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Intimate Revolution

Definition and Action to Be Taken

For Black women globally to unlearn the language of whiteness that teaches them that their sole value is labor. For Black men to do their emotional labor in finding their way through a masculinity that is traumatized and hypersexualized by the language of whiteness, and that too often leads to pouring their untreated trauma over the bodies and beings of Black women.

Unlearning whiteness for Black women globally means redefining this relationship to labor, normalizing and culturalizing rest and replenishment. It means unlearning emotional currency—having your value treated like a commodity. Un-learning whiteness for Black men means breaking up both with white supremacy’s definition of masculinity that creates internalized conflict and with their expectation that Black women do the emotional labor of mothering a traumatized masculinity.

Breakdown

Intimate revolution is about the emotional work of changing Black, Brown, and Indigenous women’s relationship to labor, and Black men’s relationship to masculinity. This emotional work for both Black women and men is deeply complicated precisely because it is a relationship.

Labor in this case is not about a nine-to-five job that ends. It’s much more than work; it is about worth. It is about an emotional connection, a relationship at the intersection of history, gender, Blackness, value, violence, and worth.

Labor, Blackness, and women are a threesome, a relationship that lives and thrives from the plantation to the pandemic and beyond. This relationship means that a breakup comes with deep roots, a long history, and modern manifestations. The entangling among labor, value, and history is precisely what makes this an “intimate” revolution. And like all breakups, it’s messy.

Black Women, Labor, and History

Labor. For Black women globally, this word carries weight, history, legacy. The language of whiteness made labor life, breath, and death in the systems of enslavement, colonialism, and apartheid that built and continue to shape our worlds. Your worth was measured in how much labor you could take on, how fast you could do it and with little to no rest. Do too little, and whiteness would kill you; do too much, and that labor under whiteness could kill you.

Historically, that labor was under the sun, the lash, the massa and the mistress. For you as an enslaved Black woman, a colonized one, or one navigating apartheid, labor was your calling. Whiteness worked you to death. Literally.

And that work had multiple manifestations.

Different women did different kinds of labor. Your body was capital, and then capitalized. There was the Mammy. There was the Wench. Later, there was the Welfare Queen. Each name is a narrative by whiteness that created a specific kind of labor for Black women.

The Mammy, the Wench, the Welfare Queen

The Mammy. Domestic labor. Historically, she was a Southern, large, dark-skinned Black woman who took care of white children and tended to the needs of white families. She never asked for anything in return, she never got tired, and servicing white families was pure pleasure. She was lampooned and insulted, but that never stopped her caring for white families. She was removed from her family to take care of white people’s families, and that loss was hers alone to bear. She would not visibly mourn or miss her family but be totally fulfilled by looking after white children and their families. Here was a woman who had children, but was desexualized and so somehow didn’t have sex. Nothing immaculate about that conception; that’s the narrative of whiteness declaring desirability had a form—and it wasn’t Mammy.

The Wench/Jezebel. Sexual labor. Stimulating, exciting, satiating white men’s appetites. Her sole existence was to tempt and tease. Her humanity was stripped, her sexuality all-engulfing, oozing out of every pore. That meant sexual violence could not be considered violence because her screams were not connected to struggle or pain; they were about sex and pleasure. Always. Her body and being were about desire and contempt, navigating white men’s deviant lust, and white women’s deadly lens.

The Welfare Queen. Political labor. Undeserving, scamming, lazy users. These were do-nothing dawdlers waiting for government assistance, hungrily eyeing the hard-earned—read white—taxpayers’ dollars. That was the narrative of whiteness. This Black woman was a single mother. Blamed for her self-inflicted predicament and labeled as the main reason American ghettoes were in fact ghettoes; she failed to progress. The facts? The majority of welfare recipients were white, and the majority of those who had committed welfare fraud were male. The facts did not shape the narrative. That is what the language of whiteness does: it rewrites the narrative to serve the delusion of whiteness as rightness. Welfare Queen was a term engaged as a weapon of the political right. It was political currency, part of political labor to score votes, courtesy of Ronald Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign. This narrative was deadly for Black women’s families and family structure. This was political labor in service to a constituency of whiteness.

Your Weaponized Body

Sexualized, mammy-fied, and demonized. Your body was treated as a weapon and then weaponized against you; your Blackness a labor sentence and your humanity a no-go, a no-no, and a who-gives-a-fuck. In each of these ways, Black women were emotional currency, their identity commoditized to serve the narrative of whiteness.

