CHAPTER 1 You Are Already Alright

Remember when folks started a Change.org petition decrying baby Blue Ivy’s “matted dreads” and urging Beyonce and Jay-Z to “properly care for” their daughter’s hair, which was just healthy kinky hair unrestrained by barrettes, beads, or bobos?3 The Black community has folded a belief in Black femme physical inferiority into our culture such that beloved cultural rituals have developed around “fixing” Black girl hair when the occasion demands she be pretty. Saturday morning. Straightening combs. Heavy grease. Admonitions against “tender-headedness.” The lesson: highly textured and coarse hair that displays more sheen than shine needs to be tamed and requires more extensive maintenance than any other. It doesn’t. Kinks require special maintenance only if you are intent on prodding them into uniformity and styles meant for straight hair. But too many of us are convinced that Black hair is “problem hair,” especially on Black women, and that wraps and weaves and wigs are not just fun ways to play with style, but necessary tools to hide physical defects.

In a 2007 study called “Ladies or Loudies?” Dr. Edward W. Morris, a sociologist from the University of Kentucky, found that teachers at a Kentucky middle school subjected Black girls to unique discipline directed at perceptions of them as aggressive, loud, and not ladylike.4 (Accusations that just happen to align with traits enslavers assigned to African women to justify bondage and assault.) Most of the educators at the school Morris studied were Black women, who told researchers they were trying to teach Black girls life skills because they “don’t get [these skills] at home,” or “their parents are unemployed a lot of times,” or “there is a lack of a male figure in the home.” (Assumptions that mirror biased negative beliefs about Black families.) When it came to Black girls, educators encouraged bodily control, quietness, and passivity over more assertive behaviors that were subtly encouraged in White middle-class children.

Morris discovered that while Black girls at the school dominated class discussions, actively participated in class, competed for opportunities, and stood up for others, they were not rewarded for their effort. Educators actually stifled outspokenness that supports academic success in order to teach Black girls to be more ladylike.

This distorted lens has contributed to Black girls being demonized and pushed out of school through disproportionate suspensions and expulsions, and disproportionately disciplined and treated violently not just in Kentucky, but nationwide. Overpolicing of Black girls in schools has resulted in them being the fastest-growing group in juvenile detention nationwide.

Black femmes are lied to from the day we are born—sold distortions of who we are and who we should be that separate us from our authentic selves and cloak our divinity. Is it any wonder that it is hard for Black women and girls to hold on to an awareness of our alrightness when, in the face of misogynoir, we are forced to make adjustments to the way we show up in the world to help ensure our safety and access to opportunity, to protect and provide for our families, and to advance our communities? Is it any wonder that when I asked nearly fifty Black women if they felt free, 60 percent said they did not?

A friend of mine has a saying she uses to describe walking into a room with confidence and a belief that your authentic self is owed respect and regard. She’ll say, “Girl, I’m ’bout to walk into that room like a forty-five-year-old straight White man.”

In America, Whiteness and maleness are identities associated with value, intelligence, attractiveness, leadership, and competence. White men are not evaluated negatively for traits associated with their race or gender. By contrast, since Europeans began marauding, African-descended peoples have been noted as inferior, stupid, untrustworthy, childlike, ugly, and animalistic. Across cultures, women have been branded unclean, seductive, scheming, and guileful. These traits have been used to justify our servitude and subjugation for centuries and have made it so that when Black women and girls enter a room people often see us as problems in need of a solution. We must weigh each encounter and experience to mind that we are showing up the “right” way, obscuring the things about us that we have been told are bad.

Are my frizzy edges laid enough? Am I deferential enough? Am I confident? Too confident? Is my voice too loud? Are my clothes too bright? Should I tell them that I am a single mom? Is my ass too phat? (Will folks at work sexualize me?) Is my ass too fat? (Will my doctor blame every ailment on my weight?) Am I not educated or credentialed enough? Am I too educated and credentialed to be a good romantic partner to a man? What’s that sister over there doing? Is she showing up right? If she shows up wrong, what will people think of me?

Laura, whom you will meet in chapter 7, talked to me about how her body has been problematized throughout her life. As an adolescent she heard from well-meaning family that she was “developing too much” and becoming “too curvy.” This is not uncommon for Black girls. The National Women’s Law Center reports that “Black girls are more likely to be disciplined for clothing at school than their peers, because ‘adults see them as older and more sexual.’”5

At school and, in Laura’s experience, at work. Laura says that when she entered the work world, she noticed that the pencil skirts and cute tops that were an acceptable, stylish uniform for her White colleagues were appraised differently on her frame.

