This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America(24)

Believing that, after the long silence, this meant that he was finally ready for me, I woke up at six o’clock on a spring morning to a text from him asking for me to call him as soon as possible. When I did, I soon discovered that he only wanted to be friends with me, although he left the option open for casual sex. I told him that wasn’t what I wanted; I yearned for love within a committed relationship.

“You sound like you’re falling into the trope of the overachieving black woman who has super high standards,” he said.

And I shattered all over again.

Although he later apologized—and I accepted that apology—I felt like a failure on a much larger level than I ever had before. Rejection wasn’t because I was too clingy, too outspoken, too aggressive, or too talkative. I was rejected because I was a black woman who was too successful. Somehow all my achievements that I had worked so hard to accrue seemed to be steadily whittling away my dating prospects.



In the beginning I thought that my anxiety about dating was mine, and mine alone, until I started paying more attention to popular culture and the ways black men fuel this dilemma. Tyler Perry has made millions off of characterizing successful black women as bitter, pretentious, single shrews who need a man to soften their behavior (see Daddy’s Little Girls), or who insult black men (see Madea in The Diary of a Mad Black Woman and I Can Do Bad All by Myself, and Angela in Why Did I Get Married?). This is not to say that these kinds of black women do not exist, but it is disappointing that Perry, one of the most visible black filmmakers of our generation, perpetuates these stereotypes. What is it about our goals that leads to our stigmatization? Is it because there is a deep-seated fear black women will outpace black men, and the only way to remind us of our place is to withhold love and affection? We may be accepted out there in the world with a good-paying job, but that world will never give us love because it wasn’t designed to. But when we return to the folds of our community and find that we are denigrated for the skills we used to survive, what else can we do but suppress ourselves just so we’ll have somebody?

Coined by Moya Bailey, and further developed by Trudy Hamilton of the now-defunct feminist blog Gradient Lair, the word “misogynoir” describes the hatred towards black women specifically manifested through American visual and popular culture. It is so rampant that to try to conceive of ways to eradicate it would be to pull the threads of society apart altogether. Leslie Jones’s continual harassment on Twitter for being a black woman in Ghostbusters is a prime example. Anytime you see an animalistic or masculine image of Michelle Obama, that’s misogynoir. Whenever black women’s lives are used as props to empower white women, such as the “phenomenon” of Miley Cyrus twerking or Lily Allen’s “satire” in the “Hard Out Here” video, that is misogynoir.

I don’t want to believe that David deliberately intended to hurt me, but at the same time he is too smart not to know what his statement meant. I wish I could have asked him why he hated me so much before emphasizing to him that, despite what he’s been told, I am not his enemy.

It felt like no matter what I did, whether I lived at my mother’s house in New Jersey or my apartment in New York, wrote in obscurity or heightened visibility, took initiative or became more submissive, my romantic life always floundered. And because David is black, his comment made me feel like I failed not only on a societal and gendered level, but also on an ethnocultural one, and this failure textured all my past dating experiences. What if I could not keep a man around long enough because I was a black woman who didn’t know her place? What if the modifier of being a black woman vacuumed all my other qualities away? It is an insecurity that I am constantly trying to tease out of my consciousness, but that is hard to do when you’re reminded of the statistics about black women’s marriageability, or lack thereof; every time your grandmother asks yet again if you’ve met anyone; when people crack jokes about why black women’s attitudes are the reason black men flock to white women.



An NYPD sniper tower was set up on Lenox Avenue between 129th and 130th Streets in Harlem, just a short walk away from where I lived during the summer of 2016. I do not know for sure why it was there. It looms in front of the Pioneer supermarket, which is not exactly a hub of illegal activity besides occasional shoplifters whose pictures are posted on the left side of the glass door as you enter. Central Harlem in general is not that crime-heavy. I have walked home at one or two o’clock in the morning, unscathed. I’ve never been mugged, or heard gunshots. I first thought that because the tower rose around the Fourth of July, maybe the NYPD was preparing for some shit to go down during Independence Day celebrations. But no, that couldn’t be it. I moved in around this time last summer, and there had been no sniper tower.

Its tall white presence communicated to all of us that we better not try no shit or else. Sometimes a police car would be parked beside the tower, and when one was not, I squinted up to try to see if there was anyone in that tower, but its windows were tinted black. I wanted to ask passersby on the street what was it doing in the neighborhood, but I assumed that anyone’s guess would have been as good as mine. I always said to non-Harlemites that if, God forbid, anything happened to me, I would go to the black men who sat on top of upturned crates outside the barbershop or the laundromat before I would ask the police for help. Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had recently been murdered, and their deaths had triggered another cruel summer of black rage that burned hotter than the heat itself.