By Anika Tene Rich
The first time I can recall being criticized for the way I owned and operated my body around white people was when I participated in a teacher training program. I had just graduated from an HBCU, and was now in a white-dominated world. I was assigned to an advisor who was a white man, and my team of four teachers was made up of two white women, one white man, and myself, a Black woman.
I had no intentions of becoming friends with my team, but we seemingly got along well enough. One afternoon, I was called into a meeting by the director of our training site. The director, a Black person who, at the time, identified as a masculine woman, led me to a classroom and closed the door behind us. She sat down in a chair very close to me and said softly, “your team and advisor have concerns about you.”
I braced myself for major critiques of my practice, preparing to hear that there was an issue with my teaching. That is not what this meeting was about.
“Your team doesn’t feel comfortable working with you. They feel that you are dismissive and unfriendly. They went to [our advisor] and he thought it might be best that I have this talk with you first.”
I sat for a moment with a look on my face that certainly read as confusion and surprise, to which the director responded quickly, “I know, it’s probably bullshit, and I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, but you know how people can be sensitive. I want to moderate a conversation for you all to get everything cleared up.”
I squinted at her, wondering how she could continue this conversation after admitting that she didn’t believe I had done anything wrong. “See, that face right there,” she wagged her finger up and down at my face. “If I wasn’t Black and didn’t know you, I would think you were dismissing me. I wouldn’t want to talk to you either.” I left the room and didn’t speak a word to my team the rest of the day.
Later that evening, at the moderated conversation with my director and team, it became clear that the only thing I was guilty of was daring to express my thoughts and feelings on my face, speaking with conviction with natural bass in my voice, and calling out foolishness as I thought necessary.
I was scary. I was threatening. I was “intimidating” and “hard to work with.” I was unclear as to how anything I did with my body, aside from touching another person, was anyone else’s concern but my own. I was told afterwards that if I just “play the game” I would have an easier time in the program.
My teaching career would continue to be marred by experiences such as these – white people taking issue with something to do with my body and sending the “safe” Black woman to come speak to me about how I should change in order to get along.
I am mostly reserved and only speak when necessary. However, when I did say something, my voice was too loud and too deep. I sounded angry. My “expressionless” resting face looked “angry.” I was intimidating and arrogant when I corrected, with confidence, the errors of a white person. My hair – locs that I sometimes wrapped in scarves and other fabric – made me “unapproachable” and “militant.” My body language and facial expressions, that mirrored male teachers and white teachers alike, presented as “uninterested” and “not invested.”
It didn’t matter how well I did my job, how much my students progressed, how great a rapport I had with my students’ parents and individual staff members. I was a problem because of my body and the way that I present in the world. Speaking up in my own defense received familiar messages – “just play the game.”
Author and activist Ebony Janice of the Free People Project helped me decipher these acts of anti-Black aggression when, in an hour long video, she described her parallel experiences dealing with white people in graduate school.
Black women are denied ownership of our bodies through tone policing, unsolicited comments about our body language, and accusations of being intimidating or unfriendly in schools, jobs, and other public places. We are constantly being told what to do with our bodies to make other people more comfortable with our presence.
White people feel entitled to say, “I don’t like what you’re doing with your body” or “your body is making me uncomfortable” through deepened codewords and dog-whistles. This entitlement threatens the safety of Black people everywhere, and Black feminine bodies are particularly endangered by this entitlement. We stand at the intersection or racism and sexism, and thus are less likely to be defended or protected from harm, while experiencing compounded impact.
The denial of Black women’s bodily autonomy is historical. During our enslavement, Black women’s bodies were deemed uncivilized and shameful, and worthless beyond our ability to bear children. Our sexuality was often coerced and damaged through systematic rape and sexual assault, with no mechanisms for exacting justice appropriate for such horror.
Consistently, our autonomy has been taken both sexually and non-sexually, in that there is a hardened social expectation that we bend at the whim of whatever person, especially if they’re white, believes they can lay claim to ownership of our bodies.
In this refusal of autonomy, we don’t get the benefit of the doubt. We don’t get the assumption of innocence. Instead, we are forced to contend with a stereotype of the “angry Black woman” held so deeply as truth that any behavior we exhibit is considered proof of its validity.
Melissa Harris-Perry writes in her book Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America that “the angry black woman myth renders sisters both invisible and mute.” This myth shapes not only influences how non-Black people see us but how we believe the world perceives us. We feel pressured to change ourselves, our bodies and behaviors, in an effort to avoid the assumption of aggression, while the result of invisibility remains regardless of our self-censorship.
Over the years I realized that there weren’t enough things I could change to just “get along” if the problem was with who I was as a person. I could cut and straighten my hair, speak in a higher tone, smile often, sit upright with my hands in my lap, make eye contact with any speaker, and even try to build relationships to prove myself friendly and approachable. It was never enough. There was always something else about my body to find fault with because, regardless, my body makes white people uncomfortable.
Black women should not have to reduce themselves to performances in public based on the idea that our bodies are affecting or offending someone by simply being. One day Black women’s bodies will be allowed unlimited freedom. In order to create this world, we cannot wait for our autonomy to be granted back to us. We must find every way possible to divest from all people, groups, or institutions that seek to control and transform our bodies into molds that do not honor who we are. We must remember that we are the sole owners of our bodies, and be unapologetic in taking up the space we require, moving as freely as we deserve, and making sure that our authentic selves are seen and heard.
Suggested Reading
“Our ancestors had orgasms, too“— Ashley Danielle, RaceBaitR (July 24, 2018)
“Aggressive Encounters & White Fragility: Deconstructing the Trope of the Angry Black Woman” — Trina Jones and Kimberly Jade Norwood, Iowa Law Review Vol. 102(2017)
“Black Women In Our Society Aren’t Allowed To Be Angry“— Char Adams, Bustle (March 27, 2017)
“Black Women Are Not ‘Sassy’ — We’re Angry“— Dr. Brittney Cooper, Time (March 15, 2018)
Anika Tene Rich is a southern, spiritual, queer Black feminist educator and cultural worker. Her writing explores the Black feminine experience in America. Follow her on Twitter @anikatenerich.
