[Oprah] And now, an OWN SPOTLIGHT.
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[melancholy music playing]
[woman] Mother.
The stars fill my mouth while I speak to the universe
on a tight rope between life and death,
negotiating the promise of an unbreakable heart.
She molds the pieces of the last one,
into a birth canal paved with gold.
While the night plays its finale,
the ocean opens its arms and pace is my breath.
I push, so the pull of waves
crashing already in celebration
of the newest extension of heaven.
[melancholy music continues]
Pushing the form of black women astronauts,
healers and architects.
Living to a soundtrack of little black girls
feeling the opera house with strings
and when pushing the choir of queen singing,
we have overcome pushing a theater
at ballerina's next door with Afros out rocking
so wade in the water, pushing the applause
for the leading actress shining like a new moon.
Under the spotlight was she plants seeds falling
from the hands of a playwright kin to her.
I push from the shoulders
of giants ancestors that left gifts.
They receive no honors for by the river
to run through their daughter's forever.
I push on the lie that I am not infinite.
But this warm has not given the world's renaissance
after Renaissance, when the world's given me sorrow
after ghetto, after brick wall.
I scaled it with the entire nation
tied around my waist, screaming 'go faster' for you.
My beautiful black daughters, I push.
[woman] Video one, take one.
[Dr. Joy] My occupation is kind of hard to put my finger on.
My occupation has been about healing for a long time, um,
and I think my existence as a black woman
is directly tied into my purpose.
I think that from the time I was a little girl,
even though I couldn't put my finger on it,
it was a wound that I couldn't quite figure out what it was.
I knew it was there, but I couldn't articulate it
in a way that made sense, even for me.
But I knew it was a deep wound.
[melancholy music playing]
I knew it was a heart wound.
It was a soul wound.
[Sheila Thomas] We've been hurt.
We've been abused and used and thrown out decades
of just not mattering to anyone.
That makes you... It makes you very angry.
Makes you upset.
A lot of us are angry because
of the things that happen in our lives.
The things that we go through,
the way we treat it. We have cause to be angry.
The misuse in abuse of the black woman's body.
It goes way back, goes back hundreds of years.
[thunder rumbling]
[melancholy music continues]
[woman] In your book, 'Fighting Words',
you state, 'Publicly articulating rage'
typically constitutes less a revelation about oppression,
than a discovery of voice.
Ooh.
Well, I'm happy to hear I said that.
[laughing]
Because I actually said that quite some time ago,
and I haven't thought about this in a while.
So this is quite interesting.
Having said that...
[sighs wearily]
The terminology now I think,
would be speaking your own truth
by claiming your own truth
and claiming all parts of yourself, including the rage,
claiming the full range of voice
is claiming the full range of self.
We also have joy, right?
We also have sorrow.
We also have pride.
We also have laughter, right?
And so I think we have a right to our anger,
and I think that we should hold on to that right to be angry.
Why would we reject anger when there's so much to be angry about,
that affect us, that affect our children,
that affect our communities, that affect our loved ones?
Why would we want to tamp that down to become a good girl?
If I do begin to assert myself,
if I begin to stand in my own truth,
"Oh, she's aggressive, she's angry, she's violent."
Out of control.
That's all you are, is an angry black woman.
I mean, there's angry white women as angry Spanish women.
I mean, there's angry women. You know, why does it have to be the black woman?
"Angry black woman."
We don't have dibs on it.
When you were labeled that, "angry black woman,"
was that one of the things that knocked you back...
That was one of those things that you just sort of think,
"Dang, you don't even know me."
Yeah.
It flies in the face of the reality of who we are.
It is taken such a level
of indomitable strength and courage
to bear the burden of consistently being,
uh, I guess, portrayed as someone less than human.
♪ Lord, got to get out ♪
[man] The new Mammy holder dispenses paper towels
with a touch of Southern hospitality.
[man 2] The tax free cash income alone
has been running $150,000 a year.
Society's views toward black women
are framed through these particular images.
The Mammy...
the Jezebel...
the welfare queen, that was relatively new.
But it's the whole notion of punishing black women for, um,
not being abused,
for saying, "We are entitled to the benefits"
"that other people get in this country."
When Social Security started in this country,
black women where one group that were excluded.
So when black women began to claim
and say, "No, we should be included,"
they became denigrated as welfare queens.
[speaks indistinctly]
[Dr. Hill-Collins] The Jezebel is the sexualized black woman.
This is the woman who again is supposed to be available
to everyone to serve them, but to serve them differently,
to serve them sexually,
and to then be punished for that.
She's there to be used and to make people comfortable.
What have we got for supper?
You stay here. I'm just gonna get a hot supper.
And then the last one is the, what?
The Mammy, yeah.
The Mammy is the mother for the white family.
That is the all nurturing black woman
who does everything for everybody else, and loves to do it.
She is the fantasy of white America.
When we think about those kind of archetypes
that have been imposed on black women,
archetype of the Mammy, of the Sapphire,
of the Jezebel, of the welfare queen,
those are meant to dehumanize us.
You call us welfare queens?
You call us lazy,
you call us bad mothers.
No one else gets those titles.
Why is that?
But if you had that image of Aunt Jemima,
you, um... you were accepted.
And I think that for decades,
all we wanted was to be accepted
and visible instead of invisible.
So often I ask my audiences, I said,
"How many of you have ever met a Black person
that isn't Black?"
The Black person that will try to be anything...
All of a sudden, anything that I can tell you,
that will convince you that I'm not Black.
Well, I have another word for it...
It's called post traumatic slave syndrome.
