Back in the Race

Today I was listening to the an episode of "The Black Woman Opt Out" podcast. The show is an extension of "The Black Woman Opt Out," a movement that emerged out of this group's fatigue. The website describing "The Black Woman Opt Out" reads: 

THE MOVEMENTBlack women are TIRED.  We are at a crossroads in our life where the pull to lead a softer, less busy life is winning over the self important titles, pleasing others, and being Super Woman.  
Welcome to The Black Woman Opt Out – more than just a podcast, it's a revolutionary lifestyle pivot. In a world that constantly demands more from Black women, we've created a haven where tired souls can find solace. We understand that the juggling act of modern life has left us yearning for simplicity, balance, and empowerment.
Our podcast dives deep into the experiences, challenges, and triumphs of Black women who have courageously chosen to opt outof the chaosand prioritize their well-being. Join us on this transformative journey as we explore insightful conversations, practical strategies, and inspiring stories that resonate with every facet of your life. The Black Woman Opt Out Podcast isn't just a movement; it's an embodiment of the change we so desperately seek. It's time to embrace a new way of living, unapologetically centered around our own joy and fulfillment.
(https://www.theblackwomanoptout.com/?page=4)
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If I've encountered one narrative like this, I've encountered twenty. The capital TIRED in this description is meant as emphasis here, but I prefer to register it as volume. I want to lean into the loud as well as the soft expressions of fatigue among Black women, a group whose "mythic" strength is the subject of tropes and theories.

The purpose of this study is to understand how Black women's fatigue becomes usable in terms of clarifying the conditions that shape their lives as well as the literacies and pedagogies that promote their respect, safety, pleasure, and joy in the future.

I imagine this focus on the usability of Black women's fatigue comes across as odd or, worse still, appropriative. As I illustrated in Rhetorical Healing: The Reeducation of Contemporary Black Womanhood, my study of the reactionary wellness campaigns directed towards members of this group that emerged after the Black Women's Literary Renaissance, learning cures, or the impulse to teach or instruct as a way to ensure wellness, can be highjacked for other purposes. Black women, as I have always maintained, have historically had a deep investment in the potential of literacy and learning and sometimes those conversations have been encoded in discussions of healing. Yet, even when well-meaning individuals have come forward with what appeared to be well-intentioned instructions or pathways to wellness, the rhetorics and curricula they've marketed to Black women have sometimes been undercut by regressive labor-politics and antifeminist agendas. 

With this project, I want to pick up where I left of in that book, namely in my contention that Black women are a race for healing. I borrowed that phrasing from the late literary critic Barbara Christian in her essay "The Race for Theory" because it was the first piece I was assigned to read on the first day of my Black Feminist Rhetorics graduate seminar. At that time, Christian's essay cleared ground for me to see a variety of discursive practices and meaning making projects among Black women, and it oriented me to see those landscapes of "pithy words" and "stories" as a tradition of theorizing that had been happening all the time. Her words, even back then, helped me to solidify my investment in studying what was written by us and to us without apology.

Now that I've been assigning Christian's essay as the first homework assignment for the Black Women's Rhetoric courses I teach, the claim that Black women are a race for healing is different for me. When I finished Rhetorical Healing, the gravity of how short Christian's career and life ended up being had not yet registered for me. I could not conceive of how many Black women academics I would know or know of who would battle diseases like cancer, or as succumb to it as Christian did, and I could not foresee how many would be run down, run out, and run over to the point that they would resign. I could not imagine then how many Black women across socioeconomic class would eventually begin to openly discuss battles with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation that African American communities have historically admonished each other to keep quiet. I certainly could not have predicted how my own experience with sudden loss and its resulting grief would become a trauma that has changed me. I didn't know any of this when I vowed to "stay in this race" at the end of Rhetorical Healing.

And so, I'm checking back into this race with this course on fatigue because, at this point in time, my investment has to be different. Whereas Rhetorical Healing set out to understand the rhetorical competencies and consequences inherent in African Americans' attempt to repair issues affecting Black women, I am stepping back here to center and listen to what Black women have and are saying when they talk about fatigue. I am tuning into what their loud, soft, unspoken, and performed expressions of fatigue and recommendations of repair require of us. I am in this race for the women we have lost and the ones we are losing. I am in it for my claimed daughters because I need them to survive. And yes, I am in this race for myself. Because I deserve healing and wellness too. 

*Posted on Begin Again (Wordpress) 4/1/2024