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Black Women Don’t Exist to Save Us
White women praise Black women at our peril
My Twitter feed this morning is full of praise and credit to Stacey Abrams for the astounding senate seat wins in Georgia. And rightly so.
How could you possibly go wrong trumpeting her success on social media? Turns out it’s pretty easy for us white folks to screw it up even as we were are trying to be allies because we have an amazing ability to make it all about us.
Black woman have been raising our children, changing our parent’s diapers in the nursing home, cleaning our toilets, getting degrees, fighting for a chance in academia, doing the math to send our rockets to the moon, entertaining us, and turning out election after election to vote for the party that at least some of the time fights for equality.
So white people should be falling all over themselves to praise Black women, right? Turns out it’s complicated.
I’ve been mulling over the essence of this article in my head for weeks now. I know I have something I want to say to my fellow white women but I’ve also been hanging around eavesdropping on Black Twitter long enough to know that venturing off the map in this way is heading into “There be dragons” territory.