As a mother of two Black men...
the thing that I'm most afraid of
is that I'm going to get a call
saying that someone killed my sons.
That terrorizes me.
Mornings around here aren't just hectic...
Oh! They're insane. [laughs]
And that's why I love these.
[woman] Aunt Jemima frozen pancakes.
They're the perfect solution to busy weekday mornings.
♪ Aunt Jemima Now you're cooking ♪
[man] Hey, these are terrific. What's the secret?
Oh, it's an old family secret handed down
from generation to generation... - [laughter]
...from father to son.
- By Aunt Jemima. - The Secret is out.
I mean, I have yet to meet a black woman
who loved being a Mammy.
[woman] Did your mother work?
Yes, she did, uh, housework.
That was her way of income,
working and cleaning house
for, uh, the white people back there.
Washing and ironing.
And, um, that was her way of her income
and making a living,
because at the time,
that was all that the black woman knew to do...
at that time.
Do housework, cook...
wash, iron...
They were influenced, too. Be the Mammy they knew.
Labels, stereotypes like Mammy, um,
are what my colleague Patricia Hill-Collins
calls controlling images.
They boxes that try to contain and control us.
And one of the things that I find most important about these stereotypes
and these controlling images is, even when we're trying to defy them
and not fall into them, they're controlling us.
The process of making oneself invisible or playing small, right?
Trying not to draw negative attention to ourselves
also means that we're not drawing positive attention to ourselves.
We're not able to fulfill our potential.
So often I ask my audiences, I said, "How many Black people in my audience,"
I asked them, "How many of you have ever met a Black person that isn't Black?"
The Black person that will try to be anything...
"Oh, did I mention how much Native American I have in me?"
"Oh, and I understand based on my DNA now, that my people come from Switzerland."
All of a sudden, anything that I can tell you,
that will convince you that I'm not Black, right,
and everybody Black knows that. Well, I have another word for it...
It's called post traumatic slave syndrome.
Post traumatic slave syndrome is exactly what it sounds like.
It's multigenerational trauma, intergenerational trauma,
as it relates to people of African descent.
Being separated from your your native land,
being beaten, being sold, being raped,
being experimented on, any number of things.
As an enslaved African woman,
you um... you had no rights to your own body, no rights at all to your own body.
And it didn't start when you were a woman.
You know, that's the other kind of mythology when we talk about rapes,
were thinking about women.
You think they waited until they were eighteen?
You think few girls got to teenage years without having been raped.
To imagine being a mother...
Someone just comes in the middle of night says, you know we have some visitors.
They like the young ones.
So we going to pass her along, to the visitors that night.
See you can't wrap your head around that.
And we want to really believe that,
well that just happened a couple of times,
well according to a mid eighteen hundred census
or over six hundred thousand mixed race babies born.
That's a lot of sneaking out back.
The more disturbing pieces are the fact that you have the institution
of the church that was complicit, that with slavery was complicit with
beyond that, I mean, you look at the Reverend John Newton for example.
This was a man who spent many, many years
on slave ships, raping little girls and women.
This is his own accounts, he said that I sinned with the high hand,
and he at the same time, said that Black people
were not destined for the next world, because we didn't have souls.
[singing "Amazing Grace"]
This was the same person who penned Amazing Grace.
♪ The ♪
♪ The sound ♪
♪ that saved ♪
And it took him a long time to arrive at "Amazing Grace."
But that was because he knew what he done.
He knew later on, as he was approaching death.
That he would be held accountable for that.
I don't think anyone sings "Amazing Grace" more than Black people.
Somebody singing it this Sunday, I'm sure, "Amazing Grace."
But have no idea that the wretch was him and not them.
So now they're calling themselves the wretch when he, in fact, was the wretch.
It is so difficult to talk about the misuse and abuse
of Black women's bodies by so many different people,
on so many different levels.
If slavery is being exposed to images that tell you
you are the mule of the world or you are a Jezebel
or you are a prostitute or a bitch or a ho, then slavery is not over.
So there was an attempt by, um...
this structure from the beginning to take women's bodies,
Black women's bodies, and make them not our own.
[Dr. Joy Degrui] This one particular physician,
um, J. Marion Sims.
J. Marion Sims was a physician in the mid eighteen hundreds.
Consider the father of modern gynecology,
because he developed the speculum, which is used for every woman today.
So much goes through my head when I think about
what these men would do that would bring...
He had a makeshift hospital in his backyard in mid eighteen hundreds.
So in his makeshift hospital, and all of these slave owners
would bring these enslaved girls and women and say fix them.
And he'd go, well what's wrong with them?
They would they would be women who were suffering
from something called Obstetric fistula.
Which is a breakdown of tissue in the vaginal wall,
usually occurs during childbirth, where you actually tear all the way
through the bladder, through the rectum, and it causes,
this... gaps which causes leakage of urine and feces.
And he'd said, "We'll fix them because they're not fit for duty."
Well, obstetric fistula's
pretty horrible thing to have, but it will heal.
You still have leakage, which is horrible and uncomfortable,
but it doesn't preclude your ability, to say, working the fields.
Doesn't preclude your ability to clean, feed animals, what have you.
So what duty, then,
were they not fit for?
And that duty was they needed to be sexually accessible to the slave owner.
So he said, fix her J. Marion Sims,
so she could be fit for duty.
And that duty, didn't matter that she was twelve or ten, she's not fit for duty.
Mississippi appendectomy is a is a phrase
that describes the forced sterilization
of Black women, mainly but not only, in the South.
