This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(13)

Like the girls I grew up with, Claudia MacTeer in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye treasures a “blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll.” The possession of one, as she says, is what every little girl in the world, whether she be black or white, wants. Black and white girls want the same white doll. Only problem is, white girls stare at Barbies and see potential. Black girls stare at white dolls and see impossibility. This is what stirs Claudia to ask, “What made people look at them and say, ‘Awwwww,’ but not for me?” Her quandary can only be solved if she destroys a white doll, a symbol of white womanhood. White women can weave magic around others in a way that she cannot.

In our patriarchal culture, both white and black women have to fight for the reclamation of their bodies. But we cannot group all women together under the patriarchy without considering race, which further stigmatizes us as black women but provides a buffer for white women.

Their womanhood does not eliminate their whiteness. We as black women are doubly disenfranchised in the throes of two spaces, race and gender, and there is no solace. Toni Morrison once said that “the black woman has nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality, she may very well have invented herself.” Morrison’s predecessor Zora Neale Hurston wrote in Their Eyes Were Watching God that black women are “de mule uh de world.” The offspring of a male donkey and a female horse, a mule is not quite one, not quite the other. Mules require less sustenance and support than horses. Their hooves are much harder, which helps to ward off disease and infection, and they have thicker skin. Black women, like mules, have always had much less support and a greater burden. And our efforts rarely receive acknowledgment; if they do, it is only as footnotes on our cultural narrative. This is why the idea of the Strong Black Woman is sweet in sound but damaging in effect.

Lorraine Bethel, a black lesbian feminist poet, wrote a poem called “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” about buying a sweater that was once owned by a white woman. When Bethel smells the sweater, its scent is comfort, a delicacy that she will never know in her life. This comfort that Bethel describes is one that I believe black women secretly desire, but also eschew. There is pride in getting by with less. We do it, our mothers have done it, and our female ancestors have surely done it, too. There is a pride in still being here in spite of it all, and that’s a feeling that white women will never be able to experience. But even though black women may not want to be white women, “frustration” and “anger” would be plausible words for how some of us may feel about all the benefits of their whiteness that they receive—luxuries won without any exhaustion, without an investment of labor. We never had organized groups like the KKK believing so strongly in our purity that they would lynch any sun-kissed man for even looking in our direction. We are never in mainstream spaces without someone asking, Why? With white women it’s, Why not? Our existence begs more questioning. Their existence doesn’t and, in fact, often comes with praise for just having shown up. We are afterthoughts; they are the nuclei. White women have been the basis of feminism, and they have fought for their rights at the expense of black people. Elizabeth Cady Stanton once asserted, “The representative women of the nation have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the Negro . . . but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first . . .”

And arguably, white women have a vested interest in a patriarchy that is more ruinous towards black women’s bodies than their own. Our pussies do not unite us. It is easy for white people, especially women, to cut away at our bodies like we are meat on a slab. It was easy for nineteenth-century white women to wear bustles to make their asses look bigger; easy for Rachel Dolezal to slap on a wig and brown foundation and call herself black; easy for Kylie to wear cornrows and be seen as an innovator. We are not seen as people, but rather as parts that can be appropriated and tailored anytime and in any place.

When black women look at Rachel Dolezal, we see someone who used our skin and hair as a cloak. She never lived in a black woman’s body, because if she did she’d know that to be like us is to always dwell in a place of war. Our bodies are vulnerable; we await attack as we salt our wounds from the last one. We are the mules whose origins we cannot fully imagine, but now is our time to reclaim our dreams about ourselves. What is the black woman, and how do we go about procuring this knowledge about who she is? We’ve been finding out who we are through the influence that we have upon everyone else and the influence they have on us. Black men, white men, white women—each one of these groups has had a stake in our bodies, even though we’ve never given our consent. We have to get our bodies back somehow, but we must navigate our own bodies first. How do we turn inward? How do we find a place of refuge within them?

I’ve never been asked what I am in my own imagination. What is a black woman to herself out from under the shadow of the white woman? For black women, whiteness and white womanhood linger over our heads, smothering our consciousness every day. But we are not the inverse of whiteness—or white womanhood, for that matter. Still our bodies find a way to come back to us distorted like images in fun house mirrors. We know something is wrong with the distortions, but we cannot say what. This is the magic that I believe Claudia talks about in The Bluest Eye. But if we are not the opposite of whiteness, then what are we? Maybe the truth is that we are invisible to ourselves. The truth is, we are all clamoring for something ancient within our souls that is still virgin from white touch. We are nostalgic for something that we cannot claim, an artifact within ourselves that was not chained when our foremothers were transported across the Atlantic to the New World. The Portuguese call this “saudade,” feeling a loss or absence of something that we know will never return.