I’m Not Your Superwoman

It’s been said that Black women can’t be the world’s shield and its target.

I don’t want to be either one.

“I’m not the kind of girl that you can let down,

And think that everything is okay.

Boy, I am only human.”

-Karyn White, “Superwoman”

Mama is Gen X, so I was raised on old school, quiet storm, and new jack swing: everything from the Temptations to Luther and Anita to Mary J., Babyface, and New Edition. She had an old-school Kenwood stereo system in the living room and Karyn White’s 1989 anthem was regularly in rotation. Even though little Erica couldn’t personally relate at the time, her story of going above and beyond while still being unappreciated was one I’d come to know well.

Country girls can survive

The women in my family are forces of nature, to put it mildly. We be Gullah-Geechee, with lightning in our tongues and fire in our veins. We are strong by nature; in body, mind, and spirit. But I also think about how many times we were strong because we had to be.

We come from southern Alabama mostly, but also Mississippi, and we have deep roots in this blood-soaked, haunted land below the Mason-Dixon line.

My great-great-great grandmother, called Mema, was literal property and didn’t even know her actual given name.

My great-great grandmother Ma Berta, and great-grandmother Ma Frankie, lived through both the Depression and an era of church bombings, Jim Crow, and KKK night riders.

Ma Berta’s shadow looms particularly large in my life, even though she died five years before I was born. Alberta Grice was a slender, feisty woman, and my mama often says that’s who I remind her of. Some said she was mean, but I wonder how much of that was just armor she wore to protect herself against the world. I imagine it can be hard to take off sometimes, especially when a person knows they’ll just need to throw it on again tomorrow.

Margaret Lee, my grandma, worked and took care of other people for most of her life. She was a sharecropper from the time she was a little girl and she left high school in the tenth grade to help provide for the family. Ultimately, she would raise six kids, while working full-time at the hospital in which many of us (myself included) were born.

All these women had husbands, but even the most supportive partner can only provide so much of a barrier against the world.

My mother had a somewhat easier time, with the steady support system that my family provided. I lived with my grandma until the summer before my ninth birthday, while my mom built a better future for us. My dad was also present in my life.

Yet, my mom was still a young mother—barely in her twenties—working and going to school full-time, one hundred miles away from her first and only baby.

Make no mistake: I had an amazing childhood, surrounded by love, family, and protection. I had everything I needed and most of what I wanted, because the women who came before me knew how to make something out of nothing.

I just wish they hadn’t had to.

Author, feminist, scholar and activist bell hooks

September 25, 1952 - December 15, 2021

Photo: Getty Images

Ain’t I a woman?

“Usually, when people talk about the strength of Black women, they are referring to the way in which they perceive Black women coping with oppression,” bell hooks wrote in 1981’s Ain’t I A Woman? “They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.” 

In the book, hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins) explores intersectionality, or how overlapping social identities - in this case being both Black and female- can exacerbate discrimination and oppression. She argues that the confluence of racism and sexism which occurred during slavery led to Black women having the lowest social status in America, something that continues today.

As a general rule, the strength of Black women is celebrated, but rarely is it truly appreciated. Our perceived formidability is only seen as a positive when others benefit from it by using us as crutches, shields, or attack dogs. We are not allowed to reserve it for ourselves.

My confidence, my smart mouth, and my sharp tongue are only acceptable if I don’t use them to defend myself against society’s many acts of violence, be they institutional, physical, or in the form of insidious microaggressions. Once I do that, I’m dismissed as angry, even though I have every right to be.

Ironically, the only emotion society acknowledges from Black women is anger. Even then, it’s never validated, only criticized. However, I learned a long time ago that we will always be too loud for a world that never wanted to listen to us in the first place.

Black women have long carried that very same world on our backs and shoulders, bending and bowing, but never being permitted to break under its weight. We are seen not as human beings, with thoughts, feelings, and needs, but as perpetual beasts of burden. 

And we’ve been treated as such. 

We’ve single-handedly run households and raised generations, and we are expected to be rehabilitation centers for fractured men who won’t fix themselves. Black women have stood on the front lines of movements and revolutions, only to be overshadowed by those same men. Election after election, there have been different iterations of “Black women saved us again.” 

And we did. 

We did it even though that’s not our job, regardless of how often it’s shoved upon us and regardless of how many of us take up the mantle anyway. We have been asked for everything and given nothing in return, except for society’s most vitriolic hate.

Black women are often seen as cold, abrasive, aggressive, masculine, overly sexual; anything except worthy of love, consideration, protection, respect, and not least importantly, rest.

