CONVERSATION SERIES ­ #05 Black Women 2015­11­11 #0:0:0.0# MONIFA: As a black woman, who was a black girl, I see the attack on us comes in a very different form. In some ways it comes in the same form, you know, people do experience racial profiling, police brutality, but sometimes you come across women who have not had that direct interaction, but we’re attacked in so many nuanced ways. #0:0:24.7# #0:0:24.7# NICHOLE: So you have internal race issues within our own culture, and then the external race issue, and then your mothering issue around race, so for me being a women of color is so multi­layered, it’s like, you could excavate all day. #0:0:44.6# #0:0:44.6# RAHIEL:Two uniformed security guards walked over to us, one white, one latino, and began to ask us questions about what we were doing in the lobby of that hotel. If we were guests. Um­ Quickly responded and said that I was in fact a guest. I was asked details, my name, what room, and it was at this point that I became very upset. #0:1:8.7# #0:1:8.8# ADENIKE: And then you start to wonder, well, what other difference could it be if you’re a white cop, I’m a black female, what other difference­ What else could I have done to piss you off this much? It just starts to then look racial. #0:1:25.1# #0:1:25.1# RAHIEL: We actually had to bring in a white colleague from the justice conference before anyone could get an official response from the hotel. #0:1:34.4# #0:1:34.4# JESSICA: I’ve had people focus on my hair not being professional enough. I had an executive director actually pull me into a room and it went down the path of like, you know, just letting you know, I don’t think that you’re professional enough, and I kind of had to go through this whole­ I had to actually pull back because I was so, I felt like I couldn’t be emotional. #0:2:1.9# #0:2:1.9# RUSHELL: All the other chorus girls were white, and um, I remember going up to the person in charge of costuming and saying, you know, “Why is it that we’re dressed this way? You know, why is our hair doing this weird just lump together thing and all the other girls get to do curls and pretty things?” #0:2:20.0# #0:2:20.0# And she was like, “Yea but your hair can’t do that.” And I was like, “You never asked me.” But for me it was really hard because I just wanted to dance and sing and be in the play and I was being told, “you’re not good enough, your hair isn’t good enough, your clothes aren’t good enough, and we’re going to make sure everyone notices that you’re black and everyone else isn’t.” #0:2:41.3# #0:2:41.3# EMEFA: And that colored my own thinking about myself and I was like, “Maybe I am unattractive. Maybe I am like this monster. But then I’d call my mom, and she’d be like, “Don’t listen to them, obviously I gave birth to you and I’m gorgeous, so obviously you have to be gorgeous,” so I like­ always like­ Whenever I always felt bad I’d always think about that. #0:3:4.5# #0:3:4.5# BRITTANY: There was this huge population of black girls who weren’t dating anyone and I wondered why that was because in my eyes they seemed to be beautiful and attractive and smart and intelligent and ambitious and, it just didn’t make any sense to my why they didn’t have a boyfriend too. #0:3:23.8# #0:3:23.8# And that same consciousness is also what I’m thinking now at almost twenty- five years old; like why that’s the world I still see today. #0:3:36.0# #0:3:36.0# NICOLE: Once you accept your womaness, that’s where your power comes from. It doesn’t necessarily always come from your academic prowess. It doesn’t always come from what you have. #0:3:47.1# #0:3:47.1# It comes from your perception of self and when you accept that you’re a woman, and “I’m a woman hear me roar,” that comes from a validation outside of yourself. Even if you want to say that it doesn’t it does. #0:4:2.7# #0:4:2.7# MONIFA: My father would buy me books, and before he would give me the books, he would painstakingly shade in the characters in the books in brown crayon. I still have some of these books, I mean I had like Cinderella, she was brown­ like all these things, and of course as an older toddler you would notice that they’ve been drawn in because he’s not an artist, and he would explain you know, as much as he could to a five or six­year­old why he was shading in these characters to look like me. #0:4:40.2# #0:4:40.2# BRITTANY: (sighs) Um, I don’t have a daughter right now but if I did have a daughter I would tell her that she’s beautiful, that she’s intelligent, that she’s all of these things all the time because I feel like we don’t hear that enough in the media, we don’t get that attention #0:5:3.1# #0:5:3.1# RAHIEL: You can’t wear your resume or degrees on your sleeve. It doesn’t travel with you. I have no way of telling anyone what I’ve accomplished and who I am. That all of that can be erased simply because they have these images and ideas in their head that I can’t do anything about. #0:5:22.3#