“God is in control ... She’s black.”
“What if we just let black women run everything?”
“Let me be clear: We won in Alabama because #BlackWomen led us to victory. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and we can’t take that for granted. Period.”
”Oprah 2020.”
These are just a few of the tweets extolling the virtues of black women’s political power after the December 12 special election in Alabama which gave Doug Jones a victory—marking the first time a Democrat has represented the state in the Senate in over 25 years. Democrats and their allies directed effusive praise and thanks toward black women for turning out to vote in record numbers in both Alabama and in Virginia the month before. Twitter went wild with messages about how black women were saving the country and that it was time to “trust us”—presumably meaning that it is black women who remain loyal to Democratic politics and can be counted on to vote America out of its Trumpian nightmare and into better days.
For many black women, this newfound adoration felt incredibly hollow. Sure, it always feels great to be recognized. But let’s also be truthful. The social, cultural and historical conditions under which black women live cannot be easily forgotten or fixed through simple appreciation—especially when it comes with no promise or guarantee of change. From giving birth to an entire Southern economy in the form of human labor, to working in fields ourselves, to serving abusive masters and mistresses who refused us freedom, to breaking our backs as maids, nannies and cooks and everything in-between, America has never loved or appreciated us as much as it has loved what we could do for it. So the fact that some folks suddenly got excited about what we could do in the voting booth meant little to us, particularly because we knew it would come without equity, reward or compensation.
Sadly, the experience of black women in America is always being reduced to two words beginning with the letter s—struggle and sacrifice. We are sometimes recognized for the pain and suffering that enslavement, segregation and Jim Crow, crushing poverty, systemic inequality, mass incarceration and lack of reproductive choice has caused us and our families, though often we are seen only insofar as our proximity to black men. The struggles of blackness are understood as impacting us only as the mothers, partners and loved ones of black men while the entire experience and history of misogynoir (anti-black misogyny) remains almost entirely absent from national discourse. On the other hand, when we aren’t framed in terms of struggle, we are being touted as unicorns or some other magical, mythical creature of goodness and morality that exists to sacrifice ourselves in order to save others—especially white people. Neither representation is fully accurate, though certainly the former applies more than the latter. But these two tropes consistently manage to deprive us humanity and another important s-word—self-determination.
It would be an understatement to say that 2017 was a tough year. The Trump presidency forced us as a nation to adjust to a new normal that was anything but. The consequences of allowing a reality TV star to enter the White House, who subsequently brought all of his white supremacist pals with him, were immediate and devastating. And while numerous marginalized communities were targeted through the administration’s policies, black women were overwhelmingly made vulnerable due to the intersections of race, class and gender.
Between the repeated attempts to repeal Obamacare, the revitalized War on Drugs, a Muslim ban which included four African countries, the repeal of DACA, a change in policy permitting the federal government to once again contract with private companies to manage for-profit prisons, a renewed emphasis on law and order and return to mandatory sentencing minimums, the defunding of Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, the GOP tax bill which gives aid to billion-dollar corporations and the wealthiest Americans, the dismantling of Title IX protections for sexual assault victims on university campuses and much more, black women were placed firmly in the bullseye of the Trump administration.
All of these policies will impact black women in significant and harmful ways, and they necessitate significant organizing efforts to get people engaged—both in their communities and at the ballot box. But this urgency isn’t anything new for black women. There is well-documented proof of black women’s civil and women’s rights activism dating back to the late 1700s starting with our involvement in mutual aid societies. Despite widespread stereotypes that we are living versions of reality style ratchet housewives who don’t vote, don’t raise our kids properly and don’t care about our neighborhoods, communities and families, we’ve actually been doing political and social engagement work for centuries. If anything, the black female turnout in the 2016 presidential election as well as the elections in Virginia and Alabama solidified what black women already knew—we care deeply about social issues and are willing to do the work it takes to make our cities/towns, states and nation one that works for us and our families.
But what is unspoken about all of this labor is the tremendous toll it takes on us—physically, emotionally and spiritually. It is literally killing us. And the most recent example of this is the death of Erica Garner at age 27 on December 30, 2017. Erica was the daughter of Eric Garner, the black man who died after an interaction with police on Staten Island in 2014 where he was stopped for selling loose cigarettes. He was placed in an unauthorized chokehold by officer Daniel Pantaleo who subsequently proceeded to murder him (his death was, in fact, ruled a homicide) as he gasped the words “I can’t breathe” 11 different times. Pantaleo is still employed by the NYPD.
