So what I’m seeing in all these conversations about this photo, bottom line, is that black people, and especially black women, are studying, we’re studying history together and without letting white people come in and “teach” it to us. And we’re getting real fucking real on history and not mincing words or pretending like shit wasn’t/isn’t that bad. And that’s an absolute threat.
Like this is one of those situations where white people do not have control over the conversation (try as they might to make it about “a woman breastfeeding is beautiful”, “let’s just remove the context”, “this should be about the innocent child”), and that’s fucking scary.
That baby, who as an infant has more societal power than this grown woman, is being fed while her own children are malnourished. Her own children will grow up far too early, become workers and property and less-than-human far too early, while this baby is taken care of.
White people wanna change the conversation around that, make it less real. They won’t give us space to deal with what our families have lost because they refuse to deal with their guilt and benefits. That baby could be their great-grandmama or great-great-granddaddy. AND MAMMY DIDN’T LOVE THEM. You can’t beat and abuse and monetize love out of her, just like you can’t berate and silence love out of us now.
This is exactly why I study all the time. I spent four years in college with white people trying to silence these real conversations because it made them feel bad (said that word for word in a lit class where we were discussing Beloved, no joke); that’s why I study now. That’s why I teach kids of color. That’s why I don’t let their teachers sugar-coat things for themselves and the white students, thereby erasing the histories of the kids of color. Because it’s a threat. All of it.
I study all day knowing yall want me to be ignorant, quiet, and docile; I work all the time knowing you want that same silence of my students. We’re a threat. This history that we know, that we teach ourselves and each other because somehow it got left out of our classes and textbooks or it got banned or was inappropriate, is all a threat. Keep trying to silence us, keep trying to make our ancestors’ lives revolve around your pitiful underdeveloped feelings and lack of empathy, but we’re gonna keep studying and teaching and doing what we gotta do.