisfying husband for a wealthy entrepreneur. As a punishment, she is beaten by her new lover and contracts HIV. In Madea’s Family Reunion, Perry illustrates another toxic relationship between the character Lisa and her abusive husband, who’s an investment banker, while the heart of the film is a romance between another woman and a poetic bus driver. In Nappily, Violet doesn’t slow down her career for either man, but Will’s lifestyle ultimately feels more grounded.

While the film overshoots the emotional confinement black women have to their hair, it significantly underplays the way black women support each other. The second most endearing counsel Violet receives on her makeover and breakup from Clint is from her father. At no point in the film does her marriage-obsessed mother express any empathy for her daughter’s life unravelling. And Violet’s girlfriends (one is black with natural hair) might as well be cardboard cutouts. In one scene, at an all-women group therapy session, where a homegirl intervention is likely to occur, Violet is simply told to “own” her shaven head by the group’s leader, and the scene ends abruptly.

Ultimately, Nappily’s ideas of liberation are too male-driven to upend any of society’s expectations of black women. Its hazy narrative attempts to define “realness” as a lack of physical adornment rather than self-actualization. In the end, Violet feels free from her tiresome facade, but it’s men who define where her true happiness lies. In reality, the biggest comfort of being a black woman with black hair is the experience you share with other black women. Nappily would be a much better film if it contained stronger female bonds and acknowledged the romance within our community of women who share care tips, experiment with different looks and uplift each other’s hairstyles, whatever they may be.

“That respectful bow that #NaomiOsaka gave to Serena Williams at the presentation ceremony…that’s Japanese culture for you. An athlete and a lady. Maybe it’s time for Serena Williams to take some lessons.”

I blinked in disbelief at this Facebook post from a woman friend in India, but it found an echo across the world, especially here in America, in the wake of Osaka’s win and  Williams’ loss at the U.S. Open. We decided we could tell two of the world’s greatest athletes about the conduct of cultures, the comportment of ladies, and who exactly needs to school whom.

The controversy raging around Williams and Osaka has made many casual observers  think they are experts on tennis, umpiring, and sportsmanship. But we’ve also been weighing in on something we already have down pat—prescribing women’s behavior.

What is more disconcerting this time around is that we’re pitting two women of color against one other. Tennis is a spectator sport, but here the gaze is heightened; what transpired last Saturday was ultimately not just a game, but a spectacle of two brown, female bodies vying for glory in a sport that has been historically white and male. As if on cue, white male Australian cartoonist Mark Knight delivered an image of Serena Williams as a gigantic, fuming baby with an unruly Afro, stamping on her racket while the umpire, Carlos Ramos, asks Naomi Osaka, “ Can you just let her win?” Look closer and you will see that Osaka is drawn as a tall, skinny blonde, looking up at Ramos with both poise and a childlike innocence. Composure, here, is not for brown skin.

It’s easy to think that, because Osaka is a woman of color, racism and sexism are not at play. But when my friend and others refer to Japanese culture, what culture are they comparing it to? What ‘culture’ does that Facebook post conjure up for Serena Williams, one might wonder. What we leave unsaid speaks volumes about our beliefs. Naomi Osaka has a Japanese mother and a black, Haitian father. She holds dual citizenship in America and Japan and is a New Yorker.

Why don’t we credit her Haitian background as making her gracious?

Osaka’s victory has pushed Japan to both redefine and articulate what it means to be Japanese.  “Her soul is Japanese,” a Japanese spectator told The New York Times. “She doesn’t express her joy so excessively. Her playing style is aggressive, but she is always humble in interviews. I like that.”

This isn’t the first time that a Japanese woman has been admired for being “demure,” no matter that here she is being crowned a world class athlete and would be forgiven for whooping it up a bit. As is so often the case with controversies around race and gender, what happened with Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka tells us more about who we are, not them. This year’s U.S. Open tells us who we want our women and people of color to be.

Leslie Jamison—author of The Empathy Exams—wrote in the New York Times earlier this year: “The sad woman often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant. Angry women are messier. Their pain threatens to cause more collateral damage.”

Jamison is white. Her essay went viral, tapping into a growing national female rage—albeit a non-violent one—that’s been swelling since the Trump election and the staggering revelations of #MeToo movement. We can barely come to terms with white women’s anger, so how do we begin to find empathy, let alone support the rageful tears of a black female athlete?

What do we discern from Maria Sharapova’s words in her autobiography for Serena Williams’ behavior in the locker room after she was defeated by Sharapova in the 2004 Wimbledon final? Williams had let go, “guttural sobs, the sort that makes you heave for air, the sort that scares you…I got out as quickly as I could, but she knew I was there,” Sharapova wrote in Unstoppable: My Life So Far. Elsewhere in the book and in interviews, Sharapova has spoken of Williams’ “thick arms and legs,” and refereed to herself as “the skinny kid who beat her.”

Sharapova often spoke of being intimidated by Williams on the court. Fair enough. But the white imagination has an ongoing history of looking at even the most vulnerable moment of a black body (Serena was sobbing in the locker room!) and still feeling like a victim. The #sayhername campaign led by scholar-activist Kimberle Crenshaw is painfully poignant in describing phenomenon; the black female body has been struck dead by the white man’s fear—again and again and again—yet somehow it’s the white man who lives in terror.

Whether or not Sharapova taps into the white imagination in thinking of Williams’ sobs as animalistic, she certainly taps into the collective imaginations of gender and beauty— “thickness” as masculine or unattractive, skinny as feminine, desirable.

When we shrink away from a black woman’s guttural sobs, how could we be expected to lean into her rage?  We can’t, or at least we won’t. Let us not forget that Sandra Bland was pulled out of her car, tased, and arrested to later die in jail because she “mouthed off” to a man in power.

You shouldn’t trust me to explain tennis. I have never played a sport in my life. But I am a brown-skinned woman who has faced the consequences of mouthing off, with my family in India and at my job in the United States. I heard something in the voice and saw something in the body of Texas state trooper Brian Encinia when he dragged Bland out of her car ( “You seem irritated,” he said, clearly warning her that she had no right to be irritated, leave alone angry).