Erica initially didn’t want to be an activist. She was reluctant to have her father’s story be used as part of the movement to demand greater police accountability. Presumably, she just wanted to grieve her loss in private. It is, after all, what any human being would want—especially given the circumstances. But, in the tradition of many brave black women before her, Erica saw beyond herself and realized this was a movement that needed her voice. Thus, she pushed on. She spoke across the country, organized protests, and publicly accused Mayor de Blasio of selectively caring about black lives. She was front and center in the presidential campaign in 2016, talking with candidates and insisting that they take up this important issue. And after three years of activism, she was tired.
In an interview in December, she said the following:
“I’m struggling right now with the stress and everything,” she said. “This thing, it beats you down. The system beats you down to where you can’t win.”
Erica’s life came to an end when she had an asthma attack which triggered a heart attack. She was placed in a medically induced coma and remained that way until she died a few days later. As Melissa Harris-Perry aptly named her piece on Erica in Elle magazine, “Erica Garner died of a heart attack. But it’s racism that’s killing black women.”
“Even though she was born a full quarter-century after the victories of the Civil Rights movement and lived most of her adulthood during the administration of the first black president, Erica's life opportunities were determined from the moment of her birth by her race, gender, and zip code. Being born a black girl meant Erica Garner was far more likely than her white counterparts to have a family marked by the American corrections system. In this country 6% of white men have connections to family members in prison, but 44% of black women are connected to imprisoned family members. Erica’s father was killed by police in 2014, but he had been arrested by the NYPD more than thirty times since 1980.”
There are many things that make the death of Erica Garner tragic. And while no official report has been issued naming her cause of death, we do know a few things for certain. We know that she was 27—much too young for a fatal heart attack. We know that she had recently given birth to a son four months prior. We also know that black women die from pregnancy-related complications at four times the rate of white women—making the US the world’s worst developed country for maternal mortality. We also know that the stress of racism takes a toll on black bodies, wearing them down at accelerated rates. According to Arline Geronimus, a faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, the term weathering is a way to describe the way continuous stress wears at the body. Weathering is a serious concern for black women in pregnancy and childbirth. And nothing serves to protect black women from these risks—not education, income level or anything else.
“Weathering “causes a lot of different health vulnerabilities and increases susceptibility to infection,” she said, “but also early onset of chronic diseases, in particular, hypertension and diabetes” — conditions that disproportionately affect blacks at much younger ages than whites. It accelerates aging at the cellular level; in a 2010 study, Geronimus and colleagues found that the telomeres (chromosomal markers of aging) of black women in their 40s and 50s appeared 7 1/2 years older on average than those of whites.”
Again, while we don’t know what medically caused the death of Erica Garner, we know that the last three years of her life were filled with immeasurable stress and grief, coupled with all the health risks that come along with being a black woman in this country. And that, we also know, was enough to kill her.
This is worth remembering when we ask, expect or even demand black women to continue to politically and socially labor for this country—especially when others are standing on the sidelines and allowing black women to risk everything, including our lives. Black women shouldn’t continually be asked to show up and do the work when others aren’t invested and don’t have skin in the game. The Underrepresented Peoples and Nations Organization states that “all peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”
So, too, then it must be we allow black women the right to self-determination. Black women will no doubt continue to do the organizing and activism work we’ve done since our arrival on these shores. But it would be a step in the right direction if those who are not black women stopped expecting it for their own benefit and started understanding all that it really takes for us to do it. Instead of empty praise for our votes, what about giving financial, socio-cultural and health support to black women? It is sorely needed.
Finally, the death of Erica Garner and the immense toll political activism takes on black women is best summed up by Dave Chappelle in his brilliant skit from 2004 in his TV show Chappelle’s Show. The skit is a play on 1960s sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver with a white family named the Niggar Family (see below for the full video). You can likely guess the types of racial stereotypes that are referenced when people address the family. In the very best part of the entire skit, Chappelle (who plays the family’s black milkman) is in a restaurant laughing heartily about the Niggar family’s behaviors when he then looks directly into the camera and says these six important words. Though not written specifically for this context, they say up everything about being a black woman in America today.
“This racism is killing me inside.”