This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(19)

Calling what I experienced after our demise “heartbreak” would be an offense to the depth of my feelings. I didn’t just break. I shattered. I cried whenever someone uttered his name. I kept my cell phone by my face at night, hoping that I’d hear the buzz of a notification and it would be a message from him telling me how much he missed and loved me. Because I did not immediately get a job out of college, I had moved back home and my idleness worsened my suffering. When I wasn’t pitching articles, I was losing myself to grief. I went to two therapy sessions with two different professionals. I took ballroom dancing lessons. I wrote Bradley a letter where I confessed that I thought I was never good enough for him and he responded thanking me for my vulnerability, but sticking to his belief that he had made the right decision.

In retrospect, I know that losing my virginity to Bradley would have been excruciating because I would have felt coerced and judged myself for not feeling aroused. But back then, I hated myself for thinking that my pussy was any better than those of the billions of other women out there who have healthy and happy sex lives with imperfect yet good men like Bradley—with or without commitment.



It took me six months to go out on a date again after Bradley, a year to get over him, and two years to recover from the pain. Since I spent most of my time indoors, either at my mother’s house or in a dancing studio, I decided that the only way I would meet men was OkCupid. Within a few short weeks, I’d connected with a guy named Chris, a redheaded veterinary student at the University of Pennsylvania. On our first date we went to the Cheesecake Factory and then a bar, where we discussed our families, political views, and past dating experiences for two and a half hours. He tried to compliment me by saying that he would date any woman irrespective of race, and that when he saw my profile he didn’t see a black woman. I remembered how my outspokenness had perhaps ruined my dating life at college. It was already bad enough that I could not attract black men, and so I kept quiet, afraid to correct Chris about the impossibility of color blindness because he might have mistaken that for aggression. I didn’t want to be a black female stereotype, the Sapphire who emasculates men and usurps their dominant role.

Since the 1800s, one of the stereotypes that black women in popular culture fall into is that of the “sassy mammies.” Because they were accepted in white families, their presence gave the impression that their oppression was minimal. The name “Sapphire” came from Sapphire Stevens, an Amos ’n’ Andy character, who constantly mocked her husband, Kingfish, leader of a black fraternal lodge in Harlem, calling him a failure. Both black and nonblack men know the Sapphire very well. She’s Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, Tracy Jordan’s wife in 30 Rock, Omarosa Manigault on The Apprentice: any loud neck-and eye-rolling black woman who dares to challenge a man or voice her opinion. Black women aren’t presented as people to be loved, but rather as sources of entertainment, and black women’s mouths are always a spectacle.

I thought that I would only be seen as desirable, as a real woman, if I kept quiet. Within a span of a few seconds, from the time Chris lifted his drink to when he sipped it, I tried to teach myself how to be silent and allow a man to speak even if what he said was wrong. No person, especially not a woman, should do this because it’s impossible, and demeaning to try. But what was I supposed to do: Ruin a good evening by defending myself? Perhaps I was overthinking it.

In retrospect, I know that I was thinking just the right amount. Chris didn’t see me as a “black woman” because he didn’t want to see me as one. It was easy for him to make this judgment when I was just a 400×600 image online, unmoving and unspeaking. But it could’ve been worse, I thought. He could have called me a nigger or exoticized me, which only demonstrates how low my standards were for white men at the time. He concluded the night by kissing me on the cheek and asking to schedule our next date, so I assumed that my silence had worked to my advantage. The next time we met, we went to an Indian restaurant and then another bar, and we kissed on the lips before parting ways. Then I didn’t hear anything from him, and I grew anxious. At first I thought it might be because his twelve-hour workday was taking a toll on him, but the timing was too convenient; it was about a week before Valentine’s Day, and my mother told me that men always get weird around Valentine’s Day if they are not in a relationship with the woman they’re dating.

After two weeks, I’d had enough. I texted him saying that if he wasn’t interested in me, he could have at least let me know. Less than a minute later, I received a seven-screen text from him saying that I was a nice girl but that I was right, he had lost interest. I didn’t respond. And then I thought: Why didn’t I correct him? That was when I realized that, as a black woman, silence would never save me. It wouldn’t make me more desirable, only more susceptible to whatever a man wanted to give to me, even if it was a pittance.



Before I moved to New York, I imagined the male gaze to be like Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes, which watch over all of Long Island in The Great Gatsby. You can never be out of the line of sight. I perused tweets and essays by women whom I admired, in which they proclaimed that they didn’t need men to feel beautiful, let alone desired. I envied their confidence. Most of these women were in long-term relationships, whereas I had never been in one of any length and I wasn’t quite sure what men wanted. I viewed men as potentially scary, but I still wanted to be desired by them.