I heard the same coiled anger from the umpire Carlos Ramos on Saturday. Countless women and even more women of color know this man’s voice and feel his body language in our bones: smile, submit, be grateful to be here.

Male tennis players like John McEnroe (the prince of rage on the court),  Blake and Andy Roddick have spoken in support of Williams’ claims of sexism ,and said that they have said and done worse and gotten away with it. Yet, greater in number are those who will protest that all we are demanding from Williams is “sportsmanship,” and that the queen has fallen from grace for her own “childish” and “bratty” (the gentlest terms borrowed from the best of Twitter) behavior. I ask them to consider that racism and sexism do not show up in a vacuum without a complicated and painful history.

The sight of Williams weeping and pleading with a white female and white male referee (“This has happened to me too many times here!”) raises the specter of too many racist images to even count. Williams was crying out against a cumulative history of punitive consequences; we should hear in her cries the silenced voices of history.

For instance, earlier this year, Inside Tennis reporter Bill Simmons asked Williams if she was “intimidated” by Sharapova’s “model good looks.” He said he had waited 14 years to ask her this question, prompted by observations of the two women’s looks made by none other than Donald Trump in 2004 after Sharapova defeated Williams at Wimbledon.

A white man egged on by another white man to ask a black women—one the best athletes on the entire planet—to discuss how her face and body compares to that of a thin white woman. It’s racist, grotesque, predictable. And it adds up. That Serena Williams shows up on the court a whole and graceful athlete after a series of such abuses should leave us in awe. But, ah, Williams was grossly wrong to point to sexism last Saturday.

The New York Times brought in tennis great Martina Navratilova to get us to calm down and examine Williams’ behavior. “What Serena Got Wrong,” said the headline. And the subhead—Just because the guys might be able to get away with it doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.

What Ms. Navratilova—and others who come in with such simplistic rhetoric—should also know is this: as tennis great Billie Jean King pointed out on Twitter and later in the Washington Post, just because penalties are also handed out to male players doesn’t mean they aren’t handed out to women more often. Further, men who misbehave are not just allowed to, but rewarded for it, sometimes being given endearing titles: Andre Agassi was called “l’enfant terrible” of tennis. No such cute French terms bubble up for Ms. Williams.

Williams and Osaka dared to play. But we don’t get to sit back and enjoy that; there is no naked glee for the marginalized. We were given the spectacle of our women in tears. Like millions of women succeeding at the workplace and apologizing for it, Osaka apologized to the crowds for defeating Williams. And Williams did what many women do at the workplace. She recovered from her own disappointment and took care of her young female colleague. Williams asked the crowd to stop the booing; she asked the stadium to celebrate Osaka. She embraced her and looked genuinely happy for her victorious opponent.

But the spectacle demands that we see a black body in rage, not in repose, and a docile, demure woman set against her to make her rage all the more appalling. It doesn’t matter if that’s not who these women are. These are the roles we want them to play.

Writer Damon Young calls this the weight that black Americans carry, which robs them of their big moments. The pictures of both Williams and Osaka in tears reminded me of another moment in which black winners were denied the pure, dazzling moment of celebration in the spotlights, sashaying to center stage, awash in applause and uproarious cheers, the way white victories often are. I thought of the moment at the Oscars two years ago, when Moonlight won for Best Picture and some confusion over cards handed the spotlight for a moment to La La Land. By the time the black stars and filmmakers of Moonlight arrived on stage, the story had shifted, the lustre dulled. Sure, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway made a mistake. It could have happened to anyone.

But you see, it happens to some people more often than to others. Some of them stay gracious. Some don’t—they fall from grace.

You might not know Sarah Baartman’s face, but you know her body.

Sarah Baartman — also known as Saartjie or the “Hottentot Venus” — was born in the late 18th century in the Eastern Cape (part of modern-day South Africa). She was brought to the UK with a ship surgeon who profited from exhibiting Sarah for the entertainment of the British public because of her steatopygia. This meant that she had excess fatty tissue around her hip and bottom area, spectacular enough to warrant her, well — a spectacle. She subsequently spent most of her adult life being exhibited as a caged freak-show attraction both in London and Paris, where she died and was displayed even in death up until the late ‘70s.

There are many details about the life of Sarah Baartman that are still either unknown or unconfirmed. This includes her birth name, her cause of death, and the extent of any agency she may or may not have had in the events of her adult life. A lot of us won’t even have even heard of her, yet her story bears a troubling resemblance to the experiences of generations of black women down the line. Sarah Baartman’s reality as an attraction to behold, gawk at, and prod at manifests itself today in every hyper-sexualized fetishist remark veiled as a compliment, and every depiction of my big black ass as either comedic fodder or the accessory of the moment.

You might not know Sarah Baartman’s face, but you know her body.
Click To Tweet

Sarah’s story has always resonated with me as a young black woman with a pretty shapely behind. As a teenager especially, I was no Sarah Baartman, but I still turned heads. My developing body was the pink elephant in the room, creating tension that was exacerbated by my being both the youngest and the only girl in my family. Lewd comments from men on the street old enough to be my father went hand in hand with warnings and admonishments from relatives to not wear that skirt, or sit like that, or dance too provocatively. This seems to be a shared experience among black women growing up, and this hyper-sexualized lens from which the black female body is viewed is a major factor in how we are treated.

Sarah Baartman was one of many Khoi women who were visited by European scientists and coerced into undressing and displaying themselves to satisfy Europeans’ perverse curiosities. These scientists carried back with them the image of these women as primitive and sexually insatiable. This misconception has managed to trickle right down to the mouth-breathing creep at the bar who leers at us with suggestive confessions of “never having been with a black girl before,’’ then adopts this picture of our sexuality as primal, serving to further dehumanize and assign us the role of entertainer.

Charles Matthews, a comedian who lived in London at the time of Sarah’s station there, recorded his observations of visitors who came to view her. “One pinched her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, ‘nattral,” he wrote. Documented interactions like these further justify the fury we feel when white people tug at our hair and paint their faces black on Halloween.

