black women

In 2015, to be a woman (and a black woman at that) among the general public means having to keep your defenses up.

This is no small thing. The institutional barriers to achievement faced by Black women are staggering: African American women earn only 64% of what white men earn, and they earn only 91% of what Black men earn. African American women held 8.58% of the bachelor’s degrees held by women in 2012, though they constituted 12.7% of the female population. The poverty rate for African American women is 28.6%. In comparison, the poverty rate of white, non-Hispanic women is 10.8%.

Black women have endured the unfathomable. We’ve watched our leaders be assassinated, and our hopes go with them. We’ve watched the nation’s leaders be assassinated, and watched our hopes float away with them too. We’ve buried our 5-year-old daughters after they were bombed to death in church, our 12-year-old sons who were playing in the park, and our 29-year-old daughters who were stopped for simple traffic violations.

Remember how I told you about the nasty little trolligans (trolls + hooligans = trolligans) that felt the need to show their racist behinds in response to a picture of Aamito Stacie Lagum, a Black model, modeling MAC’s new lipstick? And I slightly hinted at the Instagram clapback on the MAC photo feed. Well, what I didn’t tell you is that there’s an Instagram clapback, and then there’s a BLACK Instagram clapback. The two are worlds apart, and baby I promise you, you have seen nothing until you’ve seen a Black Insta-clapback.

I live my life at the intersections of blackness and womanhood, which means my presence is doubly erased and my words often fall on deaf ears. Even in spaces created to challenge power structures that disempower black women, we often find ourselves seemingly shouting our grievances into the ether.

Placing ourselves at the center of our lives is an act of political warfare.

We must not ignore or downplay the dangers that Black women, including trans women, face at the hands of police officers.

We must not ignore or downplay the dangers that Black women, including trans women, face at the hands of police officers.