And the reason why the phrase is so powerful
is because it's naming a practice of deceiving Black women.
Because often people were admitted to the hospital and told, for example,
they had to get their appendix removed,
and really they were given a hysterectomy or tubal ligation.
This is a culture that wants us to talk about the political and the cultural.
Um, much more than talking about the foundation of it all is exploitation.
So the economic dimension is the exploitation
of Black women's labor and Black women's bodies.
It's that fundamental.
[Cora Mathews] At the age of fourteen,
I was in a little town out of Pine Bluff called Old Timers, Arkansas.
I began on a plantation.
There was a job, there was earning money.
It wasn't very much.
But, I was happy that at the end of the week
I had money, and I could go shopping.
And I remember, my first week of working.
I bought myself, a beautiful yellow dress,
and, uh, a pair of shoes.
And I think at the end of the week, I had about 18 dollars.
That was the way, I was taught at that time,
to, uh, earn money, for myself.
We had overseers, we had water boys to bring cold water.
Some of them were White and then there we had some that were Black.
At times, I hated it.
I wasn't very good at it.
My uncle tried to teach me because he would always
have me beside him on a row.
I wanted to fill my bag, but you have to shake it down to make it heavy
so you have a nice weight when you're going to have it weighed.
And every time I would fill my bag, he would shake it down.
And that was discouraging because I wanted a full bag like his.
And once you fill it up, then they pay you by the pound.
It was like 50 cents a pound, so you really had to pick hard to make any money.
My husband promised to get me out of there.
And he did.
Once I got engaged, then I didn't go any more.
My biggest fear is that the police
stop one of my sons and something happens to them,
they get shot or get beat up, or anything...
Anything would have happened to them.
Slavery did not end.
If that is a question of not being able to make decisions about your own life,
if slavery is a situation of economic disadvantage
and not being able to get out of it from one generation to the next,
if slavery is being exposed to images that tell you
you are the mule of the world or you are a Jezebel
or you are a prostitute or a bitch or a ho, then slavery is not over.
There's this kind of mythology around slavery
that slavery officially ended, and at that point somehow
the playing field got leveled.
But what I would submit to you is that, you know, you had Jim Crow,
all the lynchings that occurred,
thousands and thousands of lynchings occurred post-slavery,
not during In fact, if you were to look at right now,
look at the majority of lynchings that have gone on and those thousands
of lynchings that have occurred all over the United States,
there's this delusional paranoia that people of color,
and principally Black men would do to White women
what White men did to Black women. And the average Black man knew to run.
Don't even make eye contact with a White woman, which could
cause, you know, cause your death. Wrote a note to a White woman,
failed to run an errand for a White woman, startled a White woman,
All of those would lead to lynching, not just of Black men, but of the entire family.
[woman] I hear you have a problem with these gentlemen
having a barbecue here at the lake. What's going on?
- Now she don't want to talk. - [woman] She doesn't want to talk now.
It's illegal to have a charcoal grill in the park here.
- [woman] No, it's not, actually. - Yeah, it is.
I just looked at the map that says this is a designated barbecue area.
[woman] This woman don't want to let a little girl sell some water.
- Illegally selling water without a permit, yeah. - [woman] On my property.
No, I want the cops here right now.
[children crying]
- Mommy. - I'm gonna stay right here. I'm gonna stay right here.
[woman] The cops are right down the block.
So what I've been thinking about a lot lately,
and I'm a mother and I'm a godmother.
Something that I feel almost is
a transgenerational memory,
the idea that I don't have the power, really, to protect my children.
My biggest fear is that the police
stop one of my sons and something happens to them,
they get shot or get beat up, or anything...
Anything would have happened to them.
As a mother of two Black men,
The thing that I'm most afraid of is that I'm going to get a call
saying that someone killed my sons.
That terrorizes me.
[man] All right. I've asked Helen Jones to join us.
Okay, Helen, go ahead.
Okay. This is my son, John Horton
that was accused of hanging hisself
in the Men's County Jail last month
on the 30th. They came to my daughter's residence
to tell me my son hung hisself.
But they didn't say that my son
have scars in his head.
He have, uh, meat showing to where... a handcuff
was on his wrist to where it's ate down to the meat.
They didn't mention none of that, you know?
And then the bruise that's on my son's head,
you can see it clear as day
where he been hit with a billy club or a flashlight.
The line's right here.
You could see it clear as day.
I can, I can show you proof.
These lines right here is right on my baby's head right here.
And I'm just trying to figure out,
how did my son hang hisself
after taking a blow like this to his head,
without receiving medical attention from anybody.
'Cause I know he didn't get no medical attention.
This is the noose that came with my baby's body.
This is what was around his neck.
And this is not the print that's around my baby neck.
My baby have a mark around his neck this thin.
So how would, how can he hang hisself with this?
This came to me and my family, and I'm just trying to,
how did this get out of evidence and out of custody...
I have one daughter today.
She's 32, and I have a son
that, you know, that's deceased.
I knew they was doing something to John because they wouldn't let me see him.
And I tried to visit him numerous times
and they hid him from me and
kept lying to me, telling me he was over here, he was over there.
So if anything, I just want John to know that
I wish I could have saved him. I wish I could have helped my son.
That's it.
There's no way I could get over that.
I would use my dying breath to get justice for him.
So the question is, how to protect oneself.
And how do you raise a child in a culture that hates your child?
How do you raise your child in a culture
that will kill your child and not even think twice about it?
The police state is existing exactly
as it was designed to exist,
and it makes me very angry.