The white gaze of the black body, regardless of gender, has always been and is still very much entrenched in the idea of entertainment. What were minstrel shows without the large drawn-on lips and charcoal black skin? How much funnier is it when the loud and gobby black female character we’re encouraged to poke fun at in any comedic TV show is fat and often dark-skinned? This sense of awe over the black form reduces us to being spectacles rather than human beings, something you’d see in a museum, a freak show in Sarah Baartman’s case. When black people set boundaries on our bodies, asking white people not to touch our hair or ask about our skin color, what we’re trying to get across to people is that our bodies were not made for white entertainment.

If black bodies were seen as inherently sexual, then emulating blackness has been a way white women have played with their sexuality while remaining safe in their whiteness. We keep seeing white women in the public eye monopolizing the black female body to gain them cool points (see Miley Cyrus circa 2013 and Rachel “Transracial” Dolezal who, after being outed for pretending to be black for most of her adult life, has written a book, and is now the topic of a Netflix documentary, which can only serve to give her even more publicity.) White women in the public eye who go so far as to surgically enhance their bodies to adopt typical black features like large lips and big butts tend to become the poster girls for the “body of the moment.” Everyone wants “Kim Kardashian ass” because her body is an amalgam of the erogenous features of the black woman, but without all that “black.”

Miley Cyrus’ Makeover Shows Why Black People Fight For Their Culture
theestablishment.co

This is especially interesting considering the infamous #BreakTheInternet Paper photoshoot where, in an Inception-like multi-layered recreation, Kim Kardashian stood in as the subject of a series of images that originally cast black women in a highly fetishized light (one that photographer Jean-Paul Goude has reinforced with previous works and comments.) Long before Kim’s time, the images in question have often been likened to our very own Sarah Baartman. We can’t ignore Kim’s role as the modern Sarah, this time using her body to exploit modern society as opposed to society doing the reverse. But 10 points to whoever can guess the main difference between Kim and Sarah. Her privilege in being able to cherry pick the aspects of the black female form that enable her to commandeer her universal appeal so successfully (the butt, the lips, the racial ambiguity) puts her at an advantage that no black women are welcome to.

For those without Kim’s figure, there was the bustle, which was all the rage in 19th-century women’s fashion. These huge structures (often accompanied with padding) were worn as a way of accentuating the female figure and enhancing the posterior. This means that during Sarah Baartman’s time as a freak-show attraction, the very women gawking at the natural curves on her body would likely have been enhancing their own bodies to look like hers. The difference is that while these women were seen as fashionable for their manipulated forms, black women like Sarah were being treated like freaks. It seems like a black woman’s body is only desirable (not to be confused with fetishized) when a white woman is wearing it.

The Real Reason Everyone Freaked Out Over Kim Kardashian’s Nude Selfie
theestablishment.co

One of the saddest things about Sarah Baartman’s existence, besides her enslavement and objectification, is the absence of her voice in her own narrative. Everything we know about her has been recounted by the scientists, captors, and audience members who benefited from her circumstances. Her duty was to be seen and not heard. That’s still the expectation for black women today — think about how quickly white audiences rejected the political turn Beyonce’s music took. The booty-shaking, female empowering Beyonce with her universal themes of overcoming heartbreak was actually black all of a sudden, and this made people uncomfortable.

It is this attempt to silence black women that concerns me most. As troubling as Sarah’s story is, there are plenty of black women out there who enjoy being exhibited, whether they are models, dancers, or any other type of performer. The freedom we’re asking for involves being able to express ourselves and control our bodies without attracting harassment and ridicule.

Sarah Baartman was only returned home to be buried in 2002 — more than 80 years after her death. If there’s one thing we can take from her story, it should be the reminder that every inch of the black female body — her skin, her butt, her voice — belongs to the black woman herself. It is not your costume nor your plaything. It is her being.

Every time I get a letter from my MBA program, I feel guilty. Unlike my other classmates, I don’t have a high-powered career — a vocation with thousands of people and millions of dollars in my purview. I’m a writer and what’s in my scope, most of the time, is just me and my own output. My decisions mostly affect just me.

My chosen job role doesn’t fall in the ranks of typical MBA careers like finance or marketing or something else that has “manager” in the title. And although I spent over $100,000 on classes designed to teach me how to be a leader, I have no interest in becoming one in the traditional sense. I don’t want to be a corporate denizen. I don’t want to run a company, or to run anybody’s anything. I just want to be a regular person.

I did not get to this point easily.

The road to my quasi-success began when I was a child. My mother had my IQ tested when I was 5 because she suspected that I might be very smart. When we got to the university that administered the test, the doctors there didn’t want to test me. They insisted that black children didn’t score high on IQ tests and encouraged my parents to abandon their plans. From what I’ve been told, there were some very choice words delivered by my mother before I was finally ushered into the testing room. All I remember is thinking that they were asking me really easy questions. Later, we found out that I’d scored in the “genius” range on the test; Mommy vowed never to tell me the actual number for fear that it would affect me negatively. My parents enrolled me in a gifted school soon after and I was on the “fast track” before I ever knew what it was.

Since my parents had verification for how smart I was, they groomed me to be the smartest kid in the room. And then they encouraged me to be a leader. Someone in charge of things. They told me that African Americans had not been given these opportunities for leadership and that I should seize my opportunities to be whatever I wanted to be. I’m pretty sure “whatever I wanted to be” actually meant “be something great because you can be.”

I continued to feel as though my life was supposed to be big when I entered an Ivy League college. Although we never talked about it, the understanding was that all the students there were all special in some way, and that we were all expected to run the world someday. Most folks — myself included — were running student groups and organizing protests and generally being kick-ass. It was why we were at that school in the first place. And I felt the weighty expectation that it was even more important to be running things as a woman.

My women’s studies classes were rife with stories of women who had beaten the odds and become firsts in their fields. Second-wave feminism encouraged us to redefine ourselves as women who could have it all. We could rule in the boardroom, then rule in the bedroom, and we were letting down our sistren if we chose to do anything but rule the world. Armed with feminist bravado after college, I tackled business school, followed by corporate America. I thought I was invincible.

But the path wasn’t what I imagined: I got sick in business school. I was diagnosed with major depression during my first year and I struggled to get my medication and therapy in place so that I could resume my rise to workplace importance.

