檳榔嶼

- It has not been easy for black women to maintain faith in love in a society that has systematically devalued our bodies and our beings.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, <Damnaiton of Women> : "The crushing weight of slavery fell on black women. Under it there was no legal marriage, no legal family, no legal control over children...Out of this what sort of black women can be born into the world of today?There are those who hasten to answer this query in scathing terms and who say lightly and repeatedly that our of black slavery came nothing decent in womanhood; that adultery and uncleanliness were their heritage and are their continued portion."
- Violated black females had to cope with the disgust and disdain of everyone around them. No one cared about the impact of traumatic rape on their psyches.
  - No one praised black women's generosity of heart, their willingness to practice forgiveness.
- Just as some enslaved black women survived by opening their hearts and trusting in divine will, other black women survived by hardening their hearts, by shutting down their emotions.
- Judith Herman, <<Trauma and Recovery>> : "Traumatized people feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. Thereafter, a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community and religion. When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living."
- Enslaved Africans made beautiful art, created music that still dazzles the world, and sought to find spaces, however relative, of self-actualization and self-development despite bondage.
  - Religion became the location where creativity of mind and heart could freely be given expression. In worship the slaves could know joy and delight, could know experientially that they were more than their pain.
- While historical documents provide evidence proving that newly freed slaves often set up households based on the same principles of coercive domination that they had experienced, these facts have not led to enough discussion about the black experience of trauma and recovery.
- This reality is nowhere more evident than in the lives of African-American women, as it was during slavery that we were first represented as licentious, lustful, untrustworthy betrayers.
  - These racist and sexist stereotypes were first articulated by powerful white men eager to explain away their use and abuse of the black female body they claimed to hate so much.
  - In a world rooted in patriarchal religious teachings it was much shrewder for all white folks to blame black women for abuse by claiming they were monstrous sexual temptresses who lured good upright white men into sin.
  - Since sexual slavery (i.e., women bound to men in conditions of lifelong servitude and subordination) continued even as slavery based on race ended, black women still had to face a culture that perceived and still perceives us as the emobodiment of these stereotypes.
  - All these factors together sustain a psychological climate that is conductive to the formation of self-hate rather than self-love.
- Cope with the stigma of being labeled whores and prostitutes, licentious and lewd, led black women in the early twentieth century to place undue emphasis on puritanical virtue.
  - For all black women were subject to being seen as either madonnas or whores. Both representations required that black females surrender a complex emotional universe and conform to a stereotype.
  - Since a hatred of the female body and its natural functions was at the root of both stereotypes, no matter the identity a black female embraced, madonna or whore, it was unlikely she would learn to love her physically.
- The fact that black female are perceived as a group that men can rape without consequences is part of that continuum of devaluing black female bodies that began during slavery.
- This society has never taken the rape of black women seriously. Knowing this, black females who are raped often say nothing and live with the troubling psychic aftermath of this trauma.
- Developing positive self-esteem about our bodies and beings continues to be arduous for black females in a society that consistently represents us negatively. Promoting devaluation and hatred of black females has been absolutely politically strategic within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
  - As long as folks hate and fear black women, seeing us as sluts and prostitutes, there is little chance that masses of white men will ever choose to marry black women.
- White supremacist thinking keeps these racist/sexist stereotypes alive in everyone's imagination for a reason; it both encourages and allows for white male lust for black females even as it encourages this lust to stay on the level of objectification and degradation.
- Spike Lee, John Singleton, and a host of other black male artists continue to project sexist images of black womanhood. In their films, when the black female is not a sex object she is often depicted as a treacherous, evil bitch.
  - Since these men, like their white counterparts, see females as subordinates, they see nothing wrong with their attitudes.
- When any black female acts out in a manner that is in keeping with negative stereotypes, there is more room for her in the existing social structure than there is for decolonized black women who challenge the status quo. No doubt this is why so many young black women feel that the only options they have are to claim the roles of bitch and ho. By embracing these labels they can feel a false sense of agency. They fit within the dominant culture's idea of them.
- Melogy Beattie, <<Stop Being Mean to Yourself>> : "There are many drugs that can injure the body and deaden the soul - cocaine, alcohol, heroin, marijuana. But there are other drugs whose narcotic power we overlook. Disillusionment and betrayal can grind away at our souls until all our faith and hope are gone. The cumulative effect of a lifetime of disappointments can leave us wandering around confused, lost, and dulled. Whether it happens in one moment or over many years, losing faith deadens the spirit."
- To avoid pain, black females often turn to substance abuse or to psychic self-multilation by disconnecting and closing the door to their hearts.
- Audre Lorde, <Eye to Eye> : "Why do Black women reserve a particular voice of fury and disappointment for each other? Who is it we must destroy when we attach each other with that tone of predetermined and correct annihilation?... This cruelty between us, this harshness, is a piece of the legacy of hate with which we were inoculated."
  - Lorde was clear about the fact that many black women had to unlearn their own sexist woman-hating to love themselves and other black women.
  - "Until now, there has been little that taught us how to be kind to each other. To the rest of the world, yes, but not to ourselves. There have been few external examples of how to treat another Black woman with kindness, deference, tenderness or an appreciative smile."
- My mother let us know in no uncertain terms that there would be no catfights, no wars over boys, that we would respect and love one another as sisters.
  - We know how to love one another. We know how to open our hearts.
  - To love ourselves rightly, to love others, we have to claim all our emotions.
- Expressing our full range of emotions is healing to the spirit and engages us in the practice of self-acceptance, which is so essential to self-love.
  - To love, we have to let fear go and live faith-based lives. Living in faith means that we recognize, as our wise black female ancestors did, that we do have the power to decolonize our minds, invent ourselves, and dwell in the spirit of love that is our true destiny.