This compartmentalization of Black women and their labor was about dehumanization. Because, of course, a human woman may be a combination of caretaker, sexual being, mother, provider and one who is provided for—that is humanity, that is complexity. Physical backbreaking labor held a contradictory narrative defined by whiteness. Black folk were supposed to be content, happy to be doing this labor. The narrative of whiteness imposed joy on cruelty, weaponizing the emotional to contrive this joy on Black folk doing brutal labor from stolen freedom.

Labor as Connection to Value and Worth

What makes this history and its contemporary manifestations particularly enraging, confusing, and internalized is that there was always a parallel narrative of Black women as lazy. Back-breaking, soul-aching labor by Black women was rewritten as laziness, and the two stood cheek by jowl. This “lazy Black women” narrative was part of the psychology of whiteness. What it did was nurture a connection between value and labor within Black women—part of the internalized racism. The narrative would develop an intersection with never wanting to be seen or considered as lazy, and taking on more labor to prove that you were not. You did more to prove you were worth more. Laziness historically was a death sentence. It came alive as emotional connection: your labor and your value were how you measured how you mattered. That’s because how whiteness saw you, mattered.

This seeing by whiteness created a cycle of different kinds of violence: the economic intertwined with the emotional—the connection between the two. Understanding the combined toll of both must be part of this breakup, and requires scrutiny, identification, unraveling, and unlearning. This is how the language of whiteness thrives within Black women’s emotionality. This emotional connection to your value as historically defined by labor was about how much you do, how much more you can do, how much you have done, how much more you are willing to do, and how valuable you are because you do it. Enduring, exhausting, unending labor.

This connection then was about a conditioning that manifests not in the labor Black women do but in the relationship to that labor—one that took root in Black women’s minds and souls.

Emotional Mammies

Physical labor extended to emotional labor as part of an oppressive system. Historically, that emotional labor was crucial to navigating the violence of the time and keeping those who wielded power happy and reassured that the Black bodies they owned and controlled were content. It wasn’t historically gendered; both Black men and women did this kind of emotional labor, but it has become particularly gendered—there is now the “emotional mammy.” The Black woman—of any hue, shape, or size—is expected to take care of the feelings of white people, of white women and men, of all men—no matter the cost or consequence to her, her body, her well-being.

What does that mean for Black women? How does this manifest? It manifests as Black women emotionally rearranging ourselves to make space to soothe the discomfort of white people always—even when the discomfort is about harm they have caused to us. You know that phrase “There, there”—in other words, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.” It’s that. It’s “there-there-ology.” It has meant swallowing our anger, fighting our pain, suppressing our rage, repressing our contempt, stuffing down our humanity, shoving it hard into the crevices of our bodies so that we can keep an unpeaceful peace. It means an endless reassurance to white people that all is well, that they are “good people”—even when that makes us sick emotionally—and, all too often, eventually physically. It means choking our own Black breath to let whiteness breathe.

The language of whiteness teaches Black women that we are emotional currency. Our value appreciates or depreciates according to the service we provide for white people, for whiteness as this emotional mammy. It is our expected willingness to consistently, relentlessly provide that service that is the measure of us as valuable—no matter the ask, the demand, the weight, the pain, the harm, the toll.

How Do I Speak the Language of Whiteness?

It is in our emotional relationship to ourselves and one another that the language of whiteness reigns, rules, and ruins, and labor’s legacy lives. This emotional relationship manifests in an interconnection of self-love and self-loathing inside us. It is here that a breakup must happen.

A crucial part of unlearning whiteness for Black women is asking ourselves, How do I speak this language? How do I emotionally profit from it, invest in it? What does that look like? Here’s what it looked like for me.

I was a Black woman journalist in the UK. I was an executive producer on a show about Africa, and I left to become a researcher in a white media house. Climbing up the ladder in a Black space, only to climb all the way back down to get into a white space. The position was a demotion. The language of whiteness turned it into a promotion. I was at the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation. The biggest broadcaster in the world. Going from Black space into white space—that act turned into ladder climbing, a definition of making it. I was therefore certified a success—to me, to my family, to friends, to the world. It was major, and I loved how other people saw me and how I saw myself because I had gained access.

I did become a better journalist; I upskilled, moved from radio to television, from being a researcher to a reporter to a producer. Remember, though: I was an executive producer before I came to the BBC. So there’s that. I also became a more insecure person there, much more insecure. I fought to prove myself again and again, always starting again, even if I had climbed to a role with a different title. The title may have held more power, but I did not. I was the same.

Proving myself, being constantly questioned about my ability, being gaslit, being challenged about my right to be there. I balanced better technical skills and a higher profile with discomfort, anger, constant job insecurity, vulnerability, and the veneer of professional success. I was always professionally insecure, teetering on some language-of-whiteness-made precipice, balancing, losing my balance, and trying to gain a sure footing.

