Preface

I love Black women.

I love the Baptist church mothers in white.

I love the girls who “buss it” on TikTok.

I love the sisters with Ivy League degrees and the ones with GEDs.

I love the big mamas, ma’dears, and aunties.

I love the loc-wearing sisters who smell like shea butter.

I love the ladies of the “Divine Nine.”

I love the “hot girls” in Savage Fenty, designer pumps, and premium lacefronts; and the sisters who keep a fresh Caesar.

I love the girls who jumped double Dutch and played hopscotch.

I love the Nam-myoho-renge-kyo chanters, the hoodoos, and the atheists.

I love the hustlers, scratching and surviving, trying to make a way out of no way.

I love the trans sisters living out loud.

I love the awkward Black girls and the quirky Black girls and the Black girls who listen to punk.

I love the “standing at the bus stop, sucking on a lollipop” ’round the way girls.

I love Black women. I love us in every way we show up in the world.

Black women have claimed and asserted our power, laying new ground for collective liberation since I wrote the first edition of The Sisters Are Alright in 2015. Like we always do. It ignites my spirit.

We have our first biracial Black woman as vice president of the United States.1 And the first openly transgender Black woman serving in the Minneapolis City Council.2 There are three Black women leading the modern civil rights movement.3 Black women were the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs—at least until COVID-19 upended the whole world.4 Beyoncé has broken the Internet fiftyleven times.5 And Bill O’Reilly, who used to have so much to say about her? Fired from Fox News in 2017.6 (O’Reilly’s dismissal had nothing to do with Bey. I just wanted to provide a moment of schadenfreude. Or, in Black girl speak, youhatetoseeit.)

Black women have come a long way. We are still not free, though.

Black women organizers routinely put their lives on the line to protest violence against other bodies, while brutality against ours provokes shamefully little passion.7 Black women with privileges, such as class, education, and light skin, have far better access to power and achievement. (Insulation from racism and misogyny sold separately.) Too many of us are poor. Too many of us don’t have health care. Too many of us are or have been incarcerated. Too many of us are struggling to gain a post-secondary education or are buried under college debt. Too many of us have been assaulted. Too many of us are carrying the weight of other people’s problems. The sisters are still alright—intrinsically valuable and human—and we are still struggling.

I have studied yoga for years and recently completed a two-hundred-hour yoga teacher training. On my mat I have found spiritual tools to navigate life as a Black woman. I also found, in a popular mantra, Sanskrit words to describe what liberation might feel like for me and my sisters. Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu. May all beings be happy, healthy, safe, and free.

That sort of liberation is hard to find, because the world does not love Black women—not in the way we deserve to be loved. It doesn’t truly see us. Our authentic collective and individual selves are usually hidden by racist and sexist stereotypes that we can’t seem to shake—or rather, images that other folks won’t let us shake.

This is confirmed for me every time I read yet another article about a little Black girl sent home from school, not for bad behavior or bad grades, but for having kinky hair; every time some well-meaning pundit or preacher offers advice to “fix” Black women to be more marriageable; every time some hack comedian tells a specious joke about tyrannical Black wives and girlfriends; every time Snoop Dogg—that is “I once walked two bare-breasted Black women on leashes down a red carpet and ran an actual brothel” Snoop Dogg—tut-tuts at Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion for singing about their own “wet-ass pussy”; every time a young Black woman is shot dead by police in the night; every time the American health care system mishandles Black women’s lives, leaving dead mothers and dead babies and dead Black women doctors who allegedly too “intimidated” health care professionals to receive adequate care.8

Misogynoir, abetted by dehumanizing caricature, is like water.9 It fills its vessel, taking many forms, and then overflows, creeping unnoticed into the cracks of things, rotting the foundation. It spreads a belief in Black women’s inherent wrongness. It decays how the government sees us, how employers see us, how the medical system sees us, how our lovers see us, how we see each other and ourselves.

I first wrote The Sisters Are Alright out of anger at the warped societal view of Black womanhood. I wrote it because I want Black women to be seen. I want to be seen. I want my three young nieces to know their own humanity and demand other people know it, too. I wrote the book because even if the world won’t love us, I want Black women to love ourselves and to love each other.

I write this second edition because the Black femme experience in America continues to bend and evolve. I am a water witch, divining the places where racism and sexism flow. We need this. Otherwise, Black women’s every seeming success will turn fetid.

Black women are a million different kinds of amazing. It is not our race or gender that makes this true; it is our humanity. This book is about that humanity—the textured, difficult, and beautiful humanity that lies in the hearts of all Black women. Because I love us.

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