Misogynoir: Carrying the weight and hate of black womanness.
Misogynoir: “the particular f***ery Black women face” Dr. Moya Bailey
I’ve been reflecting on the word misogynoir as I have thought about my own experience as a Black woman and girl, and as I have thought about the suicide of Dr. Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey.
I can’t get her beautiful face out of my mind, or her age. She was 49. In my new book, and companion journal, Blackwildgirl: A Writer’s Journey to Take Back Her Superpower, (out April 2, 2024)
I dedicate my book to two black women writers, Lorraine Hansberry and Leanita McClain. Leanita was a journalist for the Chicago Sun Times. She committed suicide at the age of 32. I kept her May 31, 1984 obituary in my own childhood journal. It was the same year I attempted suicide. As I wrote in my book, “I understood why Leanita could choose suicide, and throughout my life, like Leanita, there would be seasons where I didn’t think I could live another day.”
Leanita had been married to Clarence Page, another black journalist. Leanita’s obituary said that she “carried the weight of the city [Chicago] upon her shoulders.” In an interview about that reference, Clarence was asked if she should have shrugged. His response, “I think so.”
My response in the book, is “No-I think quickly and angrily.” Emphatically, NO! I write, “Some of us cannot shrug out shoulders. This is who we are. We come into this world, we care deeply, we have a calling, and we do not shrug our shoulders.” I write: “I will not shrug my shoulders. I will carry the weight of Black womanness. And so, Lorraine and Leanita, I will write for you and for the years you couldn’t write.” (Lorraine Hansberry died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 34).
What does it mean to “carry the weight of Black womanness?”
It means that we have to understand the concept of misogynoir. Dr. Moya Bailey, Associate Professor at Northwestern, who is doing incredible and powerful work, coined this term.
Misogynoir: “the anti-Black, racist misogyny that Black women — and people perceived as Black women — experience. It is a portmanteau of misogyny and noir — referring both to the French word for the color black as well as the film genre noir, because one of the ways that I see misogynoir showing up is often in media.”
Learn more in this video interview at Northwestern University:
She brilliantly and defiantly responds to the criticism of the etymology of the word combining Greek and French, by saying: “I don’t care. I’m far more concerned that I felt like I needed a word to describe the particular f***ery Black women face in popular culture.”
Misogynoir was recently added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and she was asked her thoughts about that:
“It’s been exciting, but it feels like a double-edged sword because the fact that it needs to be added to the dictionary reflects just how common, how far-spread misogynoir is in the world, and that’s pretty disheartening. I’m actually looking forward to the day when the word gets retired.”
In the interview, she asked about why it was important to name the way Black women are mistreated in society. She shared: “When you’re able to describe exactly what people are experiencing, it makes it that much easier to address it. It’s hard to address something that you don’t have context for. Giving the experience of misogynoir a name gives us a place to build and organize from. I’ve seen so many people find the language helpful in their own activism.”
Thank you, Dr. Bailey, for giving us words for what we are experiencing.
Education allows us to fight and combat and attack injustice, and we cannot address injustice if we cannot speak about it.
Keir Bristol shares more of Bailey’s thoughts in her own powerful post on the visibility project in 2014.
“In coining and writing about Misogynoir, Bailey speaks of an oppressive experience only she and other Black women share. “I was looking for precise language to describe why Renisha McBride would be shot in the face, or why The Onion would think it’s okay to talk about Quvenzhané the way they did, or the hypervisibilty of Black women on reality TV, the arrest of Shanesha Taylor, the incarceration of CeCe, Laverne and Lupita being left off the TIME list, the continued legal actions against Marissa Alexander, the twitter dragging of black women with hateful hashtags and supposedly funny Instagram images as well as how Black women are talked about in music,” Bailey wrote in a blog post titled ‘More on the Origins of Misogynoir.’ “All these things bring to mind Misogynoir and not general misogyny directed at women of color more broadly.”
We can add so many more examples in 2024.
Dr. Bailey reminds us of Tori Bowe, the Olympic athlete who died while due to childbirth complications. As Dr. Bailey shares: “there are these disproportionate negative health outcomes for Black women, even athletes who are in peak physical health. There’s no other explanation except for the particular combination of anti-Black racism and misogyny that’s impacting their birthing experiences.”
We can look at the experience of Dr. Claudine Gay.
Look at the experience of Tamara Thermitus:
We can look at the important work of Dr. Kimberly Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum reminding us that Black women are also killed by police: #SayHerName
I recently wrote about Black women’s (and my own) experience with domestic violence. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-am-survivor-finding-courage-speak-act-against-domestic-menah-pratt-wycne/?trackingId=h9%2FH8Qs0RDeOIaV5H5VqPA%3D%3D
Look up Jeannine Skinner, a Black woman faculty member at the UNC Charlotte. Look up Robin Simpson. Domestic violence is another example and reflection of misogynoir.
What can we do? We are not powerless. We can share our words, and tell our stories.
We all have our stories. They are not easy to share or write about or talk about. Yet we must.
We must because if we do not speak about what we experience, what we are suffering from, what causes us to scream and cry silently, shedding invisible tears that we hide from the world, because we wear Langston Hughes’ mask of smiles, it will and does kill us.
We have to talk about the reality that our Black womanness walks into rooms with us. We cannot hide it. And when we walk into rooms, ideas and ideologies and stereotypes accompany us. This is what we are battling. This is the weight of black womanhood. This is misogynoir.
