There is a familiar sentence that appears whenever violence against Black women becomes impossible to ignore: “Black women don't talk.” Sometimes it i
There is a familiar sentence that appears whenever violence against Black women becomes impossible to ignore: “Black women don’t talk.” Sometimes it is said with concern. Sometimes frustration. Sometimes it becomes an explanation for why abuse remained hidden.
I have become increasingly uncomfortable with how easily we accept that explanation.
Because Black women do talk. I hear them. Black women tell sisters, friends, mothers, cousins, coworkers, advocates, nurses, counselors and sometimes police. Research involving Black women who survived sexual assault has found disclosure to people close to them even when formal reporting remained rare. Other research has documented the barriers surrounding disclosure, including fear of negative responses, racist sexual stereotypes, distrust, stigma and previous experiences of not being supported.
Maybe we have spent too much time studying the supposed silence of Black women and not enough time studying the people standing within hearing distance.
1. Disclosure requires more than somebody speaking. Somebody has to receive what she says.
That distinction changes the conversation.
A Black woman can speak and still be socially unheard. She can tell someone and be dismissed. She can report and encounter disbelief. She can describe something frightening and watch people immediately begin examining her behavior instead of the behavior she described.
Research has found that Black sexual-assault Survivors can encounter negative responses after disclosure, including from formal service providers. Researchers have also traced some of these difficulties to longstanding racist sexual stereotypes about Black women.
So when we ask why Black women don’t tell, we may occasionally be asking the wrong people the wrong question.
2. I believed women would not simply stand around while another woman was raped. Then another woman reminded me of history.
Recently, on a social media app, someone said there was “no way 57 women would stand around and watch another woman be raped.” She was referencing the tragedy on the campus of Cornell University. I enthusiastically agreed. Because, I was thinking of the women I know and many that I have encountered.
Then another woman made a point that stopped me.
White women lived within slaveholding societies. Some white women themselves enslaved people. Some participated in, benefited from, tolerated, or defended a system in which enslaved Black women had virtually no protection from sexual exploitation.
Her point was not that white women are uniquely incapable of empathy. That would simply replace one racial mythology with another.
The harder lesson is that being a woman has never guaranteed that a woman will recognize another woman’s suffering as requiring her intervention.
Even today, race can interfere with that recognition. So can class, nationality, religion, caste, political allegiance, war, stereotypes, and the human desire to protect whatever system benefits us.
That history should humble all of us.
3. Black women’s sexual vulnerability was once deliberately written out of society’s definition of the victim.
The sexual exploitation of enslaved Black women and the women who survived it was not some historical side effect of slavery. Their bodies existed inside an economic and legal order that denied them fundamental control over themselves.
The stereotypes created around Black female sexuality helped rationalize that exploitation. Images of Black women as naturally promiscuous or sexually available did cultural work: if she supposedly always wanted sex, people could more easily refuse to recognize sexual violence against her. Scholars continue to identify the descendants of those stereotypes in contemporary experiences of Black women.
That history does not remain neatly behind us.
It teaches us something about how societies learn to look at a suffering woman and decide that what happened to her somehow counts differently.
4. Sometimes society does not deny that violence happened. It simply fails to extend the same urgency to the women experiencing it.
This is where our conversation has to travel beyond the United States.
Look at Sudan. United Nations reporting describes widespread conflict-related sexual violence against women and girls, including rape, gang rape and sexual slavery. The UN has described sexual violence there as being used to terrorize civilian populations, while longstanding impunity has compounded the harm.
Look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The UN Secretary-General’s 2026 report says service providers registered 90,199 cases of sexual violence, including rape, across several provinces during just January through September 2025, amid escalating conflict. The report also describes fear of reprisals and severe security and access problems.
These women are not silent. Their suffering has been documented.
The question becomes what the rest of the world does with the knowledge.
5. Congo, Sudan, Detroit and Baltimore are not the same story. But they can expose the same human weakness.
We should be careful here. Sexual violence during armed conflict in Sudan or Congo cannot simply be equated with sexual violence against a Black woman in an American city. The perpetrators, institutions, laws, political circumstances, and forms of violence may be radically different.
