The federal government has embraced the proposed “Momnibus” bill aimed at understanding why Black birthing people are three times more likely to die during and directly after childbirth, but with the caveat that the word “Black” not appear in legislative text, thereby making the health disparity invisible.
A latest study conducted by Afrotech found that Black women are disproportionately disadvantaged by the integration of AI into every economic and professional sphere and subsequently, Black women are losing their jobs at rates higher than other people in this country.
Some news worth celebrating, Black women are being honored as the new faces of Georgia politics after Keisha Lance Bottoms and Tanya Miller gained landslide victories in primary elections. But what will be the cost to their mental and emotional wellbeing as they navigate the onslaught of gendered and racial assaults on their character, their femininity, and their intelligence by the same folks who stole Stacey Abrams’s political victories from her.
I’ve always wondered if Stacey Abrams went to therapy after that tragedy, and if Vice President Kamala Harris started seeing a therapist after her intelligence was undermined by the most mediocre of white men who made it to the White House purely because of white rage and backlash?
Most likely, they were already in therapy and had their psychologists on speed dial.
Mostly I wonder for all Black women, what happens to our psyches when we do everything to win and we’re still set up to fail? At this time in history, the remedy for all kinds of heartbreak and psychological distress is therapy. Ask anyone, or even hint about your disorders and you’ll find the common prescription is therapy. “Everyone should do it at least once in their lives,” right?
Individual therapy is the gold standard remedy for everything from recovering from unjust losses to healing intergenerational trauma. We even have trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy handbooks. Read: “Just change your thoughts to happy thoughts” to help us heal from racist experiences. But really.
Can therapy actually be a solution to both the personal wounds of battling interpersonal and structural forms of racism, sexism, and oppression every day?
As a professor of psychology, I grapple with whether therapy can actually help people whose problems are rooted in other people’s dedication to our subjugation. I don’t know the answer for sure where I stand today, I believe there may be wounds and hardships for which therapy is not a solution, but rather a systematic and institutionalized form of gaslighting.
Going to therapy is a largely Western practice foregrounded in the notion that talking about our psychic wounds and psychological distresses, when guided by an individual trained to listen, assess, and decipher our symptoms, can alleviate or mitigate our stress such that our lives are made better.
But for those of us whose wounds can be traced to problems that extend far beyond our control and into the realm of injustice, therapy can manipulate us with the premise that our understandable psychological response to structural oppression can be reduced if we just think about our situation differently.
Black women face an endless number of personal, political, and social struggles that make life incredibly hard, and this is complicated by the expectations that we “save face” for ourselves, our families, and the Black race by always appearing strong and graceful in the face of struggle.
Many folks have recognized the paradox this puts us in and have so created therapy collectives and networks of culturally responsive Black clinicians, like Therapy for Black Girls and The Black Girl Doctor. But I’m going to argue that repackaging an inherently oppressive tool isn’t enough to support us. Maybe instead of self-analysis or even validation by a stranger, the answer lies in resistance in community. Resistance is a medium-ish word for any and all the ways that we intentionally push back against oppression. In subtle and in big ways.
We can start resisting oppression by being radically honest with not just our therapist, but with ourselves, and with our friends and chosen family that we are not okay because society is not okay. We can start by learning how to trade our armor of strength and resilience for a cloak of vulnerability that lends to truth-telling, to sitting with the grievance of unfairness consistent with many Black women’s experiences. In turn, we open ourselves to receiving the care that we so desperately need and the support to engage in resistance, and maybe even revolution.
Sometimes resistance is attending a protest, and sometimes it’s wearing our braids to work in defiance of white, eurocentric beauty standards that are enforced in our workplaces. Sometimes it’s teaching our Black children to love their Black selves in schools and systems that seek to annihilate their spirits. And sometimes it’s starting our own schools because the government fails to create the infrastructure for our children to love themselves. For me, resistance often takes the form of calling my friends so that they can remind me of who I am- in all of my Black womanhood, my glory. Resistance helps us make oppressive systems accountable and prevents us from internalizing the idea that we should be able to “feel better” after experiences of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and all of the other -isms.
I’ve published in academic journals about this activism, this collective action, this resistance, where we find hope, self and collective sense of efficacy, community validation, and the channels for anger that therapy most often cannot give us. We are changed by the change that we make, and we are changed particularly when we make change with others at our side.
Engaging in resistance strategies that we learn in community with other folks who are feeling crushed and tired is a powerful tool for wellbeing that is free and accessible. And though there are certainly costs to resistance, for Black women, the benefits are often worth the cost. And anyway, it’s for sure less expensive than a monthly therapy bill without insurance.
shola shodiya is a Black Feminist psychologist and Assistant Professor of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project at UCSB.
