You Ask What I Love About Black Women?

“Seated black woman" by felix Eduardo Vallotton

What do I love about black women someone asked? This person was later exposed as not loving black women much himself, but I thought about the question, and it wasn’t enough for a simple tweet, so I kept going. When I saw the tweet the first thought that came to mind was siimply that she is home. There are very few comforts like that of being in the presence of a black woman. Not talking, not dancing, or walking, or even love making (though this is also very high on the list) but simply being in the presence of. Observing, listening, admitting. I love them in yellow, I love them in style, I love them dressed in sass, or in quiet affirmation. Black women are acutely adept at loving themselves and each other, even though either of those things can fail them, or be lost in the wilderness of American hatred. Yet there is no other place where you are as welcome, as loved, as well articulated as to where and exactly when you can get off, and just how fast you may go to hell, and that too is love, and that is home. I love the way a ray of sunshine bows to the visage of a black woman. I love the way they glide in celebration. I love the way they high-five in exaggerative form when they agree on something ferociously. I love the way they invented the eye roll, the side-eye and Twitter. I love the way they intuitively read folk. I love the way they chew gum, and talk shit. The way they smoke, the way they harass men they really like, or sometimes the way they act as if their completely disinterested after having clocked you from a cool kilometer away. I love the way they interact with each other. My mothers, and aunties, and sisters, and friends. They way they lean their head back, or forward, or to the side to infer a myriad of things from "You know he did" to "Listen", to "Dont play with me". I loved the way my grandmother had a million different ways to use "Mmmhmm" ( a quality which those who know me say I inherited).

My late Grandmother Leanna Brock

I used to be prone (in my mischievous times as a child) to watching my two sisters play with dolls from under their bed, cackling over my hands as they covered my mouth, pretending along with my brother not to be fascinated by their imaginations, their ability to carve into time and space, bend reality to their will. Often times I wondered if they were playing at all. There are expressions in the way black women speak and interact of a type of bond in those interactions that feels as if it's what actually holds the world together. As if the very matter of the planet would burst and fragment if ever we were to actually annihilate that bond. I love that a reprimanding from a black woman is much like the remedies from our grandmothers and great grandmothers -less about the remedy, and more about the care behind it. A black woman's mouth can be cider, or castor oil. I love that black women can find so much space in so little real estate. Despite the fact that the world seems to despise them ( though for me that spite is infatuation playing at being hate, but what does that matter if all the outward aesthetics are as harmful as genuine hate) they find a corner, a pocket, a gap, and they make it their own black ass space. I remember being at a party sometime ago, with a black male friend. It was Christmas, and the air was still, but crisp. It was Los Angeles so, it might've only been sixty five degrees which to us is below wind chill. It was an ugly sweater party, so the racial make-up of the host and guests that would be there was not in question- still, I was taken aback when we arrived, at just how white this party was. Both outside and in there were at least 90 people for each, and all of them white, except me, my eager to please friend, and one black woman off to the right at the border of the shadow in the unlit Kitchen. She stood with her drink, seemingly unbothered, unshaken, but also not impressed. My friend knew her, and tossed a very limp hello in her direction that fit snugly in between the over zealous hugging and Game show host greetings he gave to white folk I had a feeling he barely knew. I tried to mingle with some of the people I recognized, but I felt disproportionately uncomfortable. I wasn’t shy, or mistreated, although a couple of racist jokes had me playing out scenarios in which I could chop the teller in the throat and get away it, but "That shit ain't funny" sufficed. I came back from the cooler and found the black woman still there, holding that drink still, seemingly unbothered, and yet definitely uncomfortable. The uncomfortable part, gave me some hesitation admittedly. Maybe she wanted to be alone, maybe she had found her space, her sanctuary, and maybe she didn't want to share. I approached with a readiness to be on my way at the sight of a frown, or the straight forward answers one gets from black women and black women only when they're disinterested in sharing their time and space- but all that went away from the moment I introduced myself. We are still friends to this day. Black women on approach have this reputation for being mean, nasty, cruel even. I have experienced this on occasion, but far more often they have been like a warm light in a strange room. Inviting, sweet, warm.

The myth of the unapproachable black woman has persisted through media and word of mouth

Latia was all of these things, and more to the point she had created this very black space where she controlled the temperature, the the volume, the entrance. In this very white house she stood there and created this very black space. I wallowed in my uncomfortability, my friend swam in acceptability and respectability, but she claimed her space, cajuned it up, and then graciously shared it with me. Black men long ago seem to have decided to focus on some version of assimilation, either of the standardization of whiteness, or of their strategy and tactics. Black women seem to have had the better focus - the preservation of our culture, of our strategy, of our very soul, but the work is tiring , because it is alone and isolated and too long it's been celebrated through fetishized and demanded labor. Home is what you make it, what have we made black women? I know what black women have made themselves, and I know that biologically they make us, and in many ways they shape us, and for the better. There are bad black women, bitter , cruel, divisive, lost, Terfs, homophobic, and even misogynistic, but the institution of black women isn't poisoned. I can’t say that about black men. I still strongly believe in black men, and I love us, but we have been seduced not by Eve, but by our own Ego. We allowed ourselves to become obsessed with proving our worth to white men, to patriarchy, and white women, rather than to our women. We've discarded our freedom for an idea of it born in white supremacy. So what do I love about black women, I love that their idea of freedom is so pure, so complete, so far reaching , so hot, so scolding, so tangible, and all encompassing, that if we just listen, we would be moved so expeditiously to its gates, we would not need feet. What I love most though about black women, is simply that they exist.

Me and my late aunt robbie