Once my treatment was squared away, I again performed up to my abilities. That is, until my first post-MBA job. I still don’t know what triggered it, but I entered a depressive episode that prompted me to take a few months away from work.

In overachiever fashion, I was excited when I could go back to work. I showed up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for my first day. By the end of the week, I was crying in the HR director’s office. Apparently I was still depressed, and I was exhausted. Exhausted from thinking that I had to hide my disease. Exhausted from working early mornings and late nights. Exhausted from the constant concern about being good at my job and planning my career in addition to just doing the work. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to keep doing it all anymore. In truth, I wasn’t sure that I could do it. But I had a freshly-minted MBA degree and significant intellectual capacity. What would either thing mean if I dropped out of corporate life?

I didn’t listen to my own doubts. To counter them, I kept reminding myself how proud my parents had always been of my academic and career achievements. I thought about the other African American leaders who didn’t have the support that I had. I didn’t want to let my people down by not living up to my potential. And recalled all the feminist tomes I’d read and agreed with, saying that women could surpass our biology and traditional roles. I didn’t want to let Eleanor Roosevelt down. So I kept working.

In spite of my depression, and the later-diagnosed bipolar disorder, I accomplished a great deal in my work life. I launched products. I gave presentations. I got more responsibilities, I got promoted. But every few years, I had to leave my job to be treated for depression, including several times in an inpatient setting. And every time I got better, or better enough, I got back on the corporate merry-go-round. I read about Sheryl Sandberg and participated in “lean in” groups with my business school classmates. We talked about being leaders and representing successful careers for other women in our fields. I felt empowered by my peers and by new writings about women’s authority and success.

By the time I reached the vice president level at my last full-time job, I felt like I’d finally grabbed the brass ring that I’d been trying to grab for years. I started exhibiting my authority, puffed up from years of kudos and encouragement. Then, depression hit again and I tried to hide it. I missed days of work, I was late to everything, and I deftly covered up times when I just couldn’t concentrate — a common symptom of depression. Eventually, I couldn’t handle my work responsibilities and my responsibility to myself and my own health.

I had to quit working, this time, for a few years instead of a few months. I decided that I couldn’t go back to the professional life I had led for so long, so I turned my writing hobby into a job so that I could work from home and better manage my health.

The literary profession doesn’t subscribe to the same tenets as the corporate world. I’m a writer and all I want to be is a writer, not the Queen of All Writers. There’s no real career ladder for individual contributors — and that’s how I see myself. I get no value in participating in typical women’s leadership activities any more because all I manage are words on the page. My old corporate friends appreciate what I’m doing, but their encouragement for me speaks to an achievement culture that values upward movement over productivity.

In my old life, I looked for titles and accolades from my bosses as signs that I was doing well. Now, I just judge my success by how good I feel and how much I’m able to write and get paid for it. I still get external validation, but it doesn’t speak as loudly as that from a movement of women who think we should have high-powered careers and want them for our daughters and granddaughters.

There could be a business suit and a big presentation in my life again someday. But I’m not working in that direction. My purpose right now is to focus on an enjoyable vocation, a healthy disposition, and a fulfilling life. I’m waiting for the public conversation about women and work to shift away from leadership and toward leading a good life. Because when it comes to choosing between leadership and my health, I know which one I would choose.

I see so many women who feel forced to choose “leadership.” That was me for a long time. But for now, I’m not a leader, and that’s okay.

Steve Johnson/flickr

I am a black disabled woman. Those six words convey the essence of who I am — not all that I am, but the lens through which I navigate the world. I am black, and I am disabled. But often, these intersecting identities make me twice as much of an outsider.

I was raised by a single mother, who treated my older brother, able-bodied twin sister, and me as equals. Every bike, pair of roller skates, or scooter that they received, I got one too. I grew up shielded from the eyes of strangers and blissfully unaware of the reality of the world. In fact, I genuinely did not know that I was disabled until I reached middle school, when a boy mocked the way I walked across the cafeteria. Up until that moment, I had lived like I was able-bodied, and never considered that my walk was different than anyone else’s. I had never looked in the mirror and seen something or someone I didn’t like.

There was no going back to that bliss, though. The teasing made me painfully aware of my disability; I knew who I was now, and I didn’t like her. I spent middle school and high school trying desperately to take up less space and draw as little attention to myself as possible.

In college, I made friends who never used my body as a punchline, who saw me for the things that I took pride in showing and entrusting them with. My college years were spent unlearning my self-hatred and growing into a version of myself that I could live with. Yet still, I knew only a few disabled folks, and all of them were white.

When I first started my journey of disability activism, I believed that the entire community was inclusive on principle, that issues facing us disabled people of color specifically were just as important to white disabled folks as their causes were to us. But in early 2016, when I started speaking about issues and problems specific to disabled people of color — the lack of representation in the disability community in both mass media and medical media, the fact that 50% of almost all police shootings happen to disabled black people so that if disabled lives matter we should be speaking up and in support of #BlackLivesMatter — I was met with racial slurs and demands to stop asking for my lived disabled experiences to enter the conversation. This visceral response from disabled white people made me realize that in many ways, disabled people of color are really on their own. After speaking to three of the hardest working, most visible, and brilliant disabled women of color I know, I found that I wasn’t alone in feeling this way.

Vilissa Thompson is the founder of Ramp Your Voice!, a group promoting disability self-advocacy; she has osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease. Thompson is a social worker who got into disability activism because she didn’t see herself represented in the disabled community.

“I have experienced microaggressions when I have combatted disabled whites who are harmful to the community,” Thompson told me via email. “By ‘harmful,’ I mean that they have voiced racist and bigoted comments/posts that are severely problematic.” When I participated in Thompson’s #DisabilityTooWhite hashtag, which criticized the media for whitewashing disability, I got a sense of what she means. After a few of my tweets got some attention, I spent the days that followed blocking white disabled folks who called me slurs and told me I was an embarrassment to the movement and community because, like Thompson, I was bringing the issue of erasure within the community to light.

