Essence just released its February issue, celebrating the "#BlackGirlMagic Class of 2016." I first noticed the popular term "Black Girl Magic" as a hashtag on Facebook and Twitter, attached to posts by girlfriends celebrating themselves, their loved ones, their babies, their lives. I've seen it on t-shirts spread out on the tummies of little smiling black girls, showing all of their teeth. These are statements and images of pride in blackness and girlhood, created and celebrated by black women and girls, and that's a positive thing.

But something doesn't smell right.

Maybe it's just me. As someone who has lived with the chronic, incurable illness MS for almost ten years, I know that illness and disability can make the person who has it feel like a failure. No matter what doctors, friends and family members say–no matter what the scientific establishment says, she can carry around a sense that she did something wrong. She might think that if she'd just done something different, something better, something magical, then maybe things would not be as they are.

"I'm thinking to myself: 'I've heard this one before.' And, reader, so have you."

In the past ten years of my illness, I've developed coping skills. I've learned breathing techniques. I've made sure to feel grateful for lightness and laughter. But one attitude I'll never take on is the idea that I can be a "magical black woman." That somewhere within me is some black girl magic. Because there isn't. Everything inside and outside of me is flesh and bone and a nervous system (with bad signaling). Nothing magical.

But there's something else that rubs me the wrong way about the phrase "black girl magic," something less personal. When I see it I smile and feel warm inside because I will always find delight in the sight of happy black girls and women. But then I pause, and my smile gets a little stale. It freezes in that way you notice in photos, when you can tell everyone's pleased but getting a little bit tired of feigning enthusiasm. My face hardens and I start to feel plastic, and it's because I'm thinking to myself: "I've heard this one before."

And, reader, so have you.

The "strong, black woman" archetype, which also includes the mourning black woman who suffers in silence, is the idea that we can survive it all, that we can withstand it . That we are, in fact, superhuman. Black girl magic sounds to me like just another way of saying the same thing, and it is smothering and stunting. It is, above all, constricting rather than freeing.

Saying we're superhuman is just as bad as saying we're animals, because it implies that we are organically different.

Black girl magic suggests we are, again, something other than human. That might sound nitpicky, but it's not nitpicky when we are still being treated as subhuman . And there's a of black women being treated as subhuman by the medical establishment, in spite of the debt Western medicine owes to them. It doesn't begin or end with Henrietta Lacks and the cancer cells taken from her cervix without her or her family's knowledge or permission. It doesn't begin or end with black women receiving less anesthesia, if at all, in surgeries because of the widely held belief that black women felt no pain. It doesn't begin or end with black women receiving improper and dangerous prenatal care or compulsory sterilizations .

One of our most collectively celebrated images of a black woman is the black woman who perseveres, who survives, who continues on. In pain. Suffering. It is the beautiful tragic epitome of that strong black woman type we also collectively celebrate and simultaneously criticize. Shonda Rhimes' trifecta of Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How To Get Away with Murder are among the best portrayals of this tension: the tension of celebrating and criticizing, dismantling this notion of the strong, silently suffering (black) woman.

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But it is portrayed as just that: a tension. None of Rhimes's main characters (even white Meredith Grey) are wholly healthy women (they're subsisting on a diet of popcorn and red wine or using sex as a weapon). They're not perfect, and they're not magical. What they are is incredibly, lethally, terrific at what they do. That's not magical. That's what women do. In order to survive, we don't fly, we don't acquire superhuman characteristics. We woman up. And perhaps black women tend to do it better than most but that's because we have to, not because we're magical. (Most of us fail miserably, by the way; when one of us doesn't, we call them magical.)

These days, when racist practices occur in medicine, they're more often reported on . But I find it not coincidental that as certain language started disappearing and certain practices started going underground, another language and practice started showing up: the idea of the magical black woman—#BlackGirlMagic.

Is it because we're magical that Daniel Holtzclaw thought he could stalk, rape and threaten us and get away with it?

Is it because we're magical that Daniel Holtzclaw thought he could stalk , rape, threaten us, and get away with it? Maybe the Texas policeman who threw a bikini-clad black girl to the ground at a pool party thought she was magical and wouldn't feel anything. Maybe the school security guard who grabbed a 14-year-old black girl , body slammed her and threw her across the room, thought she was magical and would bounce off the floor.

Saying we're superhuman is just as bad as saying we're animals, because it implies that we are organically different, that we don't feel just as much as any other human being. Black girls and women are humans. That's all we are. And it would be a magical feeling to be treated like human beings–who can't fly, can't bounce off the ground, can't block bullets, who very much can feel pain, who very much can die. When I see "black girl magic," I think, was Sandra Bland not magical enough? Renisha McBride ? Miriam Carey ? Perhaps she'd been trying to be magical and, failing, started to blame herself instead.

Read Ashley Ford's response, "There Is Nothing Wrong With Black Girl Magic," here.

Dr. Linda Chavers is a writer, teacher, and scholar of 20th century American and African American literature with specializations in race and visual culture. Her research interests include southern literature, postmodernism, and fiction. She holds a B.A. in Race and Gender from New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study (magna cum laude). She obtained an M.A. in English and Ph.D. in African American Studies from Harvard University in 2013. Passionate on service, Dr. Chavers has worked in prison education, foster youth mentoring, and rape crisis intervention for over a decade.

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