A note on black women

Underneath the superfluous layers of stigmatization, the perpetuating tendency of associative negative connotation and the consistent utter denigration, one may find the heart, soul and strength of a black woman difficult to grasp. What that divine spirit, that incomparable, unduplicated swagger in spite of the world? So popularized are the trending features, yet the being must somehow flourish in the shadows of adversity. All the while though, trust she blooms.

I was everything just about, but bread by white people. They were my best friends, my teachers, my neighbors and essentially my life, as the majority. Stagnant in my reverie of imagined reality, I believed whole heartedly that I could assimilate totally. I wrapped towels around my head at home, flailing as though a real attachment would ensue and my curly strands would develop one by one the commercialized silky shine and length of my peers. My parents, I realize now, had instilled in me the practice of depicting an illusion of what I truly was. My mother kept a relaxer in my scalp, while my Nigerian-bread father spoke nothing of the nation he hath lived in for more than 20 years and instead pulled my ear when I represented my upbringing as anything less than the white standard. Both doing their job graciously as parents to substantiate the individual I was to become in this world. Thus, I was trapped in the lie America had sold me. The lie that white was right. I gleaned from my childhood experience that if I wanted my nappy roots and melanin content to be beautiful, I would have to rely implicitly on my own accord. My eyes would need to see beyond the scope of life that stood before me and configure my own internal mental structure to push away any thoughts that found discord with it. It is that forced resilience, that standing against the wind nature of life, that anchored ego, of which I find unbridled beauty existing as the mold of the black woman to me.

Dually, the black woman encompasses the plight of womanhood garnered by what a curse it is to be black in America. Simultaneously, these struggles should cripple the conscience, decapitate the will and place the black woman furthest back in our competitive culture today. Media as a factor alone should inhibit the courage, but peculiarly enough crossing paths with a woman of African descent, I lay witness to all that of which resonates from her impeccably unapologetic air as the complete opposite. As science teaches us in adaptation, through adverse situations organisms must adjust, create what they lack in some way in order to survive and thrive. This my friends is what the black woman does. In a life that does not favor your gender or race, a being must accommodate to thrive, to succeed and to carry out a lifestyle, competitively ignoring such handicaps that could inhibit growth through a lowered self-efficacy.

I invite you to share this perspective of respect, this angle of logical perception with me. If not as another daily task added to your active lifestyle then as an ode to the life of whom elicits less recognition than deserved as a human. Truly.