Maysoon Zayid is a writer, actress, tap dancer and advocate. Like me, she has cerebral palsy. I first became aware of her work when her TED talk, “I got 99 problems…palsy is just one,” went viral, with well over seven million views; the talk helped shape the way that I saw cerebral palsy and in turn, myself. Zayid, who dreams of acting on the soap opera General Hospital, became a disability advocate when she realized that disabled actors were being shunned in entertainment and media.

“I realize that in order to achieve my mission, I would need to change how Hollywood looked at and portrayed disability,” Zayid told me. “I am a fierce advocate for disabled actors playing disabled characters instead of non-disabled actors ‘cripping up.’ Those portrayals are harmful to the community. Visible disability, much like race, cannot be played and the portrayals come off as cartoonish and offensive. So I want to change that.” Zayid is developing a comedy series written and starring herself titled “If I Can Can,” a show that will have disabled cast and crew members. It has taken her seven years to find producers.

While Zayid works to change the face and attitude of disability in Hollywood, she’s having to do the same thing in the disability and Muslim communities. She says that she spends a lot of time explaining to the disability community that when race comes to play in disability experiences, being a disabled person of color adds another layer of discrimination. Maysoon sad it was very hard to convince people that it’s even more dangerous to be a person of color and disabled and that, as a Muslim-identifying woman she’s dealt with a lot of bigotry in the community. In fact, she was kicked out of the very first CP Facebook group she was in because she mentioned privilege.

Alice Wong, who has spinal muscular atrophy, is the founder and coordinator of the Disability Visibility Project, which promotes disability stories, history, and culture. Wong considers herself a researcher, storyteller, connector, and “digital amphibian,” which she describes as a creature that splashes between online and physical spaces. With Thompson, she is the author of #GetWokeADA26, a report that features the experiences of disabled people of color.

Wong uses the Disability Visibility Project to promote and champion the works of disabled people of color, and to share articles and essays related to disability in the hopes of starting conversations and dialogues. From what I’ve seen, it works. The project’s Facebook page provides a space for conversations that just don’t get to happen in the more visible, mostly white spaces we are otherwise expected to go to for resources. When the film Me Before You premiered, I saw discussion about its ableist nature and harmful portrayal of disability there before I saw it anywhere else. Wong has worked tirelessly to give disabled people of color a voice in the spaces that normally shut us out. She hopes that collecting and amplifying the voices of disabled POC will lead to greater awareness of what happens at the intersection of ableism and racism — including, she told me, the tokenism that can happen when someone is a noteworthy disabled person of color.

“While disability visibility is important, there are real trade-offs and risks to this visibility for marginalized folks. It’s tiring when people constantly ask me for resources or assistance within the disability or Asian American communities to represent some aspect of myself,” says Wong. “The labor and responsibility of representation is very real and a bit unfair when there are so few ‘known’ to the disability community. It’s on them to seek out and understand DPoC (disabled people of color) and to discover new voices and people rather than relying on the usual suspects like myself.“

As visible disabled women of color there are quite a few things that we hope the disability community learns about us. For Wong, it’s an understanding that the disability rights movement’s principles of interdependence, community, and vulnerability look different for disabled people of color than they do for white disabled people — but that’s okay. What isn’t okay is calling someone divisive because they acknowledge these differences. For Zayid, it’s the end of bigotry in the community. Thompson and I agree that the disability organizational leadership needs to step up and support disabled people of color. There are so many of us doing great work and often, we aren’t even invited to participate in their projects and initiatives.

Disabled organizations should be hiring disabled people of color and allowing us to spearhead projects. They should acknowledge when they mess up and give a sincere apology while taking steps to make sure it won’t happen again. The disability community has a long way to go and as we fight for inclusion of people of color in mainstream media, we must remember that the fight starts at home, in this community. If your disability activism isn’t inclusive, it isn’t activism.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/solange-beats-the-deadly-clock-constraining-black-women-creatives-2e6d1ce16677/ Thu, 13 Oct 2016 16:00:44 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=6972 Read more]]>

“A large number of black women writers, both past and present, have gone to early graves. To know their life stories is to be made aware of how death hovers . . . [their deaths] stand as constant reminders that life is not promised — that it is crucial for a writer to respect time.”

By Stephanie Fields

There is a bittersweet feeling I have when experiencing Solange’s masterful album, A Seat at the Table. It’s a mixture of pride and sorrow that swells when I listen to the melancholic melodies and absorb the colorful abstract visuals. Solange has delivered a thoroughly crafted, uncomfortably truthful, and hauntingly vulnerable account of what it is to be black in the world. It’s an internal journey through grief, anger, doubt, and hopelessness — notable not just for causing listeners to wonder how pain can sound so beautiful, but for the amount of time she took to complete it.

Solange reported after her album’s release that it took four years to finish her work. Such a lengthy timeline is in stark contrast to those historically afforded to black women creators. Master playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s entire career, for example, was over in just five short years.

Time has always been something of great fascination, famously described as a social construct, a portal through which one can travel, a luxury often afforded to the rich and privileged. But for black women creatives, time has proven to be a parasitic poison that has long stolen many of our beloved writers far too early. In her collection of essays on the writer at work, Remembered Rapture, bell hooks speaks of time’s insidious treatment of black women writers:

Put bluntly: Black women creatives have not been able to afford to trifle with time. For them, it is a literal tumor that eats away at their lives. Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Pat Parker, Claudia Tate, Minnie Riperton, Lorraine Hansberry, Kathleen Collins have all died pretty much the same way: fairly young, of cancer, and on the cusp of burgeoning creativity.

It’s a scary pattern, especially when you are, as I am, a black woman creative fighting tooth and nail to get work out. I’ve always been plagued by the question, why. Why did all of these brilliant women go out the same way, at the hands of such a brutal killer?

Womanist writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins provided a theory on the matter. Before her own death, she stated that it was fear that caused talented creative women to fall into a self-destructive illnesses she termed as “psychic disconnection[s].” This fear was rooted in women feeling their creative power but not being able to acknowledge and manifest it.

But what stops these women from being able to acknowledge and manifest their creative power? Is it solely feelings of imposter syndrome? The result of white-supremacist patriarchal structures that incapacitate them from accessing the tools to fully step into and realize the extent of their creativity, their genius? Collins certainly faced massive hardships. Before she could make her first film at 37 — she would die just nine years later — she tried securing funding for a screenplay and was met with such fierce resistance, it left her with a deep feeling of “discouragement,” to which she stated: “Forget it, I’ll never be able to make a film; I might as well do something else with my life.”

