Being strong or fierce or whatever appellation is applied to the ones who get brutalized, who sue, who wind up in the ground with those she leaves behind begging the world to #SayHerName sounds great, but the labels are cold comfort if we don’t do more to solve the problems that they are fighting. For organizers and activists these frameworks are sometimes already in place, but for the average feminist trying to fight a local social ill, especially those living in low-income communities, society as a whole has failed to provide adequate resources. Equality is great, but equity is better precisely because the emotional validation someone with financial security and the insulation of privilege might need is nearly useless for someone without those things. It’s the Strong Black Woman problem writ large enough to include other communities, though still most likely to impact Black and Brown women.
We expect marginalized voices to ring out no matter what obstacles they face, and then we penalize them for not saying the right thing in the right way. We assign a level of resilience that is unparalleled and then once it is met, we assume that the person displaying it doesn’t have feelings. Or more accurately, we decide that they don’t need anyone to care about their feelings. In fact, mainstream feminism renders the feelings of white women as the primary concern, even in situations that are emphatically not about them. Take Jill Biden’s announcement in support of her husband’s campaign that it is time for people to move on from discussing his treatment of Anita Hill despite the clear evidence that he has his own legacy of inappropriate and unwanted contact with women. Or Alyssa Milano’s response to the Georgia abortion ban with an abstinence-based “solution” that ignores the reality that those most likely to be negatively impacted are the Black and Brown women in Georgia who aren’t part-time residents.
This is the dirty underbelly of the perceived fierceness of Black and Brown women. Ultimately, the fierceness narrative is a millstone around the neck, dragging them down and endangering their chances at survival. Because pop culture and media teach us that low-income women exist to serve, to be the workhorses, we don’t consider what they may need.
We frame them as cold, undereducated, sassy, emotional, and actual servants to advance the cause of feminism. Quietly inserted into the narratives of their lives are idealized Mammy and Nanny expectations. Girls from the hood don’t need help because they can protect themselves against everything, or so mainstream feminism believes. They are ready to brawl, to be hood rats and harridans who can force the world to change, but who clearly lack answers for the problems they face inside their communities. They are simultaneously the first responders and the last to get resources. The same fear of the hood that prevents mainstream feminism from entering it without gentrifying it also contributes to the idea that no one needs to care about the scary angry women who live there, unless they can be useful.
We must move away from the strategies provided by corporate feminism that teach us to lean in but not how to actually support each other. Organizations and initiatives are wonderful ways to tackle certain societal ills, but overwhelmingly they do little to provide care or access to care for those who need it. A victim-centered approach is more than just a phrase that looks good on paper; it has to be a key component of how we structure responses to those who fought to advance the causes that feminism holds dear. We don’t even need to create a diagram in order to accomplish this goal; it already exists. We can look at existing victim-advocacy programs, can structure our responses both virtual and otherwise, to insulate victims.
In a victim-centered approach, the victim’s wishes, safety, and well-being take priority. Victim-centered feminism would bring to bear specialized services, resources, cultural competence, and, ideally, trauma-informed perspectives toward caring for the needs of those who go through the trauma of testifying or pressing charges or filing lawsuits. We would provide a conduit to the professionals best able to assess survivor needs, and we’d provide critical support to survivors in the aftermath even if they were not eligible for traditional victim-support services that may exist in their area. These skills are imperative to building rapport and trust with survivors, meeting their needs, and assisting them in creating a sense of safety and security in their lives.
We need to be tackling the loss of critical community resources ranging from mental health-care clinics to housing. We need to understand that sometimes the fiercest warriors need care and kindness. We can’t be afraid of their anger or their willingness to shout. We love that fierce energy in the moment, but we need to embrace it across time. We need to shift our ideas of who deserves support and move away from the idea that after the case everything is fixed.
THE HOOD DOESN’T HATE SMART PEOPLE
I have what my mother calls euphemistically a rebellious spirit. It’s a nice way to describe a child who is not what you expected. This does not mean that I was always strong, always sure, or anything even remotely close to the narratives of inborn self-confidence often foisted on young Black bodies to excuse the premature expectations of adulthood. I was a cowardly child who (a) hated fighting—literally cried through a fight because I hated fighting; and (b) threw my whole self into the fight anyway. I wasn’t a good fighter. I was just a child who understood that not wanting to fight is meaningless sometimes. There is a lot of research around young women of color and fighting, a narrative that lends itself to the idea that they are violent for the sake of violence. It ignores the fact that they are often the only people with an investment in their own safety outside their nearest and dearest.
I wasn’t a cool kid. I was a nerd; my nickname was Books. And yes, I got teased for talking so proper and reading so much. But it wasn’t the “Black people don’t value education” trope that gets trotted out so often. There were lots of smart kids at my grammar school, Charles S. Kozminski. We were all poor, so there was relatively little difference in our clothes in terms of price. Style was the key, and I had none. None. I was two years younger than everyone else in my grade, and my grandmother’s sense of style was age appropriate but not grade appropriate. She bought me the kind of clothes you dress little girls in that are prissy images of girlhood. Lace tights, Mary Janes, and full skirts, while everyone else was in overalls and gym shoes. I stuck out and not in a good way. It didn’t help that I sounded like I was reading from a dictionary half the time. Fortunately, I had friends who understood the social perils of being raised by a grandparent; they nudged me to hang out, to talk like the other kids did when the adults weren’t listening. I learned to code-switch sometime between seventh grade and twelfth grade. But I was always a nerd.
There’s a trend in some of these feminist books to tell you that the hood punishes you for being smart, that it hates those who reach for success. That wasn’t my experience at all. The same kids who called me Books are now adults who pass my articles around and tell me how proud of me they are, because there was nothing malicious in the teasing. I teased, I was teased; that’s basically the nature of kids. There’s a myth of exceptionalism attached to people who succeed academically after a childhood in poverty. We must be unique and thus worth listening to, but at the price of leaving behind the past and the people in it. You’re supposed to look back on those years as though they were this hardscrabble time and you would never expose your child to the same things—if you even have a child, because after all, growing up there is scarring, the kind of thing that might mean you have to sacrifice everything else to claw your way out.