It makes me angry that Black mothers are gunned down,
people like Wakisha Wilson, or Kisha Michael or, Michelle Shirley.
Way, stand in the rifle sight.
We raise our children in the rifle sight.
[man] The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman.
The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman.
The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.
Faith is not only believing in something that you can't see and touch,
but it's really expressing your true potential,
We were meant to survive as units of labor.
We were meant to survive as commodities
that other people can use for other purposes.
But we were never meant to survive
as fully human beings that are seen as fully human.
If I tell you this secret, do you promise to keep it?
My armor is only flesh,
more human than you could ever imagine.
Feet swollen somewhere between systemic diabetes and years of marching
from the house to the river, across the fields,
through the underground, for women's suffrage,
for civil rights, for Bring Our Kids Home, for gay marriage,
for Black Lives Matter, for Say Her Name.
I'd be lying if I said the blood of my children
and pimped across phone screens didn't make me regret opening my eyes.
Most mornings it's hard to remember a time
when death was beautiful and old age was regular.
I don't remember a day since puberty
when the generational trauma of being held captive
didn't blow its foul breath in my face.
With the passing of cop cars, I see my voiceless sister in the trunk,
bullets destined to rip through my brother, a driver.
It's having six o'clock beers with correction officers who mocked my father,
reaching through the bars of his cage, begging for one more phone call.
It's a mama who needs 15 minutes of his voice like aspirin
at the end of her third double this week.
It's the intuition that makes your toes go numb,
the vision that glazes your face until strangers ask, what you looking so mean for?
I'd be lying if I said it doesn't hurt.
To watch him choose my gentrified beauty.
An another while in my off-brand accent, they say, she just mad.
Like after several thousand years of dying for
and beside my counterpart, I wouldn't be
and I shouldn't be, because I did it out of love.
He owes me nothing, but damn.
Sometimes I wonder if so many lives hadn't been so cruel.
Would he still be mine?
I wonder if his soul recognizes humiliation
of a beaten and raped wife for the master who stole his life?
When he looks at me, I wonder
if his spirit has PTSD.
I wonder if I can cure it.
Would you believe me if I told you
sometimes I go into the shower and just below the volume
of the radio, I tilt my head back and cry my heart out?
Heavy are the eyelids that wake after a thousand nights of morning herself.
There's no way around feeling it.
That's how you get through it.
And sometimes, the only safe place for that is in my dreams.
Sometimes I go to sleep just to lay my head
in the lap of Sojourner and be a woman again.
I am tired of announcing my strength with heartbreak.
And it ain't fair to be this tired.
We're still here and we haven't gone away.
And we are not victims, and we're not damaged.
We have painful wounds from which some of us have healed and others of us have not.
But that doesn't make us damaged goods in any way, shape or form.
It makes us leaders, actually.
I think the label resilient, like most labels,
the effect of that, in part, is tied to who is wielding that label.
In one way, resilient can be wielded and used to describe Black women
as a way to celebrate how you survive oppression.
But it can also be wielded in a way
that fetishizes strength that says, you know what?
You are so strong we really don't have to care about how we treat you.
[melancholy music playing]
[Cora Matthews] I went to a segregated school. All Black.
And my parents had taught us about the difference in the schools
I had heard of the fighting and the Kirsten protest.
To get this undone where we are to school together.
Even when I was going to church, it would get so intense.
I used to hear my father free.
He would pray out loud, you know,
and I always wanted to, uh, pray like he did.
I would hear prayers. That was just heartening
Just touching. It would make you feel that guy was somewhere close.
You could just feel the presence and that inspired me
to trust that same gut and go to go to him in prayer
and asked that things would get better.
There would be more unity in the world.
I think there's something very deep there when we talk about faith and Black women.
If you think about faith as being committed
to something that's bigger than yourself.
Faith as having hope for the future.
Many Black women have to get up every day
and have faith that they will survive that day,
that their children will survive that day,
and that their children's lives will be better than their lives.
Faith is not only believing in something that you can't see and touch,
but it's really expressing your true potential,
a potential that there's not evidence that anyone else believes in.
There's nothing else around you that is reflecting back at you, who you truly are.
But you know who you are, right?
And so it's a reclamation of your nobility.
It's a reclamation of your inherent worth,
even if the world around you does not believe it,
does not treat you according to that.
Faith is the reason why we're here, because we held onto that
against all evidence to the contrary.
Ended slavery times.
That's what's got them through a lot of the things
that they had to go through. Prayer. Singing.
Can you sing me your favorite gospel song that gets you through?
♪ Yes ♪
♪ Jesus loves me ♪
♪ Yes ♪
♪ Jesus ♪
♪ He loves me ♪
♪ Yes ♪
♪ Jesus ♪
♪ He loves me for the Bible ♪
♪ tells me so ♪
He loves me.
And part of our strength is the knowing that that pain will end.
That we're going to make sure it does.
You ain't gonna hit me no more.
I think what we're going to find out is the tiniest things,
the things that we think are just fleeting, in the big scheme of things,
I think those are going to be what's most amplified
in terms of the value of our lives.
And so I just hope that we don't take it for granted.
The hardest lesson I had to learn in life is stay strong
and knowing that I will make it to the other side.
Learning how to bear with this pain that I'm going through with John
and still be able to be there for the rest of my family that needs me.
It's not a strength that means
that there's no vulnerability and there's no pain, right?
There's wounds and there's pain and there's vulnerability
and we refuse to submit to it.
And part of our strength is the knowing that that pain will end.
That we're going to make sure it does.
You ain't gonna hit me no more.