In my world of journalism, the language of whiteness always maintains insecurity for Black professionals: short-term contracts, long-term interning, the temporary do not expand to the kind of permanence that makes you secure, that allows you to exhale, to breathe, to build beyond work and explore other parts of life. It is a constant navigating and negotiating for the next piece of work. My inside was in a constant state of turmoil; my outside wore the appearance of success. It was an emotional juggling act. I kept smashing into the glass ceiling of race that the language of whiteness constructs and that so many Black journalists in the UK hit.

I became increasingly bitter, resentful, and angry. And I remember staying. Because although I was not professionally secure, I was emotionally affirmed by the language of whiteness. It was a badge, a medal. I wore it, and wearing it made me feel visible and valuable to myself, my family, my community, and the rest of the world.

I stayed. Staying took me to the edge of my own principles, my own beliefs about Blackness. I remember almost selling out a group of Black boys on a documentary I was working on—putting them in harm’s way by persuading them to be on camera in a documentary that would criminalize them. I pulled back at the very last minute, went to tell the organization leader not to do the interview and not to have the Black boys he was working with do it either. I explained why. He was disappointed—suspicious too. He finally asked whether there was another way this could be done. I had to explain in more detail what doing the interview would mean for his organization, for the Black boys he was working with. He listened, shrugged, and reluctantly agreed.

He, like me, saw the value of being in a documentary made by this broadcaster, what it could mean for him and for his organization. Disappointed—and honestly annoyed with me—he agreed that the boys in his organization would no longer participate. Going home that night, I stared at myself in a mirror of fragments. Who are you becoming? I don’t think I understood how the language of whiteness communicates to us. Not then, but I do now. It sucks. I couldn’t look at myself. Who am I? Who am I becoming? What am I willing to do? What am I not willing to do?

I left. Finally. Not in some glorious act of justice, but angry, bitter, pushed, and resentful. If I could have stayed, my quiet truth is that I would have. Unhappy, angry, insecure, vulnerable, navigating racism, yes—but I still would have stayed. The payoff of being seen as successful, of being respected and revered—of emotional profit—allowed me to bargain with my emotional health to hold on to this appearance of, this definition of, success. That’s part of how the language of whiteness showed up within me. So, leaving that job wasn’t hard; it was devastating. It was also the beginning of my unlearning. Leaving was a crucial step in beginning to unlearn the language of whiteness and beginning to practice intimate revolution.

That was me in the UK.

How Do Black Women Speak the Language of Whiteness?

Black women speak the language of whiteness in the way we are taught to see ourselves, and how we are seen through the eyes of the world, white people’s world. It is needing white people to see us in order to know that we hold value. We don’t want to admit that—we don’t admit or concede that. What we are nurtured to feel is that their seeing us identifies our worth and cements our value.

Black people can see us too—they absolutely do see us too, and that matters—but it doesn’t benefit us in the same way, to the same extent. Our visibility to other Black folks doesn’t carry as much weight, doesn’t hold the same power, doesn’t affirm us in the same way. It doesn’t matter to us in the way it does when white people see us. We don’t admit that either. The language of whiteness is spoken in the ways white people do not see us, and therefore we become less visible to ourselves.

We could be a Black woman in academia, in the corporate world, in the entertainment industry, in the world of tech, in politics, in media, in the cocoon that is publishing, in the nonprofit world, in retail, beauty, fashion, and in the worlds of philanthropy or education. We could be a Black woman in America, in England, in Europe, in Africa. We are Black women in a world dominated by the global language of whiteness. We may shout—millions of us do—that our Blackness is our everything, it is alpha and omega. We shout that, we live that, in myriad ways. Loudly, unapologetically, with style, rhythm, and badass bass, across borders, beyond boundaries, we claim our Blackness as beauty, balm, and bad to the bone. That’s what makes this unlearning complicated. For millions of Black women, there isn’t a lack of love of self; this is about recognizing that the emotional connection to our Blackness is shaped by the language of whiteness.

The language of whiteness is a narrative that teaches Black women about how invaluable we are, how grateful we should be, and how little we matter—all at the same time. We are simultaneously invaluable and without value. Even if we do not see or feel that way about ourselves yet, we are shaped by the systems of the world—by schoolteachers and school buildings, by what we watch, read, and listen to, by the institutions we work in, by a religion that dominates in the form of a blue-eyed, blond-haired cross bearer. Each will teach us that speaking the language of whiteness requires being less ourselves, and that being less ourselves is our passport to expanded possibility.

