Why Most Black Women Can’t Hold Their Peace.

by Staff August 7, 2014 8 Comments News Opinion Relationships Sista Talk Weekly Columns

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(ThyBlackMan.com) Without a choice Black women carry the burdens of yesteryear. Barely exiting the womb life roles are given to them without tryout. Worse, yet, society expects Black women to succeed in those demeaning and demanding meager roles. Should a Black woman interjects the station forced upon her by those who fear her exotic appearance she is combative. And should she raise her voice to the unjust she is loud. But nothing is more damaging to a woman of color than Black on Black turmoil.

Each day Black women face issues from an era that should be long forgotten based upon the period we now live. It is sad to acknowledge but women of color as a group still embrace the slavery way of thinking. Could it be Willie Lynch succeeded when he taught callous business owners to create a hostile working environment among their slaves? Words are not being minced; but as modern-day women of color the action to sew together the fabric of fellowship that was torn long before our time has become our biggest failure.

As people Black women are recognizable forces. In a group setting Black women will tear each apart leaving nothing standing not even their fragile souls. So again, I write the following question “Could it be Willie Lynch succeeded when he taught callous business owners to create a hostile working environment among their slaves?” And please don’t be fooled in believing only whites owned slaves because slaves were also owned by Blacks. Sad to write but Blacks have exploited Blacks for centuries so the news of Black slave owners should not come as a surprise.

As a woman of color I find it sorrowful that Black women, and most of all American Black Women, have not evolved as a gender group; as a result, the slave mentality continues crippling women that were born to succeed as people, a group and part of a race. It is clear to see and understand the lamenting over our ancestral history keeps us trapped in time.

What happened to Black women during slavery was wrong. What is happening to Black women today is wrong. We are not animals. We are very human. Listen my black sisters, I want you to understand with each cheapening action directed towards women that have withstood the test of time is a penalize for being zealous despite of. The words spoken against us as a group is salted with bitter jealousy because we are strong and beautiful as the skin God purposely gave us. Only ignorance penalizes for things beyond a humans control. Somehow we as a female group need to move forward and stop toting the burdens of yesteryear. And, yes, it is those burdens that thrust Black women into settings/situations where they can’t hold their peace!

Black women we have a right to allow our voices heard. We have a right to equality. We have a right to dream and dream big. We have a right to pursue those dreams. We have a right to say no! And if our “no” is undoubtedly not heard then we need to get loud, stand-up and be account for!

Staff Writer; Annette Harrison

Official website; http://blackwomenhaveitgoingon.wordpress.com/

Also connect with this talented sister via Facebook; BlackWomenHaveItGoingOn and Twitter; AHarrsion2.

8 Comments

Tim Freeman says:

December 7, 2014 at 10:08 pm

This is nothing more than using a valid issue to explain bad behavior.

Women can be loud, without it being only in situations where they’re screaming for justice. Like, at the grocery store, or in line at the liquor store. Or in public, all of the time.

I don’t think any progress can be made while institutions validate poor behavior.

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toomanygrandkids says:

December 1, 2014 at 6:45 pm

I could be wrong but I believe when Karen said, “The real race war is against white men,” she meant that black men are at war with white men. But I could be wrong. And if I am, I apologize.

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Realman2 says:

November 30, 2014 at 8:19 pm

The thought of Black women just having some self respect for their own bodies and other black people is rare. That would be a good starting place.

for Toomanygrandkids and Northern Magnolia: You both nailed it!Totally true.

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toomanygrandkids says:

November 30, 2014 at 7:23 pm

Oh and btw, black women are peaceful people who know how to act like a woman. It’s the obnoxious, ghetto female who are loud, ignorant, and know absolutely nothing about peace. They are the ones who bring misery upon anyone of any race, including their own.

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toomanygrandkids says:

November 30, 2014 at 7:18 pm

Yes, what happened to blacks during slavery was wrong. Could I have prevented it or done something about it? NO! Could you have done anything to prevent it? Can you do something about it now? NO! White people can’t even do anything to change slavery. There’s been so many white people who have stated that slavery was wrong and shouldn’t’ve happened. Some have gone so far as to apologize even though they weren’t even born yet. But the majority of blacks can’t or refuse to accept apologies because blacks enjoy complaining and whining about slavery, racism, and the white race.

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toomanygrandkids says:

November 30, 2014 at 7:07 pm

“Without a choice black women carry the burden of yesteryear.” That’s because a large % of black women refuse to let go of the past. I noticed when I was younger that adult black women complained about slavery as if they were actually a slave. They spoke hatred toward whites and white women but yet they worked and associated with white people. When I noticed how adult blacks would skin and grin up in white people’s face then talk about those whites behind their backs, one phrase came to my mind: TWO-FACED. Us kids saw for ourselves how fake and phony black females were toward one another so it wasn’t a surprise to see them doing the same thing to whites.