“Ain’t you tired, Black girl?”

-Hannah Drake

Strange fruit

To understand how we got here, we must understand that the myth of the Black Superwoman is a result of enduring myths about Black bodies as a whole.

The misconceptions developed over time, but entered modern medical instruction around 1787, with British doctor Benjamin Moseley’s A Treatise On Tropical Diseases; and on The Climate of the West-Indies. In the manual, Moseley claimed that (in a time before anesthesia) Black patients could handle surgical procedures better than white patients. In later years, physicians would use this idea that Black people were more resistant to pain to justify their brutal medical experiments on the enslaved.

In the 1820s and 1830s, Samuel Hamilton performed barbaric procedures on his victims, seeking to find how deep Black skin went, because he genuinely believed it was thicker than white skin. Another doctor, Samuel Cartwright, believed that Black people had less lung capacity than whites and that this could only be changed through hard labor, such as slavery. To this day, most commercially available spirometers (which measure the volume of air moving in and out of the lungs in order to diagnose respiratory issues) have a built-in “race correction” mechanism to account for this. For Black patients, the assumption is that lung capacity is around 15-20% less, which inevitably leads to misdiagnoses. In October of 2021, the House Committee on Ways and Means released a report which addressed this and other issues of racial inequity in the medical community.

Beginning in the late 1830s, James Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology,” was employed as a plantation physician in Mount Miegs, Alabama, just outside of Montgomery. At first, his practice was conventional and he treated ailments such as cleft palates and strabismus (crossed eyes). This changed in 1845, when an enslaved woman was brought to him with a pelvic injury. She’d sustained it after falling from a horse and had been in constant pain ever since.

He took her on as a patient, even though he had no specific training in gynecology, a field that did not yet exist. Sims positioned the woman on all fours and used his fingers to help him see directly into her vagina. Later, he would develop the Sims or duckbill speculum for this purpose, using the bent handle of a pewter spoon as his prototype.

During the examination, he also discovered that the woman had a vesicovaginal fistula (VVF), a condition in which tearing between the uterus and bladder causes constant urine leakage. VVF often occurred following childbirth, and at the time, there was no known cure or treatment. The condition was not fatal, but could cause a great deal of physical discomfort and social stigma.

Over the years, Sims would work to develop surgical techniques that would correct VVF and other reproductive conditions. He performed these procedures on enslaved women without using anesthesia. He would later defend this, stating that he did not trust the safety of ether, which was in its infancy as a surgical anesthetic. Sims claimed that the women were in such distress about their condition that they willingly participated, yet he failed to acknowledge that they could not truly consent or object due to their station in life. He did later perform surgery on at least one white female patient without anesthesia and he has been defended by some as “a man of his time.”

It should be noted, however, that Sims did not treat white women for VVF until he’d deemed the surgeries safe enough to perform on them. This was also after he began regularly using ether as a numbing agent.

Vesicovaginal fistulas are certainly uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing, but they are not generally painful in and of themselves. Many medical historians question the necessity of such persistent surgical intervention by Sims.

However, one must only consider the time period to understand the incentive for a Black woman to be reproductively “sound.” Enslaved women provided not only hard labor, but the next generation which would do the same. Therefore, plantation owners willingly provided the consent that the women could not.

Sims’ own statements around his experimentation are inconsistent. He argued that the pain of the procedures did not warrant the “trouble and the risk” of administering ether, but later claimed that the surgeries were "so painful, that none but a woman could have borne them."

Some of his contemporaries were also wary of anesthetics, however Sims did not use them specifically due his belief that Black people simply did not feel pain as white people did.

James Marion Sims

Of Sims’ many victims, only three are known by name: Anarcha Westcott , Betsey and Lucy. Anarcha had been sent to him at 17, while suffering through a protracted labor. Sims’ attempts at delivery resulted in the death of the child and a tear in Anarcha’s birth canal. Over the next 3 1/2 years, Sims would perform more than 30 surgeries on her, in an attempt to fix the fistula. Lucy, the youngest of the three, almost died from blood poisoning after he left a sponge inside her bladder and urethra following one procedure.

These women are the true pioneers, the involuntary “Mothers of Gynecology”, as Sims’ methods were built upon their suffering.

Around 1952, Robert Thom painted J. Marion Sims: Gynecologic Surgeon. Though it shows the fear and apprehension on the faces of the patient, Lucy, and the unnamed medical assistants, the original caption is an example of the sanitized “legacy” of Sims.