This means that we must unlearn and break up with dual intersecting narratives: grind as our mother tongue and deriving our worth from how the language of whiteness sees us as Black women, shapes how we see ourselves and how we define success.

What Unlearning Whiteness Looks Like

The actions of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones show how she is unlearning this language of whiteness and rejecting being the emotional mammy with white elite institutions.

Hannah-Jones is creator of the 1619 project in the New York Times. Launched in August 2019 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of when the first enslaved Africans landed in Virginia, the project offered readers a new way to think about the founding of America, and specifically the contribution made by enslaved Africans—who became African Americans—to shaping America’s systems and modern economy. It was visionary and groundbreaking, and it made global headlines. It was considered controversial, and it attracted the ire of the political right.

That controversy manifested in the world of academia when Hannah-Jones applied to her alma mater, the University of North Carolina (UNC), to become the Knight Chair of Race and Investigative Journalism. It is a tenured position, and she would have been the first Black woman—and first Black person—to hold it. Tenure is the ultimate job security within academia, ensuring your freedom, your paycheck, and a certain power. She went through the rigorous interview process, and was successful. But UNC declined to give Hannah-Jones tenure . . . for a tenured position. There was public uproar. Across social media, academics lambasted what happened to her; think pieces were written; cable news did segments. The pressure, national scandal, and weeks of protest led UNC to—finally, reluctantly—offer her tenure. She said no, declining their offer with an eight-page letter and a television interview with CBS anchor Gayle King.

Hannah-Jones explained to King that although the position was supposed to be tenured, when the university failed to offer her what every other Knight Chair had been given, she said yes to a five-year contract without tenure. She explained, “It was embarrassing to be the first person to be denied tenure. I didn’t want this to become a national scandal; I didn’t want to drag my university through the pages of newspapers because I was the first—and the only Black—person in that position to be denied tenure. So I was willing to accept it. I never spoke up during that time.”

Her initial response is how the language of whiteness is spoken—the sometimes quiet acceptance of injustice to avoid the professional consequence of speaking up. It’s spoken here in privileging a white institution’s reputation over Hannah-Jones’s individual reality. Speaking that language meant rearranging herself to accommodate the school’s discrimination, its injustice done to her—and protecting the school with her silence. No shade, no judgment. It’s something millions of Black women do, have done—probably without the same global scrutiny—but nevertheless, we have done it, and continue to do it.

Hannah-Jones wrote in her resignation letter, “For too long Black Americans have been taught that success is defined by gaining entry to and succeeding in historically white institutions. For too long, powerful people have expected the people they have mistreated and marginalized to sacrifice themselves to make things whole.”

In the interview with Gayle King explaining her decision, Hannah-Jones said: “Since the second grade when I started being bused into white schools, I have spent my entire life proving that I belonged in elite white spaces that were not built for Black people. I decided I did not want to do that anymore. This is not my fight. It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina. That’s the job of the people in power who created the situation in the first place.”

And it is here that unlearning the language of whiteness occurs. A Black woman saying that it is not her job to heal a white institution is refusing to be an emotional mammy, all in real time. She is no longer privileging the white narrative over her own emotional well-being. She is choosing herself, opting for an emotional safety and rejecting becoming the institution’s emotional mammy.

What Nikole Hannah-Jones did is big, because Black women’s emotional labor is always expected to cater to whiteness no matter the cost or consequence to our Blackness, our being, and how it may bury us.

Gayle King asked the pivotal question we Black women must all ask ourselves when it comes to unlearning whiteness and beginning to practice the Emotional Justice love language of intimate revolution: “What is the personal toll this has taken on you? How has this affected you personally?”

Hannah-Jones responded, “It’s been extremely difficult. People see me as a symbol of things they love or they hate. But I’m a human being.”

This is the crucial step—by acknowledging our own humanity, our own breaking point, and by privileging our well-being, we unlearn the language of whiteness and actively begin the practice of intimate revolution—we are reimagining our relationship to labor, whiteness, and our humanity.

Black Women’s Labor for Freedom

Black women’s labor globally was also in service of freedom, of holding agency over their own bodies and fighting tooth and nail for self-ownership and actualization. It matters that we honor and name that. Black women absolutely did that. Every independence movement—from civil rights and women’s rights in the US and the UK, to independence in Africa, to fighting apartheid in South Africa—reveals how Black women’s labor was also, and always, about freedom fighting, a warrior spirit, and a resistance to being named and known solely according to the language of whiteness.

