"If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it."- Zora Neale Hurston There comes a point when 'share everything'
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”- Zora Neale Hurston
There comes a point when ‘share everything’ sounds a lot like ‘give up what’s left. ‘Let’s not play with this because this is a matter of life and death. It is important to name risk and harm plainly.
Every human being deserves sovereignty over their own body, voice, relationships, community, and future. Black women have been systematically denied that sovereignty, so reclaiming it becomes both healing and justice.
Power took our families, our labor, and our land. Now we’re told we should surrender our spaces too. Because that is “the best thing.” The “progressive thing.” For some weird reason, it has always been viewed as “progressive” for Black women to have less while others have more—and that’s a core tenet of nearly every political, familial, and community affiliation. We just rise anyhow.
Black women require spaces where there are no men. Period. Not because every man is violent.
Because Black women deserve at least some places where male power, expectations, and social conditioning are absent.
A room without men is not a statement that men have no humanity. It is a recognition that Black women are fully human and deserving of dignity that is not promised by systems or even communities.
Women think differently when no men are present. We speak differently. We remember differently. We laugh differently. We disclose differently. We grieve differently. We ask different questions. We notice different things. We build different kinds of trust.
Black women should not have to justify wanting spaces where our conversations are not shaped by male reactions, male approval, male discomfort, male competition, or male expectations.
In spite of what money and power say, there is nothing radical about wanting uninterrupted female community.
In spite of what fickle penthouse power says, there is nothing hateful about saying Black women deserve places where our needs are not secondary.
Every people has the right to gather among themselves to preserve culture, strengthen relationships, heal wounds, mentor younger generations, exchange hard-earned wisdom, and imagine their future.
Black women deserve that same freedom.
We do not need permission to exist together. We do not need permission to protect one another. Our dignity is reason enough.
This is not something to be granted. It is something to be respected. Black women have watched too much be taken to pretend our spaces don’t matter.
Black women have waited long enough for someone else to decide when our needs matter. We claim this because it is ours to claim.
Not only does the enemy make you ignorant…he makes you want to love ignorance and hate knowledge. -Kwame Ture
Racist white men are not entitled to access to Black women’s spaces. When you assert that some men have a right to women’s spaces you make this a very possible reality. 
Racist white men have never only harmed Black women through individual prejudice. They have carried the backing of systems. They have been believed over us, hired over us, armed over us, medically trusted over us, legally protected over us, and socially excused over us. Their racism does not stay in their mouths. It becomes surveillance, exclusion, harassment, sexual entitlement, professional sabotage, disbelief, punishment, and sometimes death.
They come with entitlement. They come with resentment. They come with the old expectation that Black women must absorb harm quietly, prove pain politely, and make room for the very people trained by this society to dominate us.
So yes, allowing racist white men into spaces where Black women are healing, organizing, resting, tending to our bodies, disclosing trauma, or building power is dangerous. Risk.
Not because Black women are fragile, y’all know that we are not. BUT because racist men are not neutral guests. And Black women deserve spaces where we do not have to be “strong” and on guard all the time. That’s shortening our life spans as it is.
Black women have the right to gather, heal, organize, speak, rest, grieve, create, and strategize without the presence of men who carry racial hostility toward us.
A racist white man in a Black women’s space is not a diversity challenge. He is a safety concern.
Our boundaries are not discrimination against him. They are protection for us.
Some people will share the violent acts of male racism against vulnerable women and girls in the news, watch the system support them, wealth them up, and acquit them, and then call Black women and girls “hateful” for fighting for male-free zones. Pick a team. Male violence against women and girls is violent and unchecked around the globe.
The thing about a racist engaging in these crimes is we can never be sure whether the system will seek justice or become their sugar daddy.
After generations of watching our families lose land, homes, wealth, and communities, don’t ask Black women to treat our spaces as though they are one more thing available for the taking
Our families lost land. Our communities lost wealth. There are empty spaces where there should be people. Now even our spaces are treated as negotiable. History has already testified. Black women do not have to keep reopening the wound to prove the knife exists.
This is an issue of civil rights. A tale as old as time. We did not start this.
✨ Survivor Affirmations for the Women Who’ve Held Their Tongue Far Too Long – WE Survive Abuse
Black Women: Unshakable, Unstoppable, Undeniable – WE Survive Abuse
Access to Women Is Not a Male Human Right – WE Survive Abuse
The Penthouse Lectures and the Ground Floor Reality – WE Survive Abuse