The denial of access to the tools to actualize a dream is criminal, yet prevalent in the experiences of black women attempting to do creative work. Their desire to create is challenged and often extinguished by deep discouragement at the hands of racist, sexist structures in creative fields and beyond. Is it having to stare down such defeat that allows fear to grow into the illness that robs these women of time? Or is it the dedication to persist beyond such racist sexist structures, such lack of power, and create anyway that requires the ultimate sacrifice of one’s life?

Eventually, Collins began making films — which required a fierce dedication, but also yielded mild success that arrived at the time of her first bout with cancer. Such was the same with the woman whom she drew great inspiration from, Lorraine Hansberry. The prolific playwright and critic died five years after she made history as the first black woman to write a stage play produced on Broadway. Was it fear that shortened Hansberry’s window? Or was it dedication?

Contrary to Collins’ theory on Hansberry’s death — a theory that eerily prophesied her own fate — James Baldwin believed Hansberry’s dedication to persist in her creative efforts was the culprit behind her early death. In “Sweet Lorraine,” the forward to Hansberry’s posthumously published book, To Be Young Gifted And Black, Baldwin writes:

“Perhaps it is just as well, after all,that she did not live to see with the outward eye what she saw so clearly with the inward one. And it is not at all farfetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man.”

Baldwin and Collins make a similar observation of timing in regards to Hansberry’s work and her illness. They both agree that she was ahead of her time, but differ in their interpretations of how she dealt with both time and illness. In Collins’ view, there was an element of fear that ate Hansberry up; in Baldwin’s, it was a fierce dedication. Are fear and dedication, then, mutually exclusive? Does one trump the other? Do either affect the amount of time black women are given to create?

In A Seat at the Table, we hear both Baldwin’s and Collins’ theories play out in a complex melee. Solange is not just providing anthems for us to sing in defense when outsiders try to touch our hair, or tell us not to bite the hand that feeds us, or that they should be able to use a word we’ve spent generations painfully reclaiming. She is not just providing an oration of her own family history, a history of Louisiana, or a man’s entrepreneurial accomplishments. Despite the beautiful melodies, and trance-like beats, the lyrics hold a weight that reveals Solange’s internal burden, which she’s carried while navigating through her sense of brokenness, grief, and fear in order to complete such an ambitious piece of work.

“I felt so many got to create my narrative and all I wanted to tell my story, our story, in my own words, and in my own voice.”

The same desire that propelled women like Collins, Hansberry, Lorde, and more is mirrored in Solange — and so are the struggles. Solange spoke about the need to maintain resources in order to complete her album and provide for her family. Her struggle speaks to the plurality of responsibility black women have had to face all while creating work. Beyond resisting the racist, sexist structures that attempt to defer their dreams, black women creators are also mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and friends, all identities that carry their own individual responsibilities. On top of being someone’s mother, lover, and friend, black women are also balancing jobs in order to fund those for whom they care as well as for their own livelihood.

They do all of this while trying to not only feel their creative power and genius, but to manifest it. Collins likened the experience of trying to complete her first film while caring for her children to “going down a terribly long tunnel. It was frightening . . . ” So often are black women’s duties hyphenated between meeting the needs of loved ones and trying to reconcile their own personal desires, this pressure is enough to give rise to the fear of one’s capacity to realize one’s full creative genius.

Such dichotomies of duty to one’s family and one’s desires and the resulting grief, fear, and desolation that occur are also reflected in two of Solange’s darkest songs: “Weary” and “Cranes in the Sky.” In one song she is succumbing to that dark space of grief and doubt when she laments her weariness of finding her place in the world and retreats into herself, her exhaustion, her internal struggles, in order to find her body, her glory:

Be leery ‘bout your place in the world

You’re feeling like you’re chasing the world

You’re leaving not a trace in the world

But you’re facing the world

In the other, she is trying to live, to create beyond the looming darkness hanging over her like cranes. She speaks of the ways she’s tried to evade it, to overcome it — with money, with fashion, with frivolity, with isolation:

I tried to let go my lover

Thought if I was alone then maybe I could recover

Even today’s most wonderfully anomalous filmmaker, Ava DuVernay, with her accomplishments of having directed an Academy Award-winning film and being the first woman to direct a $100 million movie, cannot escape the dark reality of shrinking time for the black woman creative. She recently spoke with Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah about the pressure and anxiety time imposes on black women creatives:

“I feel like I have to make the most of this time, because there’s not anyone I can look to who’s had a long window who’s a woman, period. A black person, period . . . So for me it feels like a window that could close at any time. It doesn’t feel fast like, ‘Wow, this happened fast.’ It feels fast like, ‘Better get it in.’ Before it closes.”

Thirty-four years ago, Collins found herself in a similar position as she was the premiere black woman to write, direct, and produce a feature film. But she had no one to look to for guidance, no one who had lit a path before her, no one to encourage her that she could reach the zenith of her potential. Perhaps that was the cause of her fear, perhaps that’s what led to a dark time of discouragement, perhaps that’s what shortened the time of all of the women who followed Collins; they were firsts in their own rights, painstakingly carving out trails for the women after them to blaze. Such dedication required the ultimate sacrifice of their lives.

Solange taking her time to create a sole album is a, however inadvertent, subversive response to time’s maleficent treatment of black women creatives. Though she was faced with similar feelings of doubt, a lack of resources, and extra responsibilities, the privilege she had to create without a sense of urgency, without an illness lurking over her shoulder, without time threatening to snatch her life away, was bought and paid for by the sacrifices of the black women writers before her. Solange’s process exists as an anomaly, an exception to a terrifying rule we are reminded of as we grieve the recent and far too early death of Gloria Naylor.

This is where Solange and Collins diverge. Collins existed without a predecessor, while Solange has a varied assortment of examples from whom she can pull. The same goes for me. These women, and their lives, exist as more than omens; they are inspirations that fuel my dedication when I want to succumb to fear. They lift me up when I hear the echoing of the clock ticking, of doubt telling me I can’t do something. They remind me to create with a fervency, and whatever time I can afford to take a reprieve or to even go further into my own potential has been bought and paid for by the blood, sweat, tears, fears, and dedications of the women before me.