Photo: University of Michigan

In 2014, Montgomery community activist and visual artist, Michelle Browder, began working on a monument to honor the them.

The project was a collaborative effort and it was unveiled on September 24, 2021, just one block from the Equal Justice Initiative's National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

A statue of Sims remains in front of the Alabama State House.

The Mothers of Gynecology monument in Montgomery, depicting Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy.

Photo: Steven Zucker

Such misguided thoughts about Black bodies persist to this day, in modern medical education and practice. According to a 2016 study of 222 of white medical students, roughly 50% endorse at least one false belief about physiological differences between Black and white patients. These include the idea that Black people have less sensitive nerve endings and that Black skin is thicker than white skin. Misconceptions like this are not just ignorant. They can be fatal.

Consider the fact that Black women have a maternal mortality rate that is nearly 3 times higher than that of white women. In addition to common complications such as cardiovascular issues and severe blood loss, we must also contend with a racist medical system, in which our needs and concerns are often simply ignored. While factors such as inadequate access to prenatal and/or postnatal care do contribute, the trend of Black women dying more often from birth complications is the same regardless of health and socioeconomic status.

The experience of Serena Williams, the greatest tennis player of all time, perfectly underscores this point. Despite being rich and in fantastic physical shape, the complications she dealt with after the birth of her daughter Olympia in 2018 were potentially life-threatening. She described her ordeal in a Vogue feature:

The next day, while recovering in the hospital, Serena suddenly felt short of breath. Because of her history of blood clots, and because she was off her daily anticoagulant regimen due to the recent surgery, she immediately assumed she was having another pulmonary embolism. (Serena lives in fear of blood clots.) She walked out of the hospital room so her mother wouldn’t worry and told the nearest nurse, between gasps, that she needed a CT scan with contrast and IV heparin (a blood thinner) right away.

The nurse thought her pain medicine might be making her confused. But Serena insisted, and soon enough a doctor was performing an ultrasound of her legs. “I was like, a Doppler? I told you, I need a CT scan and a heparin drip,” she remembers telling the team. The ultrasound revealed nothing, so they sent her for the CT, and sure enough, several small blood clots had settled in her lungs. Minutes later she was on the drip. “I was like, listen to Dr. Williams!”

In late November of 2020, Dr. Susan Moore was admitted to Indiana University Health after being diagnosed with COVID-19. Moore, herself a physician specializing in internal medicine, detailed her experience on social media, sparking outrage. Her most notable post was a gut-wrenching seven and a half minute Facebook video, filmed on December 4th.

Dr. Moore alleged discriminatory treatment and delayed care, including being initially denied access to pain medicine, as well as the post-infection antiviral remdesivir. She described how her white doctor, Eric Bannec, downplayed her pain, and how his reluctance to prescribe her more pain meds made her feel “like I was a drug addict.”

Moore was discharged on December 7th, but was hospitalized again within 12 hours. This time, she was taken to Ascension St. Vincent, where she confirmed that she was receiving better care. Despite this, her condition continued to deteriorate, and she was intubated on December 10th. Ten days later, she died.

An external investigation, in which four of the six panelists were Black, concluded that the care Dr. Moore received at IU Health had not contributed to her death. President and CEO Dennis Murphy did, however, admit that staff “may not have shown the level of compassion and respect we strive for in understanding what matters most to patients.” Another official remarked that staff may have been “intimidated” by Dr. Moore’s knowledge (and very existence, presumably).

Malcolm was right

“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.” - Malcolm X, 1962

All things considered, society treats Black women the way it does because of the assumption that we can handle it. Society also doesn’t give a damn if we can’t.

As a consequence, many of us internalize this notion of being everything to everybody, often to our own emotional, mental, and physical detriment.

In a paper published in 2019, lead researcher Dr. Amani Allen described the five traits of the “Black superwoman schema”:

1. an obligation to suppress emotions

2. resistance to vulnerability

3. drive to succeed despite limited resources

4. an obligation to help others

5. an obligation to present an image of strength

The study, launched in 2012, surveyed 208 Black women in the San Francisco Bay Area on the links between social and environmental stressors. It found that while Traits 1 and 5 seemed to diminish the effects of oppression, Traits 3 and 4 appeared to exacerbate them.

While I cannot personally change how society regards me, I can and do have the power to refuse.

I refuse to do unnecessary emotional, intellectual, physical, or spiritual labor.

I refuse to make myself smaller or quieter or less to make others more comfortable. Black women are divine, but we are also only human.

Most importantly, I allow myself to rest.

And for Black women, rest is the ultimate act of resistance.