[melancholy music playing]
All those, you know, generations of being told
what to do, when to do it, how to do it like we did that already.
There is a kind of fierce independence
and independence of mind, of will, of tenacity, of knowing.
There is a sense of knowing that Black women have.
It's a silent, quiet, and we know it
because we can look at each other and see it.
It's the reason why we could look and smile
and give that nod because it's a knowing.
You can't take that from us.
That's a spiritual reality.
That is that we were born with, and that has galvanized,
I think, Black women in every spot of the earth.
[instrumental music playing]
[Dr. Melina] Everything was set up for us not to survive.
Our perseverance, our survival, our resilience is a form of rebellion.
Refusing to succumb to the oppressions that we live under.
If you could imagine almost a diamond shaped chart.
The very top of the chart is White men and their arrows.
Moving from that top box to implication here
that White women feel sexism from white men.
And then there's an arrow from the White men
to men of color and men of color feel racism from White men.
They also feel racism from White women and then leading from White women
and men of color are two arrows that lead to a box at the bottom,
and at the bottom is his women of color.
Women of color feel racism from White women,
racism from White men, sexism from White men
and sexism from men of color.
And then when you look at that box of women of color and you look at
where the disproportionate level of injury is, health or otherwise,
you're going to have a box below that and that's Black women.
So Black women then become the oppressed of the oppressed.
We were meant to survive as units of labor.
We were meant to survive as commodities
that other people can use for other purposes.
But we were never meant to survive
as fully human beings that are seen as fully human.
Rebelling against that is a good thing.
I think that there's this notion that you tried to bury us
and only discover we were seeds.
Is a rebellion.
[Dr. Patricia] Rebellion occurs in so many different ways.
Sometimes when a Black woman is sitting there being very quiet,
she is engaged in profound rebellion in her own mind.
Sometimes rebellion is the sister who stands up
and tells you about yourself to your face.
Even though you did not ask her to say anything.
Sometimes a rebellion is working with the rules
within an institution to shift them and tweak them a little bit,
so there's a little more of this and a little less of that.
What I really love about Black women is, um, the way in which we've engaged
in the struggle for power in a way that's very different
to the White male leadership model.
Our very existence, the way that we move through the world,
um, is a refusal of both a White supremacist system or a patriarchal system.
And so we're in the best position to begin to try to imagine
and build something outside of these oppressive systems.
I'm thinking about the small-p politics in communities.
Charlotta Bass who ran for vice president
and said, win or lose, we win by raising the issues.
Women like Barbara Lee, Karen Bass and others
who attempted to kind of bridge community
organizing and kind of the work that needs to be done, that's larger
than electoral politics and using electoral politics is a tool.
I'm thinking of Maxine Waters today.
I'm thinking of Shirley Chisholm, who I got to act as in like,
a third grade play.
So we know some of their names,
but we don't know all of their names.
We don't know every Black woman who rose up on a slave plantation and said
we're going to have a work stoppage or we don't know all of the Black women
who, during the civil rights movement, took care of the folks
who were beaten or marched themselves.
Black women can do anything. We can make a meal out of nothing.
We can make music out of sorrow, right?
We can write our feelings and it becomes a poem.
We can transform pain into laughter.
Maybe it's more than creativity.
Maybe it's magic.
Maybe that's the Black girl magic.
[Dr. Patricia] The dignity and struggle
is part of the beauty of everyday life.
But you can't see it when you're in the moment.
I really think the ordinary Black people, Black women...
[Dr. Patricia sighs]
[Dr. Patricia] A small story, and maybe this will give the feel of it.
My first class that I ever taught on Black women,
I taught to eighth grade Black girls.
And I had a course that I'd expose them to kind of famous Black women.
And it's my exercise. I ask them,
"Could you name a Black woman that you really admire?"
They all said, my mother,
my grandmother, my sister.
They all named other Black women that they knew in their lives.
This is a narrative we really have to say more about.
I have a saying in my household, right?
Mama can do anything, right?
So, like, um, somebody's, I don't know,
toy will break and I'll fix it.
And I hand it back and I'll go because Mama and they'll go
can do anything, right? Because I can.
I can do anything.
Black women can do anything. We can make a meal out of nothing.
We can make music out of sorrow, right?
We can write our feelings and it becomes a poem.
We can transform pain into laughter.
Maybe it's more than creativity.
Maybe it's magic.
Maybe that's the Black girl magic, right?
Black woman magic.
Because I'm not a girl.
Life has either come through us
or life has come to us,
and we've been charged with shaping these lives.
And that is miraculous and divine.
Just like the mothers before us
shaped things and made a way, we, too, will shape things and make a way.
And so, for me, I think about my grandmothers,
and I think about what I learned from the women in my family.
You need to know more about those shoulders
because they were able to bear what few people in recent history
know anything about.
Where are those painful memories? Where did they go?
How did you cope? To deal with that?
How did you learn to love yourself?
And how did you learn to reconcile yourself?
In every single way that we've been harmed
and traumatized throughout history into the present.
Every single point is a site where healing is occurring and has to occur.
I believe that healing, survival, winning,
transforming, all of that is rooted in spiritual work.
Tapping into the Black women's energy
that's gone before us, tapping into divine energy.
Being still and listening to the voices of our foremothers
is what will heal, sustain and win for us.
'Cause the whole point is, how do we heal? And the healing part,
I say to people, I say, "Listen, when I say we need to heal",
that's just not a nice word.
I'm not just saying that.
I'm saying that we must heal, because if we don't heal,
"we actually doom future generations."
We have to heal. It's not philosophical, it's real.