Perhaps Solange found a similar comfort in the fact that these women had done it, pulled off the creation of such ambitious work. Perhaps it served as reassurance that she could go into the depths of her soul and pull out something as magnificent as A Seat at the Table. The fact that she emerged from those depths healthy and able to live long enough to see the fruit of such labor is, indeed, a cause for celebration.

***

Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson) and Luke Cage (Mike Colter)

By Establishment Staff

Every once in a while, a show or movie that breaks the normative mold of pop culture resonates so strongly with our readers, we field several pitches about it. This happened with trauma survivors who wanted to write about the groundbreaking representation of the titular character in Jessica Jones. It happened with women and minorities who finally saw themselves in Star Wars, and wanted to share why that was so powerful.

And now, it’s happened with Luke Cage.

The show, which debuted on September 28 on Netflix, features a Black superhero, Black female supporting characters, and a Black creator, Cheo Hodari Coker, as well as the historically rich backdrop of Harlem, New York. In a landscape rife with white male heroes, in capes or otherwise, it’s revelatory — and as such, it spoke deeply to those who don’t often see themselves represented with such depth and power on screen.

As we did with Jessica Jones and Star Wars, we’ve invited multiple writers who pitched us to weigh in on why the show is important . . . and what it means to them personally.

These are their responses.

[Spoilers ahead!]

Latonya Pettington

Luke Cage reflects the black community’s ongoing fight to be free and live in peace. It also represents the complexity of the black identity and the experiences of black people. Beneath the substantive height and bullet-proof skin, Luke Cage (Mike Colter) is a quiet, well-read guy who appreciates his community. Beneath their physical features, Misty Knight (Simone Missick) and Mariah Dillard (Alfre Woodard) are smart women with morals that make them strong and vulnerable. This complexity of black men and black women isn’t seen often in entertainment. By showing the complexity of black people, Luke Cage acknowledges our humanity.

As a black woman who recently became a fan of the superhero genre, this was the first superhero show that I’ve enjoyed in years. As a kid, I watched the animated series Static Shock and was entertained by my first black superhero. When the original Spiderman film came out, I kept wondering if anyone was going to make a Static Shock movie. I kept seeing white men and women in films and shows, and I thought that no one noticed that black people wanted to see black superheroes front and center. It took a while, but this show proved me wrong.

Luke Cage let me see myself in different characters, including Luke Cage, Misty Knight, and Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson). I also liked that I could see a bit of my experience with living among different ethnicities. In particular, there’s an Asian American couple on the show that don’t have a lot of screen time, but was portrayed as regular people instead of stereotypes. As someone with an Asian mom and a black dad, I loved that I could see the black and Asian experiences I’ve dealt with.

But the most poignant aspect of the show for me was seeing different women of color who play prominent roles. Detective Misty Knight is a brown woman with curly hair! Politician Mariah Dillard is a dark-skinned black woman! And both are actual characters. I half expected that all the women of color would be in the background, objectified, stereotypes, or killed off. Marvel doesn’t have a great track record with women of color in shows and films, so it was awesome to see women of color finally get the roles we deserve. I hope that this show will pave the way for more women of color to have better roles in onscreen superhero projects.

Ultimately, I believe that Luke Cage is powerful because a black person told the story of a black superhero. Superheroes are for everyone, but there is something special about having a superhero brought to life by someone that has the same background as them. Luke Cage felt so real and had so much heart because it involved people who live the same experiences as the characters on the show. While it isn’t the first show to do this, Luke Cage showed that people of color are more than capable of telling their own stories.

Inda Lauryn

I have a confession to make: I had no plans to watch Luke Cage when it premiered. For months, I watched my social media circle anticipate the coming of Netfix’s latest venture into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with its third series based on those comics. Having enjoyed the first season of Daredevil but ignoring the second, and having no interest in Jessica Jones, I had almost decided that Luke Cage was not for me.

But after binging The Get Down the week before the series was to premiere, I decided to give this Black-male vehicle a chance. I was terribly dismayed at the mainstream media’s attempt to kill The Get Down, declaring it as a failure with no evidence that no one was watching. With this in mind, I decided that Luke Cage was also something I could support in the hopes of seeing quality representation of blackness.

Not only did I find this representation, but I found so much more. If Black Twitter does one thing well, it’s come together as a family to support our own. I mean, look at The Wiz Live live-tweet and the trending of #BlackPantherSoLit two years before the film is even scheduled for release. Each time this happens, I’m reminded that we not only still want to see ourselves, but we also want to see ourselves on our terms in representations that are authentic in their complexities and nuances.

And this is what we got with Luke Cage: We got all our beauty, even in ugliness, and the struggles we live with every day as we navigate and negotiate a system designed to work against us. We got the respectability politics, but also the critiques that remind us why respectability will not save us. We got a lively Black community with nods to one of the most celebrated eras of Black creativity. We got a Black community that included other people of color as neighbors, friends, and business owners. We got the promise of more to come.

And I personally got to see Black women shine.

More than that, I got to see Alfre Woodard show why she is one of the most formidable actors to ever grace the screen.

Much can be (and has been) said about the colorism (and to a lesser extent, the fat erasure of Mariah) that permeates the show regarding the women of Luke Cage. But while these criticisms are valid and significant, I still appreciate the extent to which the Black women in the show are three dimensional and complex. Considering the show has a strong Black male presence behind the camera, the colorism and fat erasure did not surprise me, but the richness of the female characters in the show did.

The relationship between Misty Knight and Claire Temple had all the potential of a beautiful friendship (at least) and nice development in that, even though they are both drawn as love interests to Luke, they are not in competition with each other over him. They help each other and bond independent of Luke.

The many other supporting women — including Inspector Patricia Ridley, Candace Miller, Captain Betty Audrey, Patricia Wilson, Connie Lin, and Soledad Temple — are more than just window dressing; they are essential to character and plot development. They are their own people, providing significant threads in the fabric of this Harlem.