Black women have always had to be fluent in multiple narratives in order to make our way through a world whose dominant language is whiteness. That means we are creatively, culturally, intellectually, artistically, and musically literate beyond whiteness, even as we are simultaneously nurtured, traumatized, and shaped by it. It is that combination that births complexity and contradiction.

We built worlds before whiteness rebuilt them in its image and likeness—destroying ours. We built movements that have consistently challenged white men’s notion of themselves as authorities with dominance over our bodies.

We—Black women and Black men—are the Black front-line across communities, cities, countries, and continents. It is our fight, our willingness to stare down the violent face of white supremacy that is the foundation of freedom movements. That is our global truth. This Emotional Justice love language, though, is not about that unequivocal truth.

The Black Community’s Warriors

Black women are the designated warriors—and worriers—about the state of the Black community. We are its caretakers, nurturers, service providers. We are its first responders. There is a beauty and a badassness to that role, one that we revel in and are rewarded by. There is power and progress because of that work. Black women are builders, believers. There is change because of that work. There is deep love in this too. When the arc of the world bends toward justice, it is because Black women are the arc.

But we are not bending. We are breaking.

Being the arc without sufficient support and without a strategy for rest and replenishment is part of the community labor landscape. That landscape must change for our individual health, communal health, and societal health, for a practice of liberation.

Grind. That’s the contemporary manifestation of this historical relationship to labor birthed by the language of whiteness, and its legacy. Grind is not a word for Black women; it’s our Black mother tongue. It’s a culture, a generational inheritance passed down, passed around, and emerging from the bellies of Black women the world over. It is toil always, rest never, reward rarely. We grind for good, we grind for God, we grind for men. No healing lies there.

I call it push-through-o-nomics. Grind ignores every sign that your body, spirit, and mind cannot do any more, take any more, or move any more. It demands that you discard all those signs and push through—and find power and pleasure in pushing through, even after you have broken. Breaking is illegible, unacceptable, and makes you somehow less of a Black woman. It is familiar unrelenting exhaustion. Your heart aches, your soul is breaking, your health is failing; don’t stop . . . even if it’s killing you, if you’re burned out and burned up—but keep pushing, keep going, you must, you have to, keep going. Always, keep going.

Black women are the caretakers. Who takes care of the caretakers? They must. We must. And that is what intimate revolution invites us to learn. This is not about prosecuting Black women’s agency, endurance, and sheer will and fight to survive. We are here because of that. But this is about Black women’s healing. So it is not about toughness. It’s about toll, the devastating toll on who we become as a result of the language of whiteness and the toll of unrelenting resistance.

Unlearning is hard because this language of grind envelops and surrounds us—our mothers, grandmothers, our girls, our families, our communities, our men, the organizations for which and in which we work, in which we serve—but that do not always serve us—each and all of these communicate and demonstrate how grind is gangsta and glorious. It is expected and required.

Black women have created emotional codes and systems to essentially keep each other speaking push-through-o-nomics. We can be emotional litigators of one another if we stop speaking it. We police one another with our “Get it together” mantras designed to bolster, but that breathe deadly “You better not break” vibes. Designed to help, they harm. They are part of a historical inheritance, part of the untreated trauma.

There is a growing movement around “radical rest,” connecting rest to revolution, divesting from capitalism, and engaging Black women in exploring this. Important work by organizations like the Nap Ministry, founded by Tricia Hersey, use social media to articulate crucial messages of rest and replenishment. Hersey expands on this need for rest, its origins and context with important work in her book, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto.

To not battle through, to stop, to choose rest, and to privilege replenishment trigger deep feelings of guilt. We emotionally back-and-forth within ourselves, questioning and then challenging our own feelings, talking ourselves out of them, guilting ourselves because of them. Often, perhaps eventually, we convince ourselves that we “deserve rest, dammit”; we even justify rest, but too often we’re unpersuaded by our own internal need and pushed by ancestral inheritance. We find ways to push through, and keep going.

For the Love of Black Men

Between Black women and Black men there is a particular emotional labor—the emotional grind—that is a complicated, deep abiding love. Black men are the loves of Black women’s lives. There is such beauty and depth and power in that love. The language of whiteness and the legacy of untreated trauma from our history mean that the love shows up in ways that can wound, that harm liberation and threaten emotional freedoms.

Black masculinity born of the language of whiteness and wrapped in racism created a complex relationship about protection, power, and harm. There is a protection by Black women of Black men; there is an expectation that this protection covers them always, in all circumstances—even when they harm and hurt. Within the Black community globally, there is an expectation that Black men are protected from the consequences of their harm. Such protection stifles humanity, stunts growth, and hurts and harms. Black women and men are one another’s protectors and providers. But not in a traditional sense or space. Black women provide cover and shelter from the cancer of racism that emotionally penetrates and devastates Black men. Black women provide a mirror for some of what Black men loathe within themselves that has been shoved into them by the language of whiteness.

