10 Ways You Can Support Black Women
1. Stop slandering our natural features. Stop with the dark skin jokes. Stop with the natural hair jokes. Stop dehumanizing black women for our features. Black womenâespecially young black girlsâinternalize these âjokesâ and grow to sincerely hate their blackness. Cut it out.
2. Respect our choices. All of them. You donât have to like it but you need to respect it. If we choose to wear our natural hair, respect it. If we choose to wear weave, respect it. Stop chastising us for the choices we make for ourselves. Stop policing how we choose to live our lives. Let us be great. Gahdamn.
3. Stop with the respectability politics. You canât say you love black women and then pick and choose which black women youâll respect based on your standards. You still give a black woman respect regardless of how she chooses to live her life. You respect all black women because we are human just like you, not just the ones who wear natural hair, listen to erykah badu and shit.
4. No means no. If you approach a black woman and she says sheâs not interested, oh my fucking god, my nigga, just leave her alone. Move on. Let it go. Please do not persist. Take the rejection gracefully. Donât call her out name, donât follow her, donât assault her. Let her be. She doesnât owe you an explanation. Her ânoâ is enough and you will deal my friend.Â
5. LISTEN. Bruh, when black women are telling you something youâre doing is harming them, can you put your ego aside and just L I S T E N. Why is that your first reaction is to get defensive? If you love black women like you say you do, wouldnât you want to know when youâre doing something harmful to them? Stop getting defensive every time a black woman calls out your misogynoir. Stop brushing that off as âbashing black men.â Stop calling black women âshea butter bitchesâ for calling out how you harm black women. Black women are just asking for empathy at the end of the day. Thatâs the least you can do.
6. Stop slut-shaming. Stop shaming black women for their sexuality. Stop calling black women âthotsâ and all kinds of hoes because her sex life is something YOU disagree with or because she presents herself in a way that conflicts with YOUR standards. Someoneâs sexuality has nothing to do with you and you donât have the right to police what a woman does with her body. Stop reducing a black womanâs worth because you donât like what she does with HER body.
7. Understand that our identity intersects. Stop telling black women they have to âpick a side.â Black women arenât black men or white womenâs âside kicks.â We are our own people with our own unique struggle that, yes, may have similarities to BMâs and WWâs struggles, but is not identical to theirs. We are black and we are women. You canât be an ally to black women and not be intersectional when our existence is the epitome of intersectionality. Black women donât just experience racial violence, we experience gender violence as well. Stop insisting that we have to divide our identity down the middle to suit you.
8. Say something when you see black women being attacked. When you see black women being harassed online and offline, do something. Yaâll gotta start holding each other accountable. Stop @-ing me telling me how terrible it is that Iâm being attacked. @ ole dude whoâs attacking me. Tell them to stop. Have my back. Intervene in the best possible way you can. Stop allowing the violence against black women to persist right in front of your eyes.
9. Please kill the âstrong black womanâ narrative. Placing this title on us constantly, denies us humanity. Black women arenât allowed to be vulnerable like everyone else. Weâre constantly told be strong or weâre written off as only angry and bitter. Weâre told how weâre suppose to feel and how to respond to violence against us. Black women are humans. We laugh, we cry, we smile. We canât be your idea of âstrongâ all the time.
10. Show up for black women. Black women consistently show up for everyone else but when it comes time for us, hardly anyone is there to be found. Police brutality doesnât just happen to black men. Recognize it. Know the names of the many black female victims of state violence. Know their stories. Share their stories. Fight for them like you fight for Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Sean Bell. Fight for black women like black women fight for you. Organize and show up for black women. Stop leaving us hanging. Stop expecting our support and giving us little to none in return.
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