strugglingtobeheard:

Black women are assaulted every day. Black genderqueer people are assaulted every day. Black trans* people are assaulted everyday. Often black men are too, though this is who I’m not speaking about right now. Literally and emotionally and psychologically and spiritually. I was reading this article by the Crunk Feminist Collective and thinking about the violence and emotional hurt we experience every day. To be honest, all the hell we go through, I’m surprised more of us are not also violent. Even though portrayed that way. It’s so hard to escape. The worded assaults, the look assaults, the condescending assaults. The fact that we can’t even always support each other because we are constantly getting fucking assaulted and trying to clean up damage within ourselves, nevermind other people. I was looking through the notes on the article about those sorority sisters getting suspended for wearing black face. I tell myself not to look at the comments. But I did (and how fucked up is it, that we have to cope by avoiding many things) look down, why the 2nd comment say the reason racism is alive in America is because black people won’t get over it. We aren’t slaves today. Okay, I would rather be punched in the face than read that bullshit. THAT was assault. It doesn’t matter if the person intended it to be so. It was.

Violence comes in many forms. People need to understand this. From the articles about how we are proven to be uglier, how we can’t find men, what we need to do to be better, how we are irrational and if we complain about it, we are irrational. From the standards of beauty we are expected to meet to the kinds of sex we are expected to have. The things people want us to do just to receive their love. The way people look at us. They way they talk to us. The way we are targeted for fucked up contraceptives still by planned parenthoods. The way single black mothers trying to educate themselves have their schools shut down without remorse. The way black women get SHOT at for saying fucking NO. We are constantly assaulted.

The idea of emotional justice within an activist circle is a great one. We do not put enough emphasis on emotions, on feelings. On how systems affect our psychology. But we need some emotional justice with each other and for ourselves. We need to lift each other up. We need to learn from each others pain. We have to help each other through our pains. We truly are the only ones who understand this shit. And the ones who deny it and minimize it, we need to realize this is often their way of psychologically coping. I don’t have any solutions to offer here, right now. But I want to have black women, black genderqueer, black trans*peoples backs. No one else has them. We deserve emotional justice and quite frankly, these white motherfuckers just ain’t gonna give it. We take it, we give it to each other, we cut out the abusive sources when we can.