Black men use Black women to do their own emotional labor, to reassert a masculinity trampled on by the language of whiteness. Black women hurt, hate, love, and adore Black men for who they fight to be, and for how whiteness breaks them. Because of how the language of whiteness targets Black masculinity, and how patriarchy rolls up, squads up, and demands the center seat at every table, this love is always complicated. In other words, this love turns into privileging Black men over the health and well-being of Black women. And that’s just not good for a thriving community.

Black Masculinity, Labor, and the Language of Whiteness

The systems of oppression treated Black men’s bodies like beasts—of labor, appetite, danger. They took no account of souls and hearts. Each story served a narrative and holds a legacy that has created an emotional connection to masculinity that wrestles with power—what that looks like and feels like, and how it manifests.

For Black men, intimate revolution means doing the emotional labor of navigating their masculinity. This is tender, complex, traumatized, challenging territory.

Black masculinity is shaped by the language of whiteness and, specifically, white masculinity’s narrative of savior, conqueror, and civilizer. And while that narrative tells Black people that they were saved, conquered, and civilized, it offers a dual complicated narrative for Black masculinity.

The language of whiteness set a foundation for what masculinity looked like, and then within its systems of oppression stripped Black men of that foundation. White men understand their dominion in relationship to subjugation, of Black men and all women. They are on some alpha shit. Black men navigate and negotiate these complex and contradictory masculinity narratives: being a man is about having power over somebody, and that power is what communicates to you that you are a man. How do you uphold that complexity and contradiction?

Intimacy and Black Women’s Emotional Labor

Intimacy. I describe it as an institution where the language of whiteness flourishes. It is an institution within Black communities too. Black men work out their masculinity through Black women’s emotional labor. There is a mothering of Black men by Black women, a caretaking that is expected, that Black girls are nurtured to provide; it becomes an emotional patriarchy.

How do you feel powerful in a world that treats your body as a threat and hyperpowerful, and simultaneously infantilizes you as a man, but adultifies you as a Black boy? What is the toll on your relationship to masculinity and your Blackness with those competing narratives? Where do you figure out how to find and feel your power as a Black man?

That feeling of power is fed through relationship—the emotional figuring out is so often done for them by Black women. It is here that emotional patriarchy manifests within the Black community. It is an expectation of the privileging, prioritizing, and centralizing of Black men’s feelings no matter the cost and consequences of those feelings.

Black women and men cannot take refuge in their politics to do this work. You may be the fiercest pan-Africanist, feminist, and progressive, dedicated in your commitment to each or all of these. Each matters. Each carries weight and may shape how you have come to see and understand yourself, your world, and the world. The emotional work Black women and men must do is about the emotionality of our political worlds. There is a difference between these two worlds: one is about philosophy, and this is about emotionality. And the language of whiteness takes residence in your emotional connection to, and relationship with, Blackness, shaped by white supremacy. It does so in ways that are unshaken by having good politics, good political arguments, and sound historical analysis of the challenges of racism in a world dominated by whiteness.

You may have great politics, but that sheds no light on your emotionality. And it is in your emotional connection to Blackness that the language of whiteness wreaks havoc. The rage that can emerge comes from the simultaneous realization of how much the language of whiteness matters and manifests—even with a politics of Blackness—is painful. Anti-Blackness, we call it. Anti-Blackness is an offshoot of a narrative of whiteness; it is a manifestation of this language. It holds the power, and determines outcomes of Black life, so to be white is to hold power. Who aspires to feel powerless?

From the Plantation to the Pandemic and Beyond

The pandemic reveals how the legacy of labor, and the long-standing inequities that labor created, continue into the present. Staying home was the way to stay safe, said the world’s health experts—except for frontline workers. And who were they? Millions of Black women and men. They had to go to work. They were the front line—the black front line. Lock-down was not an option, because the historical labor that built worlds also created systems of entrenched inequity and economic disparity. Those systems made labor a place where you were paid less, had to do more, got the worst jobs, juggled to make ends meet and keep families going.

So labor and its legacy lingered, making you vulnerable during the pandemic and leading to the devastating loss of life, as revealed by the data. COVID has killed one out of every eight hundred African Americans. COVID has killed Black people ages thirty-five to forty-four at nine times the rate of white people, with Black men constituting a disproportionate number of them. Sobering. Devastating. Generation changing.

