Image description: A brown skinned woman with light brown hair smiles into a handheld mirror while holding her chin. Black text below her face reads: “Every day you face your toughest critic”
The images in today’s newsletter are pulled from my ongoing found photo archive called Woman Holding Face While Lost in Thought.
When I started my first full-time job out of college, a co-worker pulled me aside on a morning that I arrived at the office early. She would often signal a repeated warning to Kind Women : I should avoid kindness as a defining factor in my identity at professional spaces. Not doing so would surely be a recipe for disaster in institutions inherently rooted within white supremacist structures; an open invitation for abuse.
I took her advice to heart only to realize that her comment would paint the tone for most of my working relationships within that next year at this office and beyond. The Kind Woman is a part of me in ways that I wished she wasn’t, and in my daily struggle to push her off of my body, I am also faced with the racialized optics of how she operates through me in spaces where I am one of the few women of color.
Image description: On the left, a fair skinned model wears a green knit turtleneck and a brown and white checkered hat. She tugs lightly on the collar with her right hand and rests her face on her chin with her left. On the right, a light skinned Black model wears bantu knots and light makeup. She takes a selfie in the sun with her eyes closed and her right hand resting on her face.
The Kind Woman comes out in my words and gestures through my physical proximity to whiteness. Through the ways I look as a racially ambiguous body, there seems to be an expectation that I must be respectful and never wayward in my relationships. My skin is just light enough to be granted the type of humanity that other Black women fight their whole lives for: light enough to rarely be assumed as hostile upon first glance. People become shocked when my voice suddenly grows by half an octave, when I don’t laugh at a joke, when I’m not interested in making small talk, when I challenge my boss, or call out other people on racism and systemic inequality.
You are so calm and collected. I’d be scared to see you actually get mad one day.
I’ve become convinced that most people want mixed race and white passing women to exist in the shape of a-political placeholders. It’s ok to have me at the table so long as I’m there to be looked at and not listened to. There is this obsession to put us light skinned girls on pedestals as the standard for post-racial beauty, to have us represent all members of a race in spaces where only one can be accommodated. Why should pretty colored girls speak when their indisputable proximity to whiteness has gotten them this far? I’ve been granted hyper-visibility in exchange for the assumption that I shouldn’t still have the voice of a Black woman.
You are so sweet / You are so good to me , he once said while reaching for my hand.
Image description: On the left, Kylie Jenner takes an outdoor selfie with a face filter of purple and yellow butterflies. Looking down at the camera, her left hand holds her forehead while the sun shines on her upper body. On the right, Lena Horne sits in a chair wearing a green dress and orange lipstick. She leans on the chair’s armrest with both elbows while gently resting both hands on her right cheek.
I am gentle and caring on most days, independent of the way I look or where I’m from. Because of my personality, my Chill Girl Vibes™ often get mistaken for many things:
That I am too nice
That I have nothing to say or offer
That I will apologize even when I have done nothing wrong
That I am good at immediate and articulate apologies when I happen to be the wrongdoer
That I will always be agreeable
This force-fed behavior of the Kind Woman has led to many ingrained actions that I’m working really hard to abolish within myself. I am often stuck in the middle of the woman who shrinks herself at the convenience of the often more privileged person’s feelings, and the woman who knows when to draw boundaries and demand accountability. I am read as deceitful when white people realize that I too am capable of expressing a full range of human emotions like anger and grief. The Kind Woman performing through me disappears in these moments, and it becomes clear to them that the host is not a racially detached body.
I am told to stop yelling, to stop gesticulating “like that”, I am asked to stop rolling my eyes when I am simply glancing up at the ceiling, I am called dishonest and cruel and that I don’t truly love them, I make white women cry and white men stutter for their words. I am Othered even more than I probably was before.
You’re acting very wild
I leaned the meaning of the word abrasive through the act of being described as such by a white girl at fifteen.
Image description: A brown skinned model with long, straight, dark hair sits cross legged on a dirt road. Her left hand reaches over the right side of her face which looks relaxed and content. A light blue sky with large clouds, greenish-yellow bushes, and rugged mountains stretch out into the horizon behind her.
Despite all this I’m still here, physically unscathed despite the emotional aftershocks. That doesn’t make this form of hurt any less impactful, but I am as alive and visible as ever which is more than what other women can ask for. Oluwatoyin Salau’s murder can never be undone. Her voice and visibility came at a much heavier expense. I sit with that a lot these days as I reckon with the Kind Woman in my own body.
This past year has given me a tougher shell while still teaching me how to remain soft; perhaps a good full circle epiphany to reach during Cancer Season. There’s still work to do, and my shell is still forming to further protect the remainder of this precious softness. It’s a balancing act.
Image description: A Brazilian Namoradeira doll resting on a window sill with brown skin, bright red lips, blue eyes, and yellow a flower in her hair. Her right hand is holding her face while she stares off into the distance. Her static pose creates the illusion of a human woman waiting at a window.
Re-imagining :
Lorna Simpson’s “Give Me Some Moments” , online through Hauser & Wirth:
Lorna Simpson is a spectacular image maker, and I really connect with the ways she thinks about collaging in relationship to how black bodies can be depicted through photography: “We’re fragmented not only in terms of how society regulates our bodies but in the way we think about ourselves”.
Checkout this great essay on Simpson’s work by Sasha Bonét for Paris Review:
Re-imagining Black Futures - On Lorna Simpson and the Black imaginative practice of collage
Build a Black Radical Art School
“What does it look like to center Black love in a learning space? We relate to our students as extended family, not a social problem to be corrected. All of our programs are customized for each group we engage.”
I don’t believe that any level of reform or diversity plan is enough to save our current arts institutions anymore. These places have been around for decades, some even for centuries. If they have refused to listen to the concerns of its marginalized communities until now, maybe it’s time we just let them become obsolete on their own. Instead of uprooting what has always been toxic from the start, let’s create whole new spaces that value humans over profit. Support The Black School. Build your own schools too. It’s time for a fresh start.