F#@!% Your Respectability: All Black Girls Matter
Being a Black woman means a lot of things to a lot of different people. And if you are a Black woman, you’ve probably experienced some sort of subtle or extreme policing of your existence. What we usually come to realize is that we literally can please no one. We are also taught that there is a certain way we should act, a certain way we should look, and we are taught that there are certain things we cannot do if we want anyone to see us as humans. This means the closer we are to whiteness, the more our identity is aligned with respectability politics, the more digestible we are. This also means that some of our bodies are weaponized against Black women that are not.
Take for example Cardi B. A Black Latina from Bronx, NY. Her family was poor, she needed money, she stripped, she got it. She hustled, got famous, and started a music career. She’s from the hood, she’s loud, she speaks in AAVE, she wears revealing clothing.
Now take Solange. A Black woman from Houston, Texas. Her family comes from the middle class. She wears her hair natural. She sings about cranes and being weary of the world. She isn’t Cardi loud, but she speaks a lot about social injustices.
Solange is not completely digestible, but she is more digestible than Cardi.
So when you put these very two different Black women beside one another, you get told that one is better than the other. You get told that Cardi isn’t anything but a stripper hoe and Solange is a Black queen. But even if you are like Solange, you then get told that you are too radical, too aggressive, too Black. You get told that you should be more like Beyoncé. See what I’m getting at here?
There’s no way to win. It’s frustrating. It’s trying. It’s exhausting.
It is way past time for people to recognize that Black womanhood is not a monolith. It cannot be boiled down to a Cardi or a Solange. There are so many ways for us to be.
We should all remember the intersections between race, gender, class, and color. We should also always keep in mind how those intersections place Black women like Cardi at a disadvantage, and prop Black women like Solange above her.
When I saw this picture of Cardi and Solange, my heart screamed. For me, this picture displays a big “fuck you” to all the ashy misogynoiristic people who love to preach respectability politics in efforts to pit us against one another.
All of us matter. Cis, trans, gender non-conforming, poor, disabled, loud, ghetto, quiet and shy, ratchet, boujee,weave wearing, natural, dark skinned, strippers, doctors, singers, etc. We are all women and we are all Black.
We will continue to be individual, and our Black womanhood will not be invalidated by anyone, so fuck off :)
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