Unlearning Push-Through-O-Nomics, aka What Intimate Revolution Practice Looks Like

Simone Biles, the four-foot, eight-inch Black gymnast who dazzles with strength, grace, and what-a-wow routines, is the most decorated gymnast in the world, and has consistently won gold medal after gold medal for America. In the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, she withdrew from the all-around women’s final, which would end with the USA claiming the silver medal and their competitors, Russia, winning the gold.

A statement from USA Gymnastics said in part, “After further medical evaluation, Simone Biles has withdrawn from the final individual all-around competition at the Tokyo Olympic Games in order to focus on her mental health.”

Simone said, “I say put mental health first. Because if you don’t, you won’t enjoy sport and won’t succeed as much as you want to. So, it’s okay sometimes to sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself, because it shows how strong a competitor and person that you really are, rather than just battling through it.” She explained that she had no physical injuries, that the emotional toll is what caused her to withdraw.

It is here that Simone is rejecting push-through-o-nomics, and laying down a generational inheritance. This is what intimate revolution looks like.

Intimate revolution is the kind of change that doesn’t make rest revolutionary; instead it is simply human, and it doesn’t require a thesis, dissertation, or a UN convening for us to honor our need to rest, to restore, to replenish. Unlearning whiteness means changing our relationship to rest, and not associating rest with laziness.

An Exchange with Dr. Jennifer Mullan

I am talking here with Dr. Jennifer Mullan, creator of DeColonizing Therapy, an awardee of the Essence Essential Heroes Awards on Black Mental Health, and a clinical psychologist working in prisons and academia for more than a decade.

Jennifer Mullan is JM. Esther Armah is EA.

EA: Unlearning the language of whiteness is complicated for us as Black women because it nurtured how we derive our worth, our value—it’s complicated shit. What has that looked like for you? How have you spoken the language of whiteness in your work?

JM: I did a lot of harm. Not consciously. Many of us—prior to understanding the effects whiteness has on people of the global majority, on people of color throughout the globe—we are taught, we are trained, we are educated on this façade of Eurocentricity—what I like to call caucasity. I’ve also participated in whiteness in not being conscious of the ways I was getting the promotions, moving forward, being seen because of the way I was perceived as “less of a threat,” or more “palatable” for certain audiences. I was not really looking at the ways color, identity, how my Blackness shows up, how it doesn’t, how I identify, where I get to identify—all that. I know for sure that whiteness has affected all these ways. There are so many ways I found myself being a chess piece, being placed, not being aware that I was being utilized, and being tokenized. I’ve really had to look at how I internalized white supremacy, how the work that I do has internalized it.

EA: How did you learn about grind, and from whom?

JM: My mother. And my grandparents. My grandfather would look me in the eye and say, “You have to make sure people respect you. In order to get respect, this is what you need to do.” He would say, “I’m an immigrant. My people were originally brought over to Panama without consent. We did not consent to build that [Panama] Canal. We did not consent to being taken from the shores. And so your job is to work really hard, get an education, never take a day off.” In his mind, this is how he made it. And he didn’t, right. They were still struggling paycheck to paycheck. He would tell me, “Don’t forget who you are, and where you came from. You have to work that much harder than everybody else. They’re gonna assume that you’re lazy, and that you lie.” He gave me this whole outline of how to grind. And I took him seriously for so long. I respected him so much, and people respected him so much. But now looking back, that [notion of grind] continued to be perpetuated by individuals that were fed the same lies. This lie that in order to be worthy, in order to be good enough, you have to grind, grind, grind. You can never stop. My mother passed that down to me. I remember falling down the stairs taking my dog for a walk and getting hurt badly—ankles bleeding, swelling—my mum wraps it all up, she’s really, really tender with me. And then she’s like “Let’s go. Time for school.” And I said, “Where am I going?” She said, “You’re going to school.” And I say, “What do you mean I’m going to school! I almost died!” But my mother said, “Let’s go! And you’re going to gym class. And you’re not getting out of anything.” Now looking back, we talk about it. And even now, she—or I—will say “I’m so lazy” because I’m sitting on the couch. And then I have to check her—or a friend will check me. Is that lazy? Or are you giving yourself some space to rest?

EA: Talk some more about the relationship we as the women of the global majority have between grind and worth and labor and laziness—and how they combine to make so many of us grind harder.

JM: We were mules. We were labor. Our bodies were labor. Our survival depended on what we could do, how well we could do it, and how long we could bear that brunt and that burden. I believe from continent to continent we see that show up. We see how colonialism has continued to rape us of our natural ways, of our rhythm of being. I think that from the very beginning it has been about what we could be doing for “master,” for the institution of whiteness. Across the globe we see this. There’s this notion that there’s something wrong with me if I can’t keep up; there’s something wrong with me if I’m feeling burnout.