If that Willie Lynch letter is something that black women still concentrate on then that’s those black women’s problem. I wish I would think, live, and judge anyone on account of some letter. I believe the time is overdue for black women to tear up that letter and throw it out of their mind.

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Northern Magnolia says:

November 12, 2014 at 3:26 am

@Karen — My short answer to your post is at the end. But I will contextualize it so you can learn a little something…

Everything in the world does not have to include you. I am sorry that you feel left out, but you’re on a site that is by and about Black people. Recall the history of your own people, and how they effectively shut most Black people out of spaces of power and modern education until just 50 years ago. Consider how many times women like me were left out — and you may still go and find exclusively white space even to the present day. Chickens come home to roost, Karen. We are not responsible here for your feelings of being left out of the equation; at least you and most of your foreparents probably did not live in a world in which being left out was more than a feeling but a daily reality reinforced by the threat of death. That is the historical experience of Black people from 1619 to 1964; that is what we are working to recover from. And yes, many wealthy white men were responsible for much of what Black people suffered in that long time period of slavery and Jim Crow — if you are not used to hearing that said, and it hurts your feelings, that is unfortunate. The truth sometimes hurts. But we no longer have to keep quiet about how we feel after four centuries of living in this country.

“The real race war is against white men” — with all due respect, you need to come to reality. White men in the United States are not being shot down by Black police officers just because they are automatically perceived as a threat. White boys are not being tracked wholesale into prison at fourth grade — nor are future prison sizes being planned in this country based on the number of White boys in fourth grade. White men do not leave their homes every day knowing that they are going to have to work twice as hard to get half the results and a quarter of the respect; they have never been classed as three-fifths of a man, or been told by the highest court in the land that they have no rights a Black man is bound to respect. White men, collectively, are the richest folks in the world; they directly control about a third of the world and have outsized influence in most of the rest. Even the Scriptures teach that white male domination of the world will only be broken by God Himself (for those that are interested, I can give you the Biblical references). Nobody has seriously warred on white men EXCEPT white men since the Moors were expelled from Spain. I suppose the thought that perhaps the relatives of the Moors and the descendants of the Mongols and the Aztecs might someday combine to exact retribution – that someday, all those racist, supremacist tomes that White peoples set up for their own ends through the last two millennia, and forced on the world, will eventually come home to roost — must haunt the cultural nightmares of many White people. But Black folks having a conversation about what they want to talk about to the exclusion of White viewpoints is hardly making war on White men — it is just an assertion that sometimes the needs and feelings of White people are NOT the supreme point of our thought. In short, Karen: if this denial of your supremacy makes you feel left out, welcome to the tiniest shadow of the experience of the rest of the human race that is not European in these past 2,500 years or so.

Women are women — true, but a vast over-simplification. Again, return to reality. You are white; therefore there is no possibility that it was legal and socially sanctioned for one of my African ancestors to have raped their way into your line of descent and killed one or more of your forefathers if they tried to defend their wife and daughters, sisters and cousins. There is no possibility that any of your foremothers had to deal with the labels mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, and all the damage that went with how they came to be, and how many of their children would come to be. There is also no possibility, unless your family was very deeply involved in civil rights, that you had to face the possibility that your husband, your brother, your son would be destroyed in the most degrading of ways for simply asserting his rights and responsibilities as a man and standing up for what was just and right. There is also little possibility that even today, when the upstanding men of your family go out, that you have to wonder if they will even survive a traffic stop, going through one of those neighborhoods that white people still consider exclusively their own, taking public transportation with friends, or even the barest suspicion of being involved with a crime because they look a little like some other Black person. I am a caramel-colored Black woman who knows her line of descent, whose quadroon grandmother told her the stories of both the rapes and the hanging trees, who has to tell her younger beloved men things for their survival that no white woman has to — and who knows what even the most upstanding, hardest-working Black men in her world has to go through just to survive. You and I are women together, Karen; that is true. But our lived and familial experiences diverge too far for reconciliation. So of course you are left out of a conversation that is by Black women about Black women; you don’t belong in it. Period. That’s not racism, that’s truth.

Short answer: Speaking of racism, that’s precisely what makes you think you even have the right to come on a site clearly by and about Black people and insert your opinion and have it have weight just because you are WHITE. I will say on behalf of my quadroon grandmother: those days are over. We do not exist just to service your feelings; if you don’t like what is being said, go somewhere else.

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Karen says:

November 11, 2014 at 1:04 am

Very interesting article, but I feel left out of the equation. I am a female that happens to be white. Why am I unable to find a web sight that empowers white women, exclusively. Oh, yeah, that would be considered racist. Women are women, no matter their race. I have read a lot of the articles on this sight and have come to the conclusion that the real race war is against white men.

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