In “Dear Black Man,” an essay in The Black Woman, an out-of-print anthology edited by Toni Cade Bambara that was published in 1970 and that has since got a second wind in the age of Black Girl Magic and Instagram, Fran Sanders writes:
For years, the white man has projected the theory that all Black people were the same. The outside person may change in size, shape, and, to a certain extent, color. But on the inside was contained an admixture of slyness, laziness, amorality, stupidity, dishonesty, and on top of this was added the ability to shuffle along under the worst of life’s circumstances and remain happy-go-lucky. He was wrapped up in a tight little package and neatly disposed of, thereby eliminating the necessity of dealing with him. But that was light-years ago and I am optimistic. The Black man means to be seen and heard. And indeed he is. But what of the Black woman? What has become of her?
Sanders next lays out an extensive examination of age-old misconceptions of Black women as “conversation pieces or interesting oddities,” “castrating matriarchs,” or “hot-house lilies”:
Certain fixed notions are uniformly projected onto the Black woman regardless of age, background, personality, education, ability, etc. All of the notions are those which caused women to chafe under the yoke of Victorianism. We must constantly prove ourselves. It is not enough to be good at something or to be capable at our jobs or to have very valid thoughts on any matter at hand.
And while much has evolved in the decades since the publication of her essay, many discussions about Black women—and Black people in general—still largely center on correcting misguided perceptions the White audience has of us.
This is tiring and, as Toni Morrison rightfully pointed out in the speech “A Humanist View” in 1975, a distraction that
keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, again you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Like the Black man of the 1970s Fran Sanders wrote about, the Black woman of 2020 means to be seen and heard. Indeed, we are much more than that. Such is the proof of progress. But in light of this, any talk that involves correcting age-old stereotypes and misconceptions now feels like a time-consuming step backward. To take on the role of educating one’s classmates, colleagues, or neighbors about what it means to be Black is to participate in the narrative that we are one thing, that one voice can speak for us all, when in fact one voice can only speak to the particularity of one’s truth.
The same can be said of the misconceptions we have of each other throughout the diaspora. What are the differences that divide us, and what are the ones that bind?
These were the questions that fueled flash fires of enthusiasm, outrage, and outrage about the outrage that erupted after Focus Features in 2019 released the official trailer for the film Harriet about American abolitionist and political activist Harriet Tubman. It set various corners of Black Twitter alight with arguments about the director’s decision to cast Cynthia Erivo, a multi-award-winning British actress born to Nigerian parents, in the title role. “This is a slap in the face,” one tweet attributed to a growing movement called American Descendants of Slaves said. “We can’t tell our own stories?” It echoed similar statements made when Jordan Peele cast British actor Daniel Kaluuya as the lead in his horror film critiquing race in America, Get Out; when Ava DuVernay cast David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. in the historical drama Selma; and even in Spike Lee’s television series She’s Gotta Have It, when Nola Darling complained to her British Nigerian lover, Olu, that British actors are “taking all of our roles.”
The diaspora wars had spilled over into pop culture, and the central issues seemed to be the many meanings of Blackness and who understood which kinds of Blackness best in order to authentically portray them.
Erivo responded in a social media post:
Actors are free to go where they please for their work, but I dare you to do that fully as a Black woman in the U.K. If I see it, I applaud it. What was for someone else was never mine in the first place. Please believe that I have turned down roles I know I have no business playing. This role is not one of them. . . . If you met me in the street and hadn’t heard me speak, would you know I was British, or would you simply see a Black woman?
Later, in the weeks leading up to the film’s release, she elaborated:
I get that there is upset for me playing this role, and I understand where it comes from. It comes from so many African-American women feeling that they don’t get seen. . . . There isn’t enough—nowhere near enough—for us, as women of color, to see ourselves. And so I understand why this particular role, which is held to high esteem in this community, feels like it’s losing one of their own.
She continued:
But at the same time . . . I would speak to it as a woman of color. The only way we can come to agreement or to a common place is to understand that we all have suffered from feeling invisible; we all have suffered from otherness. And the only way to combat that is not to separate each other from each other, but to come together and have that discussion and understand what that is.
We know that American actors have played their share of African roles, among them Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland and as the spiritual mentor Zuri in Black Panther, for example, or Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina in Hotel Rwanda. But it’s worth exploring Erivo’s point. Skinfolk. All united by the legacy of colonialism, all divided by the displacement that the transatlantic slave trade wrought.
To judge our differences rather than learn from them is to fulfill the promise of transatlantic slavery to divide and conquer. It’s to put ourselves forever at odds with each other over who is Black enough, free enough, human enough—that very same distraction racism presents.
Not to mention, the argument against Erivo’s casting works under the assumption that racism is not a reality in England. It may not surface in the same way, through a hateful comment on the New York subway or a Confederate flag sighting on a road trip in Virginia, but it’s there. One need only look at the stories of Windrush and Grenfell to know this.
I’ve realized that I gain much more from examining the perceptions we have of each other, individuals throughout the diaspora, and using that understanding to build each other up.
On the cusp of my final year of university, during a summer internship in New York, I met a girl named Nana. Beautiful and impossibly stylish with model-long legs that she normally kept covered in vintage jeans distressed to just the right point. She wore cornrows that traced neat parallel lines down her scalp. American, she was born in New York, raised in Accra, and schooled in the mountains of central Ghana as a boarding student, and she regularly flew to England to visit extended family. She was well traveled and worldly.
On the surface we may have looked similar, two lanky brown girls interning at the New York alt-weekly the Village Voice. But our lives, our childhoods, our families, and our cultural references could not have been more different. She grew up in New York in largely Black immigrant communities before her parents sent her to their native Ghana, where her family had drivers and household staff. Meanwhile, my world was one of American public schools, carpools, and weekend chores in Chesapeake, Virginia. And through these differences, Nana offered me a new image of Black girlhood and what we could be—and showed me the value in seeking out a diasporic network of women in my own life, women who could help me interrogate what I had been taught and who challenged me to leave my comfort zone and explore geographically new environments. As we’ve grown older together as friends, I can look back and see how Nana’s free and open approach to travel contributed to the making of me.