Field of Intervention: The State of Black Women in Tennessee and the Women of Color Collaborative
Kay Heffernan | Pre-Practicum, Spring 2020
“The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”
––Malcom X, 1962
Based in Nashville, Tennessee, the Women of Color Collaborative (WOCC) seeks to intervene in the marginalization of Black women’s labor, mind, and bodies by offering a safe harbor to gather and heal from generational and societal trauma. Founded in 2015 by Erika Burnett and Nicole Kemp, WOCC provides Black women a community to navigate physical, psychological, and generational traumas that emerge throughout their professional lives. The members of WOCC serve one another through body-first, trauma-informed principles that acknowledge the daily burden of racism and sexism. Perhaps more importantly, however, the mission of the WOCC is to restore autonomy, health, and wellness to Black women and women of color, uplifting their needs first so that they can better serve and live.
Among the concerns of the WOCC, the first is the swath of health disparities that affect Black women, with higher rates of certain cancers, infertility, anxiety, and depression, being only a few (WOCC, 2019; APA, 2019). Maternal mortality rates among Black women in Tennessee are among the highest in the country, with Black women dying of pregnancy-related complications at 2-4 times the rate of White women (Healthy and Free Tennessee, 2018). Since the mid-1980s, mortality rates for Black women with breast and colon cancer have been higher than white women. likely due to late detection and lack of preventative screenings (American Cancer Society, 2019). As of May 2019, Tennessee is one of the states with the highest rates of breast cancer-related deaths among Black women in the country (41.2%). For African Americans, barriers to preventative care, including mental health care, include a lack of providers from similar racial and ethnic backgrounds, stigma associated with mental illness, and inconsistency in being offered counseling or psychotherapy (APA, 2017).
Throughout the extant literature, the impact of stigma and poverty on Black women’s health outcomes becomes clear (Ward et al., 2009; Gibbs & Fuery, 1994). While the poverty rate for African Americans/Blacks in Tennessee has decreased between 2011 (31%) and 2018 (27%), according to a 2004 Tennessee Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance report, fifteen percent of Black women report an annual household income of less than $10,000 (Tennessee DOH, 2004). In 2016, 25% of these women were in poverty, compared to 14.8% of white women (Tennessee Women’s Fund Alliance, 2018). Black women, however, have the highest labor force participation rate (63.5%), earning only 67.6% of what Tennessean white men made in 2016. These women also have some of the highest education attainment rates among racial/ethnic minorities, with 21.6% of Black women holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 27.2% of white women with similar degrees (Tennessee Women’s Fund Alliance, 2018).
These statistics reveal that despite poor health outcomes, Black women labor to surpass systemic oppression; yet the literature does not speak to the amplification of ongoing poverty, poor health, and labor marginalization by historical trauma on Black women. In a 2018 presentation, mental health expert Brandon Jones defines historical trauma as a deep emotional wound that was caused by past events targeted at a specific group of people. This trauma also can be passed down through generations. African American and Black women in particular bear historical trauma rooted in chattel slavery (1619-1865), where enslaved peoples were viewed as commodities. Women were often physically subjugated and psychologically abused through rape and the forced separation of mothers from children. During the 20th century, the publication of government documents such as the Moynihan Report (1965, cited by Jones, n.d.) attested to the ‘failings’ of Black matriarchies, and of African American women in general, and gave rise to harmful stereotypes such as the “Welfare Queen” that we see enacted through news media and biases in healthcare today. In a keynote speech at the Black Women’s Blueprint in 2019, Dr. Krystal Redman, the director of Atlanta-based SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW!, spoke to the real dangers of racial bias among medical providers. Until she “proved to the providers that [she] had done her research” about her pregnancy, Dr. Redman, a Black woman, was appalled to find that she was ignored and barred from natal care until she “justified” her needs with her advanced degree.
Seen in both personal testimony and multiple disparities in health outcomes, it is clear that Black women (re-)experience trauma from countless sources, including, but not limited to, forced sterilization while incarcerated and microaggressions in the workplace (Black Mamas Matter, 2018; National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, 2019). In public health, this condition is known as “the weathering hypothesis,” which states that the comprehensive health of Black women deteriorates as a consequence of white supremacy and systemic poverty, racism and sexism. As seen above, the depiction of Black women (“the most neglected”) by Civil Rights leader Malcolm X is often used to mobilize support and funding for organizations dedicated to bettering the lives of Black women across the United States. What this statement emphasizes above all, however, is pain, vulnerability, and struggle.
Black radical movements of the 1960s engaged damage-centered myths about poverty and labor oppression, but these movements often left Black women out of the conversation in the fight against white supremacy. Throughout the 1970s, depictions of Black women in Black nationalist pamphlets tended to reinforce heteronormative gender roles, some even citing biological determinism as a reason that men must lead households, the very biological determinism that provided the foundation for the Moynihan Report (Combahee River Collective, 1977). In response, the Black feminist organization the Combahee River Collective (CRC) attested to the difficulty of being a Black woman and, what’s more, reaching political consciousness to organize for social change: “There is a very low value placed upon Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. […] We are disposed psychologically and on every other level, and yet we feel the necessity to struggle to change the condition of all Black women” (1977). Political contributions of the CRC ranged from consciousness-raising workshops to organizing for wage labor justice and abortion rights. But these contributions took time and energy to stitch together an isolated and burdened coalition of Black feminists.
In her seminal text Black Feminist Thought (2000), Patricia Hill Collins describes the intellectual, cultural, and economic contributions of Black women as essential to conceptualizing liberation futures for us all. By centering the racial and gender-based marginalization and violence Black women experience within the United States, Collins establishes the link between Black feminist thought and Black feminist practice: Black feminist practice arises from the lived experiences of engaging with essential questions about Black women’s disenfranchisement, bodily autonomy, and restricted access to preventative health care, among other issues. In practice and theory, Black feminism seeks to restore sanity to the women who “talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious” (CRC, 1977) of the overlapping structural sources of oppression.
Four decades later, the WOCC began to take up the work of the CRC through a Black feminist lens. For many WOCC members, the Collaborative brought “the overwhelming feeling that… after years and years we had finally found each other” (CRC, 1977). What the WOCC offers above all, then, is the relief that comes with a sense of belonging. The WOCC provides Black women a community through which to receive the three major tenants of trauma-informed care, empowerment, validation, and connection (Copeland, 2002). Monthly meetings, reading groups, and social gatherings offer Black women opportunities to find power in listening, connecting, and receiving support. Alongside the care and rest it provides its members, the WOCC hosts trauma-informed professional development seminars for Nashville-based women of color. Called Collaborative Cohorts, these gatherings allow participants to explore the ways in which the current sociopolitical landscape in Tennessee and throughout the South impacts the livelihoods of Black women in particular (WOCC, 2019). These “Saturday Seminars” expand knowledge of the local political climate across sectors and create opportunities for mutual aid and interdisciplinary strategies to emerge. What Malcolm X failed to mention in his depiction of the Black woman, then, was a longstanding commitment to justice and political activism. Taking pride in high rates of education attainment, voter turnout, and public service (CAWP, 2019; Tennessee Women’s Fund Alliance, 2018), the WOCC emphasizes healing and health first to continue dismantling white supremacy and sexism in workplaces across the South. Restful gatherings, play, and joy become remedies for Black women who seek to look within before returning to the work of emancipation. The logic of Black feminism follows as such: if Black women were no longer oppressed on the basis of gender, race, and class––if the material reality of Black women everywhere improved––everyone else would have to be free (CRC, 1977).
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References
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