Mammie, May I?

There has been a particularly stressful trend among women wherein every other woman comes to Black women for “help,” and then throws a tantrum when Black women demand agency. When Black women declared that we were resting after the betrayal of other races voting for a tyrannical bigot known to target us for no reason, as the Bible says, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth–appropriate, due to the christofascist government under which we now find ourselves. People were trying to stalk Kamala Harris, whine about Michelle Obama’s opinion, and every other Black woman in politics has been drained by the relentless expectation that Black women will march to preserve the dominant narrative. It was as if the entire empire was forcefully saying, “Mammie, may I?” As a Black woman myself, I am more grateful than ever that people are giving less airtime to all people, women or otherwise, who thought they would continue to extract from us without substantially restoring us to our fullest selves.

One trait of the dominant narrative is searching for older, financially/professionally comfortable Black women to validate horrible behavior based on a need for a Black face on quiet violence. My mother was one such woman, and because my family lived in West Austin and urban modeling was new, she voted along with the rest of the Planning Commission to give the City of Austin permission to destroy the Black community. Was my mother’s vote the deciding vote? No, but without her consent, the City would have looked terrible and racist–which it was, but just like another Latino Councilmember, the City needed a face. See, most of the time, the dominant narrative pretends to engage the validation of Black women to do what someone wanted to do anyway, and usually it ends up harming all other unfortunate Black women.

What would have happened if my mother had refused to vote in favor of the destruction? Similar to other Black women who refuse to abide by the rules of their borrowed privilege, my mother might have been ostracized except by the Black community, my parents’ law firm might not have had an opportunity to grow to the prominence that it had during the 2000s, paying for two Yale degrees and a family home. That is a lot of comfort that my family never would have known if my mother had not agreed to destroy long-term neighborhoods with active community organizing. One can almost time the predictability of the dominant narrative throwing a tantrum, and retaliating if an idea is rejected, with an egg timer. Simply put, Black women are not allowed to say, “no,” and even other Black women will punish the wrong people for daring to deny the opportunity to give others a hard time.

During the last ten years, several other women have been emotionally manipulating Black women after betraying them without remorse by playing the gender card. While such behavior has happened for centuries, it has grown even more egregious because our resources have diminished, most of our communities have been spread out or forced to go online, and we are the highest unemployment demographic at this time. What are many other women doing? Pretending that it is more important to cosplay with The Handmaid’s Tale instead of the very real and disturbing circumstances within the concentration camps all over the country. As the mess is made, we are expected to come clean it up even after we were the ones fighting to avoid the mess in the first place. Most other women do not support Black women in a meaningful way, and have everything to say about how “ungrateful,” “angry,” and “rude” we are when we refuse to fight the patriarchy that those same women are supporting.

Another interesting behavior that we are observing is how everyone else leaves us once they have achieved whatever it is they wanted to do. In my younger days, that was actually how I was trained to believe “friends” should behave, and only in early twenties did I learn there could be another way. My mother was not supported and was forced to go to Houston to maintain her professional status; the mayor who used her failed to even come to her funeral, even as he was running for reelection. Kamala Harris left politics after the dominant narrative failed to manipulate her into running for governor. All the other Democrats left State Representative Nicole Collier to fend for herself when potentially being charged with a felony for discussing her false imprisonment. It has been mostly true that people who use Black women will leave us out to dry after extensive emotional labor, and definitely once our resources have been depleted. Essentially, the struggle is “ours,” but the success is yours, and we are supposed to feel blessed to be a part of that process.

The solution is simple: if people want Black women to support their causes and engage in their nonsense, they need to hire/pay for us like equals, hear our “no,” and/or leave us alone unless we directly approach a situation. If people want to whine and opine about how they never owned slaves, they need to stop treating us like the nursemaids and mammies of the world. “Mammy, may I?” No, you may not.