I Learned to Protect the People Who Hate Me

I Learned To Protect the People Who Hate Me

“To be woman and Black is to be magic

Is to be the witch that wouldn’t burn


Is to survive the White man with their needles and nooses

To be Black, and woman, and alive is to be resilient.”

—Crystal Valentine and Aaliyah Jihad, 2015 College Unions Poetry Slam

A few weeks ago a friend tagged me on Facebook. It was a video of two amazing slam poets, Crystal Valentine and Aaliyah Jihad, performing their piece “To Be Black and Woman and Alive” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mBnM2EUp0Q) at the 2015 College Unions Poetry Slam.  I watched this video REPEATEDLY! I shared it with friends, students, former students, family, and anyone else who would accept it.  For the three minute and forty second video, I felt…VISIBLE! None of the messages were new.  They were actually quite old.  But the way the poets expressed the words felt different.  I felt giddy, raw, exposed, and numb. 

A line part way through the poem states, “I grew up learning to protect men who hate me.” Speechless.  These words spun in my mind.  Though the poets referred to the relationship between Black women and men, I thought about ways in which this sentiment plays out in everyday life. The “protection” the poets speak of does not lay solely with the tenuous relationship the Black woman has with the Black man; it extends far beyond that to the relationship Black women have with vertical oppression and white supremacy.

The Black woman’s narrative is complex and layered.  1. Black. 2. Woman and 3. Black Woman.  At all times Black women negotiate being oppressed, marginalized and micro-aggressed. The places we live, play and work are not set up for our success but our failure. White supremacy makes it such that Black women must be small. Tiny. Invisible.  Our survival rests on whether or not we alter the very essence of who we are—our hair, our clothes, our body, our language, our culture and our voice.  We are required to be present yet unseen.  We are silenced beyond measure, expected to be Mammy, Sapphire or Jezebel but never intellectual.  In the tier of value, Black women fall to the end of the line after White men, White women and Black men.  Be resilient they say…

I love my work.  I truly love my work.  I have the opportunity to work with the next generation of leaders.  I am able to influence young lives and educate young minds.  Though rewarding work, I am falling out of love with higher education.  It’s not set up for “my” success—as a student, a faculty person or an administrator. The same rules that silence Black women in society are magnified on PWI campuses.  Higher education was built on exclusionary practices and racist ideologies. The symbolic messages about place and space in these environments tell me that my worth and progress are tied up in traditions and rituals that don’t align with my identity.   The system has not and does not account for our experience.  It doesn’t accept our intellect or contributions and it tells us to be resilient while we work our full time jobs in addition to "other duties as assigned”.  Black women fight an uphill battle because the system doesn’t acknowledge our existence.  Yet, we do the work.  We stick it out.  We work hard and attempt to block out the noise.  Our protection is our own and as such we inadvertently protect the continuation of white supremacy. 

Venus L. Ricks

CWI Directorate Member

Director of Multicultural Affairs

Lebanon Valley College

ricks@lvc.edu