And so, I think the best thing we can do
is expand what and how we consider healing
and to understand nothing is too small to contribute to our healing.
And so, I think, let... let a thousand forms of healing proliferate.
Every exchange, that eye contact.
Someone who you're sitting at the bus stop with, that exchange.
The little girl whose mom is at the cash register,
who turns around and looks at you,
how do you beam some love at her?
There's so many ways that I remember that I carry that love with me
that people didn't have to show me love, you know.
That I've felt so, you know, so sort of energized
by just random people showing me that I was valuable.
So I do feel that it's my responsibility not to waste any moments.
I think what we're going to find out is the tiniest things,
the things that we think are just fleeting in the big scheme of things,
I think those are going to be what's most amplified
in terms of the value of our lives.
And so I just hope that we don't take it for granted.
[Dr. Melina] And so then beyond spiritual work, there's each other.
So as we talk about healing, we have to be willing
to see each other and to help each other.
That's part of our healing as well, is seeing each other as pieces of a puzzle,
as parts of a beautiful mosaic.
When Black women win, right, we win. We have to lift as we climb.
It goes back to Black women connecting with each other,
Black women affirming each other.
[projector whirring]
[Jazmine] Resilience is the Black girl magic they can't rip off of me.
I've spent far too many lives perfecting the art of survival.
I have mastered mixing the perfect shades of red
over split lips I chewed silence into.
I tuned my laughter like a violin in office break rooms
to drown out the screaming of token Blackness I couldn't fully swallow.
Like flagpoles and statues,
I have climbed corporate ladders and rang the alarm from the top.
I've been handcuffed on my high horse without flinching.
I've learned what shadows to dust
over swollen eyelids that squint in prayer all night.
For sons with bandannas in their pockets
and for sons with Skittles in their hoodies.
Overlooked for a wife, I married myself
to education and travel, went to bed with wine on my tongue
and Isn't She Lovely playing from my nightstand.
When the terror of burning crosses began to visit me in my sleep,
I urged myself to dream from balconies and every corner of the earth.
Dedicated the sum of my life to the fingertips of ancestors,
touching lands of their wildest visions,
redefining what it means to be grounded.
Reclaiming my roots and my limbs.
These days, I wrap my arms
around great oaks that used to haunt me with visions of blood on their leaves
and nearly break down at the miracle of me,
still standing like a tree that should have been destroyed
by the fires and the floods and the feds a long time ago.
But by some Black girl magic, I'm still here.
You got to have long straight hair, that you're beautiful.
No.
You've got to be beautiful to be skinny.
No. We thick.
We ain't skinny. We chunky. We like meat. We got meat on our...
That's beautiful.
Beyonce got in trouble when she wore the 'fros,
when she walked out with the...
You know, again, she has an image
that White people thought that they were controlling.
Until she says, "No, you don't actually get to control that."
The myth that Black women are not beautiful is just that.
It's a myth.
And only those who fall for it and believe it...
You know, those are the ones that are... are miseducated and are missing out.
You could have a Black person with perfectly high self esteem say,
"Oh, yeah, she would have been really pretty if she wasn't so dark."
That will say to... say to another Black person.
This is a person with high self esteem.
"Yeah, well, of course he was attractive.
He had good hair and he was light-skinned."
The standard of beauty, and this is a really important historical piece,
is to understand that...
[sighs] Again, going back to the 1800s.
With the concept of Caucasian also came the concept of Caucasian beauty.
So beauty and Caucasian were simultaneously placed into a "scientific" category.
Normal human beauty is Caucasian,
so they began to assign beauty with science.
And so therefore, if beauty is equated with Caucasian and whiteness,
then anything outside of that, then, becomes something,
one, that is abnormal and not beautiful.
So anything that has to do with being Black
then becomes relegated to, again, other.
To not normal, not healthy, not beautiful.
You got to have long straight hair, that you're beautiful.
No.
You've got to be beautiful to be skinny.
No. We thick.
We ain't skinny. We chunky. We like meat. We got meat on our...
That's beautiful.
It's the idea of claiming all parts of yourself
and the multiple skin tones and histories
and hair textures of Black women ourselves.
[Dr. Ruha] So the dichotomy isn't simply be white or be natural.
Hair is a side of creativity, right?
So not being able to be pinned down...
People's decisions about what to do with their hair
are based on their own experiences of being treated differently.
I work very close with the CEOs of the company
and they're all white men. And I was asking my mom,
I was like, "Should I get these faux locs?
Like, is that appropriate for work?"
Now, if you're trying to move up, you know,
you don't want upset Mr. Jimmy or Miss Ann.
I mean, you're talking about generations of people
that have been telling you both within the culture and outside the culture,
that there's something intrinsically wrong with your hair.
I thought about it, and I was like,
"Yeah, of course I'm gonna get these faux locs."
Like, to just do what I want to do and be expressive
'cause either people are going to love it
or they're going to hate it, but either way, like, it's...
it's who I am, and I want to embrace that.
[Cora] Short hair is beautiful as well as long hair.
But sometimes we like the long hair.
We want to swing it, you know.
[laughs] Um, what I love about my hair
is that I could practically do anything with it.
Our hair is just strong and beautiful.
We can go from being natural to pressed out.
We're so creative in the way that we can look one way on Monday
and on Tuesday we look completely different than we look on Wednesday.
[inaudible]
[Cora] Black is beautiful.
Simple.
All shades.
[Sheila] Blackness is so beautiful.
We're talented
because we have the ability to recreate ourselves.
And we're sexy.