But there is a question capable of crossing those borders:
Whose suffering can human beings learn to live beside?
A woman can be highly visible without being socially protected. Her suffering can be known without becoming urgent. People can recognize that something terrible is happening while continuing with ordinary life.
That possibility should disturb us.
6. “Black women don’t talk” can accidentally make Black women responsible for society’s failure to hear them.
Language can quietly move responsibility.
If the problem is that “Black women won’t talk,” then the solution becomes persuading Black women to disclose. Tell someone. Report it. Reach out. Speak up.
But suppose she already did. Now our questions have to change.
Who heard her?
What happened next?
Did they believe her?
Did they protect her privacy?
Did somebody blame her?
Did they ask what she had been drinking?
Did they decide she was too angry to be credible?
Did they worry more about what would happen to the accused than what had already happened to her?
Did people go searching for her identity after she disclosed?
Did strangers decide that her entire life was now admissible evidence?
Suddenly disclosure is no longer solely a Survivor behavior. It is a community relationship between the person speaking and the people receiving what she says. That is where we continue to be weak.
7. We need to study listening as seriously as we study disclosure.
Researchers have already found reasons Black women may anticipate poor responses. Historical sexual stereotypes, racial loyalty pressures, concerns about racism, distrust of institutions and previous negative responses can all become part of the environment surrounding disclosure.
That does not mean every Black woman thinks alike or responds to violence alike. It means disclosure happens inside history, relationships and institutions. Nobody walks into that room without context.
I hope and pray that we become more curious about the other side of the disclosure equation.
What makes a family safe to tell?
What makes an institution trustworthy enough to approach?
What makes a police officer listen?
What makes a friend resist the temptation to investigate her friend instead of supporting her?
What makes a community capable of hearing something painful about one of its own?
And what causes an entire society to become accustomed to the suffering of certain women?
8. Women ourselves have to be willing to confront this.
This may be the hardest part.
Women have done extraordinary things for other women. Women created rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, hotlines, advocacy organizations, mutual-aid networks and countless informal systems of protection.
But womanhood alone does not inoculate us against racism, cruelty, cowardice, hierarchy, or indifference.
Women can participate in systems that harm other women. Women can believe stereotypes about other women. Women can decide another woman’s suffering is “exaggerated.” Women can protect institutions, families, communities, reputations, racial hierarchies, and powerful people at another woman’s expense.
If we are serious about rape culture, we have to be able to look at that too.
9. Black women should not have to become extraordinary victims before ordinary people care.
There is another burden I want us to put down.
A Black woman should not have to be perfectly respectable, perfectly sober, perfectly consistent, perfectly articulate, perfectly calm and perfectly sympathetic before violence against her becomes unacceptable.
She should not need a spotless biography.
She should not need the right photograph.
She should not need an army of supporters.
She should not need a viral hashtag.
She should not have to convince us that we would have liked her.
Her humanity was enough before we knew her name.
10. Maybe the next era of Survivor advocacy needs a different question.
For years we have asked how to get victims to come forward. Studied it. Invested public funds into it.
There is value in making disclosure safer and easier. But perhaps we also need to turn around and examine ourselves.
What kind of people are we when she does?
Because a Survivor can find her voice and still encounter a society skilled at not hearing it.
Black women can speak and still meet racial stereotypes before they meet compassion. They can disclose and find their credibility placed on trial. Women thousands of miles away can describe sexual atrocities while much of the world continues with its day.
So I am becoming less interested in repeating, “Black women don’t talk.”
I want to know whether we have built families, communities, institutions, media systems and movements where Black women have good reason to believe that speaking will bring protection rather than another injury.
That places responsibility somewhere it has always belonged.
Not only on the woman trying to find the words.
But on every one of us who hears them.
The Lie She Tells Herself: When Women Protect the Men Who Harm – WE Survive Abuse
How Abusers and Systems Use “You Have It Good” to Normalize Deprivation – WE Survive Abuse
What Happens When the Woman We Call Strong Tells Us She Was Hurt? – WE Survive Abuse