We are more than intimidating

Melanated women deserve the space to experience ALL of their emotions!

In the last couple weeks, I’ve noticed a lot of the ways we, as a society, have slid ever so smoothly back into old patterns of using language to erase melanated women’s experiences or diminish their feelings etc. We have gone back to reducing melanated women to aggressive, intimidating, spicy, having an attitude etc.

Obviously, this narrative never went away, but for a few years there we, as a society, honored melanated women’s human experience. We believed them. We gave them more space to have emotions and express them. We gave them more space to be fully human.

Now, that it’s no longer trendy, y’all have gone back to limiting us to about 3 negative emotions. We couldn’t possibly be hurt. You couldn’t possibly be harmful. No, no. We are xyz negative emotion and thus we are the problem!

As I’ve said, this is not a new narrative and we certainly didn’t do away with it in its entirety. This actually reminded me that sadly, I’ve talked about this before from my own personal experience in order to educate. In 2018 I did a facebook live because I was tired of being called intimidating, instead of people (1) owning that they are intimidated instead of projecting their own stuff onto me and (2) calling my intimidating when really they meant that they were surprised I was intelligent and articulate and bold enough to protect my peace! I was also losing my patience with people questioning my ability to do my job, hold space etc because I refused to coddle whyteness (ppsstttt - that’s what makes me good at what I do).

I wish I could say that I needed to rerecord a new version of this to fit the times, but I don’t. The only thing that has changed is that I no longer use the phrase “women of color” or “people of color” and instead use melanated.

Listen in and let’s continue this conversation in The Collective Group Chat!

If while you’re listening you find yourself feeling a kind of way and getting distracted by my passion or the energy with which I’m speaking, ask yourself why you can’t “hear” someone unless they use certain “tones”!

P.S. For educational clarity, I am speaking from my own experience

but this social reality absolutely extends to my non-binary femme family as well.

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