I share the weight of Black girlhood and Black womanhood in Blackwildgirl: A Writer’s Journey to Take Back Her Superpower.” It is a 50 year journey of what it has meant for me to be a Black girl and Black woman in America. What it means to have parents trying their very best to protect, while inadvertently harming. What it means for parents to try to figure out in the 1960s how to help a black girl become all she could be in the midst of misogynoir, which wasn’t a word they could use. My father had his own phrase: “The Pratt Setup.” My father, who got a PhD in Nuclear Physics, only to have his career sabotaged and destroyed by racism, told me that “I love you” was a nicety. For me, I needed it to be a necessity. Yet, I am here because of them.
I am here because of my ancestors, who somehow found the courage and hope to sing Negro spirituals in the midst of circumstances that were almost devoid of hope.
I am here because of my ancestors, from Freetown, Sierra Leone, the city where the newly freed former enslaved resettled to build a new life;
I am here because of my enslaved ancestors from rural Henderson Texas;
I am here beucase of my enslaved ancestors from Landersville, Alabama, who were forced to hold storm shutters during storms to protect the White plantation owners;
I am here because of my mother who picked cotton and worked as a maid, and eventually became a full professor so she could tell the stories of 100 Black people in her community;
I am here because these ancestors carried enough of the weight of blackness, womanness, poverty, racism, and sexism so that I could be here, with a responsibility to continue to bear that weight, in the hope that one day, the weight will be lighter, and perhaps, just perhaps, not be a weight.
Yes, the weight is heavy and bearing the weight is relentless.
YET, for now, we must carry this weight with more saavy and sophistication, so that it does not kill us.
As the The People’s Reader 5 Star Review says, we have to move from bearing the weight of the world, to being the world:
“If there is one book every black woman needs to read in her life, it’s Menah Pratt’s Blackwildgirl. She puts into words the emotions and frustrations many of us struggle to verbalize, even to ourselves. She offers her book as an extension of her Doutorando [journals] for us – for those who have no safe space to pour out their hearts and souls, who need to take the weight of the world off their shoulders for even a moment. Pratt invites us to find ourselves and our inherent power as she found hers. She shows how her journey from childhood to adulthood is also our journey and other women’s journeys from bearing the world to being the world.”Readers’ Favorite 5 Star Review
In my LinkedIn article, after the death of two black women presidents, I shared my own strategies for bearing and carrying this weight. I wrote about what it means to take two steps back, and how I did that in one of my positions, so that I could keep going, but differently. I included 10 lessons and takeaways about self-care, self-compassion, and self-love, and navigating life in the academy.
The lessons:
Number 1: Purpose.
Number 2: Academic Community
Number 3: Family and friends
Number 4: Beauty
Number 5: Exercise
Number 6: Eating and Drinking
Number 7: Meditate
Number 8: Recess
Number 9: Social Media Fast
Number 10: You do you.
If you want to do more, look up and listen with Black women speak.
I want to share one more personal example of the challenge of our work in the workplace as Black women. A Black woman sent me a snapshot of a text exchange with a co-worker.
The day after a meeting about DEI led by a White woman (mid 30s), in which a Black co-worker (mid 20s) provided feedback, the White woman sent a text to the Black woman:
White Woman: Hey, do you have a quick second? I’ve been thinking about yesterday’s meeting. Having imposter syndrome and need someone to boost my confidence lol
Black woman texted me her response, which she didn’t send: “Boost your confidence? Not my job. Stop being so fragile and do the work.”
This is the weight of Black womanness. A White woman is expecting a Black woman to boost her confidence! In the meantime, who boosts our confidence?
Perhaps we must be more like Niecy Nash, (who I have loved ever since Clean House) and thank ourselves for believing in us, when no one else did! Her Emmy speech is priceless, because we know there were moments when no one believed in her, no one valued her, no one respected her, Nevertheless, she persisted. Black women must pat ourselves on our own backs more, affirm ourselves, be a little less humble, and acknowledge that we are making a difference, and that we are can be proud of ourselves. We also need others to do that for us. Pat us on the back, acknowledge us, validate us, respect us.
I’ll just close with Niecy’s speech:
“And you know who I want to thank? I want to thank me – for believing in me and doing what they said I could not do. And I want to say to myself in front of all of you beautiful people, “go on girl with our bad self. You did that. Finally, I accept this award in behalf of every Black and brown woman who has gone unheard yet overpoliced, like Glenda Cleveland, like Sandra Bland, like Breonna Taylor. As an artist, my job is to speak truth to power and baby, I’m gonna do it until the day I die.”
Me, too, Niecy. Me, too!
Learn more about Dr. Bailey and her Digital Apothecary lab, trying to answer “big digital questions of our time while also critiquing the ways that digital platforms have impacted our world. How do we create digital material that helps us get closer to the world we want? Are there different strategies that we can use to lessen the environmental impact of digital platforms? These are some of the big questions that our lab is grappling with.”
Pre order Blackwildgirl and the companion journal:
If you are a woman of color in higher education, consider attending the
https://www.inclusive.vt.edu/Programs/FWCA.html
April 11-14, 2024. Ask your institution, as part of their commitment to affirm, validate, and support you, to sponsor your attendance at this life-changing conference that I founded 12 years ago.
Attend ourf free healing hour on January 31st
HEALING HOUR
January 31, 2024 at 12-1PM EST
Facilitated by
Natalia Pizarro
Register at the link below:
https://bit.ly/fwcahh0124
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