Dreaming of a World Safe for Black Women

(Photo by Leighann Blackwood on Unsplash)

Trigger warning for misogynoiristic violence. 

Earlier this month Roda Osman, a Black woman, was approached by a man in Houston, Texas. He asked for her number. She said no. He proceeded to hit her with a brick. She described, in a video she uploaded online, how Black men stood around her and watched and how none of them intervened. 

Osman, known online as Ro Bashe, talked to NBC’s Claretta Bellamy and Uwa Ede-Osifo about her attack. She is traumatized, both by the attack and the response by many in the Black community following her online video. After she came forward with her assault, many Black men claimed that she was lying, even after she shared hospital and police records. “It’s going to take months, maybe a year, maybe longer in my life to get it back together,” she told Ede-Osifo and Bellamy. 

The actions and responses from Black, cis-men are born from the very systems that create the constellation of problems Dwayne and I have discussed since July. We are critical of capitalism. We are critical of the patriarchy that has been around longer, and the ways both of these systems intersect to create a world where darker-skinned women, girls, boys, femmes, non-binary, trans, and queer people experience the worst of violence at the hands of straight, cis-gender men.

We are critical of the misogynoiristic violence Black women face daily, both by the state and by the men in our community.

Feminist scholar and writer Moya Bailey came up with the term “misogynoir” in 2008 to describe the anti-Black misogyny Black women face.

In 2021’s Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance, Bailey writes: “Misogynoir is not simply the racism that Black women encounter, nor is it the misogyny Black women negotiate. Misogynoir describes the uniquely co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of gender and racial marginalization.” Bailey describes the role popular media plays in perpetuating misogynoir, from movies to music to social media, and how it “helps maintain white supremacy by offering tacit approval of the disparate treatment that Black women negotiate in society.”

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There is the structural, misogynoiristic violence that affects our day-to-day life. How much we make. How much the state allows us to have through federal and state welfare. How much we are taxed. Where and how we are educated and provided medical care. Such violence is directly traced back to our founding fathers and the men who “birthed” a country from indigenous genocide and African human enslavement. 

They created a world built around the white, male, Christian imagination; out of white supremacist dreams. They created a world where white men could profit from genocide and disenfranchisement. As part of this white supremacist project, they indoctrinated and brainwashed and beat and raped and killed Black and indigenous women, men, and children into subservience, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. To survive we have internalized the very worst of our oppressors. 

Our very communities have internalized the worst of white supremacist male violence. This is why we see Black men who murder and rape and exploit black women, sex workers, trans people. Men of color who joke about killing or abusing their partners. Men of color who sit and watch or laugh at misogynistic violence disguised as humor and jokes at the expense of wives and sisters and daughters. Why men demand redemption and forgiveness for abusers and predators without any semblance of accountability. It is why men are able to watch while a man hits a Black woman with a brick. It is why Osman continues to be traumatized after her assault. 

The white supremacist, misogynoiristic systems we are struggling to survive in have told us that it is easier to believe that a dark-skinned Black woman is lying than to accept that we live in a society that wants us to ignore the normalized violence against Black women and femmes. We must grapple with how we have all internalized patriarchal oppression and how this exists across a spectrum of violence. We must create a world where we do not sit and watch as Black women are assaulted. 

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Much has been written about “the loneliness crisis” happening to men in the United States. Many straight men are finally coming around to the realization that these systems have falsely convinced them that they cannot be soft or open or loving. That they do not have to sit with emotions; that they do not have to emotionally regulate. White supremacist, misogynoiristic violence has created deep suffering for the cis-men in our communities, a suffering born from and sustained by a system that teaches them that to be masculine is to have power over another. 

Such masculinity kills.

Women, worldwide, are dying at the hands of cis-men. Over 70% of murdered women in this country are murdered by someone they know. Black women, especially darker-skinned women and femmes, face violence from the state and in intimate relationships. Black women have discussed the nuances of misogynoiristic violence for years, most notably for me, this includes Zahira Kelly. Kelly uses her social media platforms to educate her followers about misogynoir, including the ways in which women are groomed and gaslit by abusers. She has helped me to understand how femicide occurs within the systems we are forced to live in and why it is so readily ignored in Caribbean communities like mine. 

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I wrote this essay while in Atlanta. During my time here, I saw a young student talk about abolition and police violence, dreaming about a world rooted in a rejection of white supremacist, misogynoiristic systems.

What does it mean to dream of a world where everyone is committed to making Black women, femmes, queer and trans people feel safe in all spaces? 

What does it mean to build private and public spaces where Black women and femmes are centered, loved, protected, and cared for?

How can we fight for and build a world where women like Osman are protected?

What does it mean to exist in a world where our fathers and brothers and uncles and the men who see us on the streets prioritize our own safety and bodies and souls and hearts—and in return their own?

What must be done to create a world without misogynoir?

In solidarity,

-Olga