You know, the way that a Black woman's hips,
the waist, you know, the lips and the eyes
and the nose that are just so full. That people pay money,
big money, to have our lips and the roundness of our butts.
Just, our bodies... We're just... just beautiful.
In every essence, there's nothing more beautiful than a Black woman.
[interviewer] How do you embrace beauty as a young Black woman?
By telling myself I'm beautiful every day in the mirror.
It's a good strategy.
[interviewer] And who taught you that?
Myself.
I had to.
I am cross-eyed and people every day ask me,
"What's wrong with your eyes?"
Sometimes it'll get me down.
But I just gotta go to the mirror, tell myself I'm beautiful.
[interviewer] Was it hard to do that initially? To go in front of the mirror
and tell yourself that you're beautiful?
No.
'Cause I was never afraid to come to myself
and tell myself how I'm feeling.
Makes me feel like I'm in power.
I'm able to do what I would like to.
[Dr. Patricia] We believe in your beauty.
We believe in your possibilities.
We believe in your power.
And if you haven't started believing in yourself yet, today is a good day to start.
One thing that I love about myself
is my ability to love people.
That I make people laugh.
- And I also make myself laugh. - That I learned how to spell
Because I go to school and I learn a lot of things.
That I'm artistic.
I like my skin color and my hair.
I like that I am outspoken and I strive for what I want.
[woman] What does the phrase Black Girl Magic mean to you?
The phrase Black Girl Magic
means there's no other thing that is as great to me, personally,
as Black girls. Black girls are just great.
I don't really know how to explain that, but, like,
they're just, so like they said, magical.
It's like, you know, magic's something you want to believe
and it's something you want to see. It's something that you want to be.
You were like, I want to do magic, you know?
And so they're so... It's just something that
you want to look up to and look after and just, you know, be around.
I feel like that's that magic, totally describes a Black girl, for sure.
If we all, but certainly Black women,
are fully human people ourselves, that
would be the greatest gift to the society.
If the beauty and the genius of Black women
were ever recognized
and allowed to flourish, I can only imagine what a contribution that would be.
We cannot allow the experiences of those
upon whose shoulders we stand to be erased from memory.
Someone paid for me to be here, and I am going to acknowledge
those people who suffered so much so that I could be here.
How could I not?
[woman] As a sociologist.
The way that my training has helped me understand
the emotional and mental well-being of Black women
is to understand that if I want, for example, Black girls
to love themselves, I can't just put up posters on the wall
and affirmations as the cure for centuries of racism and sexism.
But I have to create an environment
that shouts love at them so that they can hear it
reverberate in themselves, right?
It makes me think about my grandmother who used to tell me when I was little.
I was so small, in fact, when she would tell me this
that I would be looking up at her hand
as she was holding my hand. She would look down at me
and she would point to her head and she'd go,
Always remember, you're smart and you come from smart people.
She would always do that, and I think, part of what she was trying to do,
well, she was trying to buttress me. She was trying to strengthen me because
she knew that I would enter a world that wouldn't say that I was smart,
that didn't necessarily like me or value me. She told me that my whole life,
and I told it to my grandchildren and my children,
and it's one of those things in our family where we just kind of smile.
It's like an inoculation that was given.
Ever since I was a child, I've always walked in a light
and I hear this from my family and my peers.
It's like I can do anything and be anything.
This little light of mine I'm going to let it shine.
What is the light that is inside of you,
that compels you to shine?
Because that's the beauty I see in you.
Music makes me happy.
A lot of emotions can be expressed through music.
I've been dancing since I was very little. I love how freely I get to move.
It's like you can dance wild and it will be okay.
[woman] What kind of music do you listen to?
- Um, Beyonce. I always say Beyonce. - Beyonce.
- Beyonce.
Beyonce has done it all. She's Queen Bee
as royalty in this world, and she's, I mean, she is Black.
It's really mind-breaking to see that everybody,
you know, a lot of people, a lot of people love Beyonce.
[woman] What do you love about Beyonce?
That she doesn't care what other people think.
Beyonce got in trouble when she wore the 'fros,
when she walked out with the... You know, again, she has an image
that White people thought that they were controlling.
Until she says no, you don't actually get to control that.
My favorite artist is Willow Smith.
She puts out music because her music has a message.
SZA.
I've been listening to her for years.
One thing I love about SZA is she has so much sex appeal,
and she doesn't try to hide it. Like, I feel like she lets it out and it's amazing.
If you think about our sexuality,
for generations, right, it has been the site
of so much policing, control and theft.
What we see in this generation is an attempt to reclaim that sexuality.
I think the arts have been essential to survival.
There's something powerful about reclaiming terms
and making them mean something different
because then you are controlling the agenda and the discourse.
You are not following behind it, trying to correct it.
[woman] What has been our greatest gift to society
as Black women?
I think if we all, but certainly Black women,
are fully human people ourselves, that
would be the greatest gift to the society.
If the beauty and the genius of Black women as I know it to be,
because I know a lot of Black women were ever recognized
and allowed to flourish, I can only imagine what a contribution that would be.
I think the Black woman's greatest gift to society has been truth-teller,
speaking truth, speaking truth to power.
Black women, I think, have kept this society accountable
because we're not willing to not stand in our truth
and to not speak to truth and not to live what is true for us
in the best way that we know how.
I want my greatest gift to society to be my words.
When I look at myself, I see somebody who speaks her mind,
who says whatever I need to say.
As a black woman, my life,
my life to be a gift to the society.
Some, I have done something or said something
that has enhanced somebody's life,
that have touched somebody's life, that I have lived.