EA: How did grind shape your understanding of success, and impact your approach and definition of being successful?

JM: With these credentials, with these initials after my name, with this “Dr.,” perhaps people would look at me differently. I would no longer be overlooked; I would no longer be second-guessed. I think a lot of us had that feeling. There was this illusion, this belief that I would suddenly be free of various types of discriminations and microaggressions. And again, it wasn’t conscious—I wasn’t saying, “Oh, I won’t be discriminated against because I have these letters after my name.” It was a sense of things will just be easier, I would have more freedom, I won’t be getting questioned and insulted about things. I won’t have to deal with all these types of isms. And it affected my worth deeply. Some of my identity got tied up in that. And I feel like I am still untangling myself from that violence.

EA: How did your identity get tied up in that?

JM: I was leaving the university I’d been working in for the last twelve years. When I put in that letter, I was singing around the campus. I wasn’t prepared for all of the material that I had—inadvertently or not—pushed down for later within my own self and identity. It was particularly around productivity, around my self-worth, around this martyr archetype of “I’m helping, I’m worthy,” regardless of how bone-tired I am, how it’s affecting my interpersonal relationships, how I’ve witnessed myself not being able to show up for people that I love in my life—because of my job. So, when I left the institution, I embarked on this really dark period. I really think that the grind—white-bodied supremacy—really took me for a loop. I wasn’t the only one. A friend of mine—a Black woman—said to me, “I can’t get off the couch,” or “I can’t get outside.” I was in the same place, but embarrassed to admit it. Here we both were—on our islands of invulnerability, trying to throw a rope at each other, but still as Black women having a really hard time being honest about how we’re feeling. Is this depression? Is this anxiety? What is this? Who am I? What am I to the world? Do I matter anymore if I’m not the director of this center, if I’m not a professor, if I’m not the face of this program? So, on many levels I felt “not enough.” It’s only been the last two or three months have I been able to put language to this. I’m working through that—that I am enough, that I am worthy, that I’m allowed to set boundaries. I’m allowed to ask for what I need.

EA: Let’s talk emotional mammies. It’s an Emotional Justice term. It’s when women of the global majority are expected to take care of the feelings of white people—white women, all men—no matter the cost or consequence to their being, their body, no matter the harm. What did it look like for you?

JM: I have to take a breath, because I felt that. I always felt like I was stepping on eggshells, and I was always taking care of white people’s feelings. Always. I would be activated, triggered, irritated; I felt the audacity, the level of narcissism. I felt like I had to be strategic all the time. I constantly felt drained. I’ve been on medical leave three separate times, done kickboxing for my rage. I nearly died multiple times, dehydration in the hospital, my body was shutting down. I had surgery, so I had to be out for the summer. I always woke up—after eight or nine hours of sleep—tired, depressed. And I would be on my way to work and I would start sobbing. I could name all the ways I was Humpty Dumpty trying to put myself back together again—I wasn’t the problem. We’re not the problem.

EA: Intimate revolution, unlearning whiteness—what does that look like for you and your work?

JM: For me, intimate revolution is about taking a lot more time. It’s about coming back into my body, and making a promise that I’m going to slow down, because I’m more creative on that second and third day. When I slow down, and I don’t pick up too many calls and try to be the hero martyr—something I do to myself—then I’ll be a better friend, partner, and I have more space for myself. When we start to slow down, step back—I can choose to live in joy, to step into my body, check in with myself, take care of myself before I give parts of myself to everyone. For me, that intimate revolution is about looking at how to hold myself and those I love, lovingly accountable. Not what whiteness has told us is fair, but looking at how I operate my business, and leaving space for the emotional needs as well. I am going to need that kindness, and I have needed that kindness before. I owe it to myself and my ancestors to set boundaries, and I’m entitled to do that. My hope is I continue to call myself in lovingly, in questioning grind culture and in realizing grind culture is another way to enslave us. Only white supremacy wins when the rest of us are grinding.

The Emotional Justice Template

Work through your feelings: Guilt, frustration, resentment, anger, rage, reward, grateful

Reimagine your focus: How do I speak the language of whiteness when it comes to labor and my sense of value? How has speaking this language of whiteness shaped how I work and how I feel about success?

Build the future: Centering intimate revolution and emotional well-being as part of a sustainable work life

Discussion Points

Where did you learn about grind? What impact did that learning have on you?

What would intimate revolution look like for you?