We Must Listen to Black Women

Our panel shares their experience and wisdom during this pivotal time.

- ALANAH NICHOLE DAVIS

I represent the fourth generation of women in my family to live in the United States. My ancestors were descendants of captive Africans. Post-slavery, they voluntarily came to Ellis Island from the West Indies in the early 1900s. They planted themselves in various boroughs of New York City. My skin is filled with beautiful melanin because of them. I accept and challenge the social implications of that and my womanhood on a daily basis. Like many mothers of the African diaspora, my own mother moved to another city (Baltimore) for something better. From her and my aunties, I learned to listen, take naps for respite, remain playful, fight, and feast on only what serves me. During times of unrest, I listen to these women even more.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd—a man whose diasporic experience is not unlike mine, yours, or your African American friends’—left his home for the last time. He, too, was born in one place (North Carolina) and raised elsewhere (Houston) for what we can only assume was in search of a better life, until he took his last breath under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin in his final home of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Every person whose skin is filled with melanin is also filled reasonably with grief, anger, and disgust. Any soul-bearing human, no matter their skin color, shares the same feelings surrounding the police-related deaths of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks, as well as Ahmaud Arbery, who was chased and fatally shot by white men while out on a jog through his Georgia neighborhood in February.