A Culture Of Silence

Black Women Have Fought Tirelessly To Protect Our Communities While Placing Our Lives On The Back Burner. No More. It’s Time To Prioritize Ourselves

- Kirsten West Savali

From an early age, many Black women and girls are taught that it is our duty to protect Black men and boys at all costs— even at the expense of our own safety, and even if it violates our bodies. Some women are given the impression that we must protect our men and boys from White supremacy’s cruel grip and police brutality, and that we must become the containers into which men pour their anger, oppression and sexual pathology, eventually becoming keepers of secrets that could kill us.

This toxic silence, positioned as loyalty to Black men and boys who move through society as dehumanized targets of White aggression, denies us the opportunity to live as fully realized beings. Instead, all too often, the bodies of Black women and girls found collapsed at the intersection of systemic barriers and sexual violence are deemed collateral damage.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victimization Survey, 2011–16, about 50 percent of all sexual assaults against Black women go unreported to police. Additionally, according to Tricia B. Bent-Goodley, Ph.D., a professor of social work at Howard University, “Black women have been found to withstand abuse, subordinate feelings and concerns with safety, and make a conscious self-sacrifice for what is perceived as the greater good of the community, but to their own physical, psychological and spiritual detriment.”

A HISTORY OF PAIN

This protectiveness, this complicated need to shield Black men even from themselves, is steeped in our history in this country.

The transgenerational retelling of this history, however, often minimizes a hard truth: The enslavement of Black people in America and rapes of Black women were used as a systemic tool for expansion. As slavery shape-shifted into sharecropping, then Jim Crow, then mass incarceration, the sexual violence against Black women didn’t end.