If I could describe the Black woman in three words.
I would say beautiful,
strong,
excellent.
Strong, loving, rebellious.
- Strong. - Strong.
- Strong, independent, and bold.
Un-bossed.
- And beautiful. - Beautiful, awesome.
- Empowered. - [woman] Dynamic.
- [woman] Loving. - Caring.
- Hard-working. - [woman] Brave.
Divine. I think that Black women are divine.
I think Black women are the closest that there is on this earth to God.
Um, I think that
we submit. We're vessels.
We're filled. Um...
To be one of self-fashioning,
to be one of experimenting with new ways
of being in the world and relating to one another.
Um, that pushes forward.
And there's not one that uses history as an anchor that weighs us down.
I just want Black women to be more free,
and to just go after, you know, whatever
they want to go after.
A legacy of...
...dreams realized.
The legacy is the unbroken intergenerational
commitment to black womanhood, and making sure it doesn't end with me,
and recognizing all that went into creating that legacy.
As a Black mother,
Black grandmother as a Black wife,
as a Black social scientist, a Black professor,
um, a Black social activist,
I think it's critical that
I mind this lane that speaks
about our history and our reality.
We cannot allow the experiences of those
upon whose shoulders we stand to be erased from memory.
I stand on shoulders that have allowed me to be all of those things,
to be the mother that I am and the professor and the professional person that I am.
Someone paid for me to be here, and I am going to acknowledge
those people who suffered so much so that I could be here.
How could I not?
I think that very critical piece to our being well
is knowing our own stories, and knowing and creating our own narrative.
And the only way that can happen is if we ensure that it happens.
There's no culture in the world that will readily
and deliberately erase their history.
We can't erase ours.
If your life is narrated through
someone else's words and lens, then it's not your life.
You have to be able to give words to it,
give names to it and not allow it to be distorted
through someone else's lens.
By telling our own story,
saying names like Zora Neale Hurston and reading Octavia Butler
and talking about women like Septima Clark and Fannie Lou Hamer, and others
whose names you may not know. And, we can't lose the stories
that our own mothers, the stories of our own grandmothers and daughters,
documenting our own narratives like when we talk about
the Black Lives Matter moment is absolutely
a Black women's moment in history.
We have to uplift the women who were on the ground,
who were the primary forces leading that work.
The reason why it's so important that we continue to write
Black women into history and we refuse the invisiblizing
of our experiences is because what we remember
is directly tied to what we create in the future.
But if I don't remember that, if I don't recall those experiences,
then I'm very likely to contribute to a world that reproduces it
and allow other people to reproduce it.
And if you control the corporations and you control the media
and you control higher ed, you control all of that,
you really can't ignore what Black women say.
It's kind of at your leisure to listen to them,
if you're that powerful. Black women have to look at all the different ways
that different groups have suppressed that knowledge.
White men certainly are running the game here,
elite white men.
I mean, that there's no surprise there.
We cannot relinquish the power to define ourselves.
This is the power of self-definition.
It fundamentally says if you don't tell your own story, somebody else will.
[woman] If you could talk to your 14-year-old self,
and send her a love letter, and tell your 14-year-old self
something you've never told her bit you've always wanted to tell her,
what would you say to her?
I would tell my 14-year-old self,
be strong, trust in God in all things, and lean not
to your own understanding. Follow his guidance.
And, Cora, I love you.
To not take things so seriously,
to relax a little more, um...
get a passport and go see the world.
You don't have to stress the small stuff.
No one's perfect.
You are enough and you're good enough.
None of the things that I'm worrying about right now
are going to matter in the long run,
so to just relax
and be chill.
Be kind...
and loving...
to everyone.
And always love yourself.
Love yourself.
Be you.
Educate yourself.
Stay strong.
Don't settle for nothing.
And reach for the sky.
[Dr. DeGruy] I always tell people, "Tell your story."
"It's really important."
And those generations of wisdom,
those generations of long suffering,
those long days of not knowing
what tomorrow was going to bring,
so much power, so much wisdom there,
so much healing.
[Jazmine Williams] Sis...
Have you ever been so madly aware of your beauty
that you have a shout out to God
for making you in her perfect image?
Have you ever been so aware of your magic
that you walk into a room full of other black women and see theirs too?
Do you grin from ear when yo see your reflections walking down the street,
skin glowing like she just walked out of a rain forest,
where she bathes in a waterfall
lit by a rainbow smile,
like she eats prayer for breakfast,
and meditation for lunch.
Hair that sings praises for her maker
with the ever so slight turn up her chin.
Sis...
have you ever been so satisfied with the way you shine after a storm?
That you laugh at the thought of you ever having been nervous at all?
Do you even notice how hard you hustle?
How you make your manifestations look as natural as breathing.
Like you were born to balance the world on your head
while building empires upon it.
Sis...
Has anyone's hold you lately
how fine you look in graduation caps?
How stunning you are turning the key to the home you secure for your family,
how you sit like a gym on stages
discussing your lived experiences.
Do you know that you are a visionary
with foresight worth decades?
Because time is the only currency
that does your value justice.
Do you know that you are priceless?
Have you heard that you would need
a mirror about the size of the ocean
to see all of your light in its entirety?
Even with all the miracles you spin,
you are still effortless in your glory.
Did you know that you're my role model,
that I live for your wisdom and grace?
You've given me quotes to live and die with.
I go to war with the fire you put in me.
You were always my standard of excellence.
You were always my standard of beauty.
[woman vocalizing]
♪ Ooh ♪
[woman vocalizing]