However, Mariah Dillard hands-down remains my favorite character of the series. As I approach middle age, seeing her as an older woman as an object of desire is a revelation. Seeing her emerge as the true “villain” of the show is just delicious. After a slew of mom roles, it’s refreshing to see Alfre Woodard bring such humanity and nuance to her corrupt councilwoman. As her pursuer says, she is that “domineering, sexy bitch we hate to love.”

While Luke Cage has its flaws, it managed to give us full representations of blackness, warts and all. It blended the tones of serious drama and comic campiness without taking away the heart and soul of Harlem. The show also attempted to do justice to its Black women characters, even though this is clearly the work of Black male imagination.

With the next season not set until 2019, we must all hope that it gets even better and richer in its blackness.

April Bridgeman

Luke Cage is packed with great action, amazing music, and superhuman feats of strength. But the best thing about it has to be the spectacular cast of female characters. The showrunners’ commitment to representation is obvious and highly enjoyable. Action is a genre where women typically get left behind. Watching most shows in this genre often leaves me feeling underwhelmed. The women are lacking in depth and substance. They fall into the same tropes, usually serving primarily as a love interest. These women often end up being particularly unfortunate and shallow in nature. Often, their endangerment is what galvanizes the hero into action for the finale. Even awesome women fall victim to Trinity Syndrome — they’re showcased as highly skilled warrior women who somehow end up being surpassed by the men they had been training. Women aren’t really afforded their own agency in a lot of the major arcs. They’re a part of the team sometimes, but rarely an equal one. When they do get their own storylines, usually it’s made known that they aren’t working on the most important or relevant piece of the story.

In Luke Cage, however, the women are an integral part of the ensemble. The women actually matter — they make the jokes; they fight the villains; they make the deals, and their stories are just as important. They aren’t accessories or props. They’re each critical in their own way. Even the minor female characters are far from tropes. Aisha Axton (Ninja N. Devoe) only appears in two episodes, but she leaves her mark on her series — she’s passionate and hard working, fighting to preserve pieces of her family’s history as her father threatens to drink them away. The opportunities for storytelling are endless.

Two main characters embody this exceptionally well in how different they are from each other. Detective Misty Knight is spectacular from the first episode. She’s collected, experienced, and approaches each case with startling attention to detail. Originally, she’s introduced to us as a potential love interest for Cage, but very early on, that changes. Her true vocation is revealed. She’s an investigator, vigorously dedicated to justice. Her only goal is to see crime and corruption in Harlem come to an end. The same commitment that drives her to solve the puzzle and arrest bad guys can make her vulnerable to outside influence. Her humanity is evident without being overtly feminized. She’s not maternal and it’s a welcome relief.

In contrast, we have the apparently polite, feminine Mariah Dillard, who plays the double-sided politician seamlessly. She’s an elegant and poised opposite to the charismatic Cottonmouth (Mahershala Ali), her cousin and business partner. She’s as warm and open in her presentation as she is cutthroat and calculating behind the scenes. Mostly, Dillard stays cool and collected. But, we still have the opportunity to experience her raw vitality — and the lengths she’ll go to when she’s been provoked. She was raised to rise above the crime and trouble of Harlem. But, as much as she wants to be separate from the criminal element, she continues to edge closer and closer to completely losing control.

In between these two are a spate of characters with different goals and means of getting what they want. And this representation goes beyond being welcome. It’s damn refreshing.

Importantly, the show also features almost exclusively Black female characters. For years, Black actresses have bemoaned the lack of roles offered to them. The same few tropes come up over and over. In particular, Black women are often portrayed as irrationally angry; on Luke Cage, while the Black female characters do express anger, their justifications are always explained. Moreover, anger isn’t a central focus of their characters, but one of many emotions they express. These women are all so much more than we’ve come to expect from our TV characters.

2016 is a time when disrespect for women is still unfortunately prevalent. Women, especially women of color, are hypersexualized by our society and reduced to stereotypes all too frequently. Luke Cage brings all kinds of badass Black women to the front of the cultural consciousness — exactly where they’ve always belonged.

Cameron Glover

Before I called myself a writer, I was a fantasy nerd. As a child, the brightly colored costumes and vast array of superpowers were enough to make me believe in the possibility of good triumphing over evil, something I especially wanted to believe when real life said otherwise. These superhero stories were not only my escape, but my inspiration, even making me believe that I, too, could someday tell these stories.

And yet even now, many years later, Black writers are still struggling to have power over their own narratives. This has caused a kind of drought in representation and visibility that we’re only just beginning to quench. And we still have a long way to go. From being supporting characters to being little more than three-dimensional tropes, marginalized people are still starved for the kind of representation that we deserve.

All of which is to say: Luke Cage is definitely a big deal.

From start to finish, Luke Cage is unapologetically Black — and that’s what makes it so compelling. Luke, with his impenetrable skin and desire to do good, isn’t the only hero of the story. While Harlem is threatened by the schemes of Cottonmouth, Mariah Dillard, Shades, and Diamondback, the city is also defended by the multifaceted female Black character of Misty Knight.

Beyond just the wide array of characters, the show is packed with references to many of the highlights of Black culture, with scenes paying homage to some of the most important figures throughout Black history. The show isn’t just about a bulletproof Black man, nor is it about who gets to defend the streets of one of America’s most iconic and important neighborhoods. It’s about who is allowed, and who is able, to stand up and become a hero, despite the odds.

One of the things that stood out to me in watching Luke Cage is the raw humanity that the Black women of the cast are allowed to exhibit. Both Misty and Mariah are complex characters, balancing their raw vulnerability with hard-driven ferocity to make Harlem better in their own way. While both have different courses of action, Misty and Mariah show that the title character doesn’t get to have all of the fun playing hero (or villain).

Though the show gets a lot of flak for its not-so-great points (the heavy respectability politics, the lackluster transitioning between major plot points, the choppy characterization of Luke himself), it reignites that optimism that I had so long ago, that Black and other marginalized fans deserve to have see themselves in a heroic light.

Luke Cage is important because it normalizes the hero narrative for everyone . . . especially for those who have long waited for their turn in line.

***

All images courtesy of Facebook