“I was told that I should probably watch what I wear. You know, dress for success,” she says. “My body doesn’t look the way the hierarchy in front of me looks. And I was conscious of the fact that no one was talking to the White women I worked with about how their bodies look—only me.”

Sister, you and I can never truly “walk into a room like a forty-five-year-old straight White man.” A White man may walk into a job interview fretting about his skills and references, but he won’t have to expend energy worrying about whether the way the hair grows from his head is unprofessional or whether his body in his suit will read like an invitation.

Self-evaluation is a real and necessary part of being a member of a marginalized community. You and I know that Black women and girls are often judged harshly and rarely given the benefit of the doubt or second chances, and so we adjust. But exposure to society’s negative perceptions often, over time, moves us to see ourselves as problems, too. There is a difference—sometimes a mere sliver of a difference—between strategically responding to the realities of racism and sexism in society and buying into and enforcing racist and sexist beliefs.

Black women and girls will not be free as long as we embrace a racist society’s belief that we are fatally flawed and remain complicit in enforcing that belief on our sisters and our daughters. We get to the promised land only if we can access our full humanity and acknowledge our inherent value while leaving room for complication. We can get free only once we recognize our inherent alrightness.

This is not a yoga book. But yoga has been a critical part of my freedom journey. It is the seed from which this book grew, and I share some of the principles that have been most transformative to me in this book.

In 2020, as the world was falling apart, I decided I wanted to become a certified yoga teacher—thick thighs and all. I studied anatomy, breathing, meditation, and how to properly place my hands and feet on the mat, and I immersed myself in the philosophy and texts of yoga practice: the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Mahabharata, and, of course, the foundational Yoga Sutras with its transformational opening lines:

Now, the teachings of yoga.

Yoga is to still the patterning of consciousness.

Then pure awareness can abide in its very nature.

Otherwise, awareness takes itself to be the patterns of consciousness.

Patanjali, author of the sutras, believed there is a defect in human understanding. We are divine beings observing a human experience—pure awareness. The problem is that we mistake ourselves for all the feelings and thoughts and experiences that swirl around us each day. It is only when we can still our consciousness, perhaps through meditation or matching our breath to movements, that we can understand our true nature and relieve ourselves of human pain and suffering.

Studying this, I had an epiphany: Does this not explain something of the Black femme experience, too? Sister, we are souls working to realize our true nature through the noise of misogyny, racism, and other oppressions. The eight limbs of yoga offer a roadmap for humans to reach enlightenment and realize their essential natures. I believe there is a pathway for Black femme liberation. We can get free by intentionally decolonizing our minds to cultivate an unshakeable belief in Black women and girls’ alrightness.

Part II of this book explores six pillars of Black femme freedom:

• Spot the distortions. Black women must learn to see distorted beliefs about us and to recognize the ways they are maintained by broader society and our communities. And we must teach future generations to do the same. Lisa, whom you will meet in chapter 9, likens this to learning to identify poison before it enters your bloodstream and threatens your well-being.
• Know your truth. We can locate our authentic selves outside of society’s distorted beliefs about Black women and girls, unhooking our authentic selves from caricatures crafted to abet human bondage, White supremacy, and patriarchy.
• Celebrate the real you. We can learn to accept and celebrate our authentic selves, even the benign traits we have been told are bad: our sex lives, singleness, natural hair, or courage to speak up and advocate for ourselves.
• Understand the cost of liberation. We can determine how much we are willing to “pay” to inhabit spaces where our authentic selves might be unsafe or unwelcome. For instance, is that high-paying corporate job worth the ways you must sacrifice your identity to fit in? There is no wrong response, but a free Black woman must know the answer.
• Practice freedom. Liberation is not so much a destination as a sustained practice of choosing our individual highest good again and again. We can cultivate a freedom practice designed to center our alrightness and keep our well-being top of mind.
• See free Black women everywhere. Rooted in our own Black femme freedom, we can learn to see and nurture the freedom of other Black women and girls.

If Black women can do this and teach our daughters to do this, too, we can unlock our full power and walk into any room honoring our highest authentic selves—even if no one else does. We can more clearly love ourselves, prioritize ourselves, and secure our mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being in the face of external forces. We can advocate for ourselves and our sisters—a form of self-love and self-care in itself. We can live lives of abundance and joy.

This would be monumental.