Story #91 - Anese, Reston VA (USA) - Black Motherhood, Isolation, Medical Malpractice, Preemie, NICU, Postpartum Depression
This is a consolidated two-part interview I conducted with Anese Barnett, M.ED who is the founder of The Breakthrough Mama, a maternal mental health therapist, and parent coach.
PART 1
Our son came as a beautiful surprise. We weren't expecting to get pregnant so soon, but we were so, so happy.
I must have been about ten weeks pregnant when my mom and brother came from NYC, where I'm from, for a short visit. It was one o'clock in the morning, and we were sitting around the dinner table, eating my favorite Jamaican food, when I felt this gush passing through my body. I touched between my legs and realized I was leaking blood all over the place. I slowly stood, went to the bathroom, and saw that I was passing clots in the toilet.
Every pregnant woman knows that if you see clots, you're probably miscarrying. I began to cry. My grandfather had died maybe five or six months before, and I remember watching my mom banging on the table, saying, "Jesus, no! I can't take it. I can't take it again!"
I was able to remain calm and told everyone to get in the car to get to the hospital.
When we arrived, they ran some tests. By some miracle, the baby was still there. I wasn't miscarrying, but I was suffering subchorionic bleeding*. Normally, this condition does not lead to that much blood, but mine was bigger than usual.
After that episode, my OB classified me as high-risk and put me on preventive bedrest for four weeks. I was still able to work, but part-time, which turned out to be lovely. I think it shook me more than I would have admitted it at the time. We didn't share the news of our pregnancy with anyone after that. When our 20-week appointment came, I had been pretty sad and so afraid we would lose the baby that I had distanced myself from most friends we had in the area because I was terrified somebody would figure out I was pregnant.
The isolation began in the first trimester, and I carried it throughout my whole pregnancy. Because I'm originally from NYC, I didn't have any close friends to check on me and tell me that it wasn't normal.
But we made it until after the anatomic scan and began to plan for a gender reveal down in South Carolina, where most of my family is from. We allowed ourselves to be excited, but we discovered that my cervix was already 50% effaced before we could go on our trip. My primary OBGYN was a Black woman. She told me, "You cannot travel and I'm putting you on bedrest." She also wanted to get me a cervical cerclage to prevent the cervix from opening even more. But since she was new to the practice, she didn't have the right to do surgery at their hospital and referred me to a maternal-fetal medicine doctor in Alexandria.
I'm not sure if you're aware of maternal health statistics for Black women in the US, but it's scary. When I showed up to my appointment and sat down in front of a rude white woman, I immediately felt like that: a statistic.
I remember being so worried, and she wouldn't even answer my questions. She was very short with me, and you could tell she didn't want to have to deal with me. Still, you'd think that given the fact that I was high-risk and my cervix was eroding, you'd do your best to provide good care and follow through with your colleague's recommendation. But she didn't. Instead, she refused to do the cerclage and said, "Come every week and I'll check on you."
I was blindsided. You only have until 23 or 24 weeks to do the surgery, and I was already at 20.
This went one for three weeks. Before my third—and last—visit, I had talked to the sister of a friend who's an OB in NYC. She told me, "You have to advocate for yourself or it's not going to end well for you." So that's what I did. I said to the doctor, "I get it. You don't want to do the cerclage and if things don't work out well, I'll simply be another statistic for you. But the decision we're going to make today might affect and hurt me for the rest of my life. So I'm urging you to do the cerclage."
It's not as if she suddenly became compassionate, but she agreed. She said, "Fine, fine. Come by Monday and we'll schedule you for surgery." Like she was doing me a favor.
Here's the crazy thing: I demanded the cerclage on Thursday, and when she checked me that day, I was around 2 centimeters effaced out of 4. When I came in on Monday for my pre-op appointment, and I was at 0.5 cm. In three days, I went from 2 to 0.5. I had almost no cervix left.
The doctor came in casually, looked at the sonogram, and cheerfully said, "What are you doing tomorrow? Cause you're going to be here, and I'll do the surgery!" The sonographer, who was Black, looked at her and said, "Dr. P... No! what do you mean, ‘come back’?! She can't leave! Look what's happening here." The sludge was already starting to come out. His feet were already starting to come out!
They finally rushed me upstairs to do the emergency surgery, hoping to stop the contractions.
Because that's another thing that I had been mentioning to her over and over for the past three weeks: I was having pain I knew I was not supposed to feel, but since her wisdom was to dismiss everything and tell me it was normal, I went back home every single time thinking I was the crazy one. Turns out, "It's nothing" was more like "I'm having contractions and feeling him kicking his way out."
After she did the emergency surgery, I switched practice and hospital. I asked my doula, and she referred me to the George Washington University Hospital in DC. They followed me from 28 weeks until I delivered, and I'm so happy with the care I received with them. Something about GW being a research hospital full of young residents makes them more attuned with the statistics and bias. I didn't see a Black professional, but I truly felt that their attention and professionalism were superior to what I had received at INOVA Alexandria, and specifically from Dr. P.
A couple of weeks went by, and my brother came down from Boston to visit. He cooked and took care of me for a week. He works at MIT and told me it was his last chance to see me pregnant, give my husband a break, and enjoy each other's company before getting back to work.
I had to go to the hospital for my 31-week check-up and he offered to come with me. Everything went well, and after the appointment, we went to Whole Food right across the street from GW to get something to eat.
And then I felt that gush again.
I rushed to the bathroom because I was certain it was blood, but everything was clear. It wasn't a lot, so I thought it was probably nothing (or pee!), but 40 minutes later, as we were putting the groceries back in the trunk, I bent over to get a bag, and my water completely broke.
Luckily we were still across the street from the hospital, so my brother drove me right to the ER entrance. The staff wheeled me upstairs and checked me into the antepartum unit.
I stayed there for two weeks.
We tried to hold my baby in for as long as we could. I was on antibodies, and they checked on me regularly. From the very beginning, the medical team was very clear about their plan and we went over it several times: they supported my choice to have a vaginal delivery despite having a premature baby, and we'd prepared for an induction at 34 weeks.
But our son came on his own, on the first day of my 33d week.
I'm glad I could get him to 33 weeks because when I came in at 31 weeks when my water broke, everybody was certain I would deliver him that day. I was already five centimeters dilated, and I had been at the hospital for six hours when they put me on magnesium. I couldn't move. Then the doctor realized I was still stitched from the cerclage, so they remove it to make sure there would be no more damage done to my cervix. But then I didn't progress anymore for another two weeks.
I'm truly grateful it stopped to give him more time to develop.
Still, I remember this stay as something incredibly depressing and very scary. I had to cancel my baby shower and maternity photo session. I had finally built up the courage to book one, thinking it would all be fine, and it was heart-wrenching not to be able to do it.
When they checked me in at 31 weeks, the NICU team had also come to let me know that there was an almost 100% chance that my child would be in the NICU for quite some time.
They really did their best to explain what was going to happen: they said that a whole team would be there when I deliver, and then they would take him away. But no matter how well they described it, nothing can prepare you for that experience.
I ended up loving my birth, although it was not what I had planned.
I had hoped for my doula to be there to support me. I wanted to use pain management techniques, and I also wished my mom could be present. She delivered all three of us without pain medicine in the nineties. I remember being eight and already knowing that I could, and was going to do it.
But the thing is, no one was confident I was truly in labor until the very last moment, and then it went very fast. Luckily, my husband was there with me. I think watching everything closely during our prenatal appointments with our doula gave him a lot of confidence. I would squeeze his hands during the contractions and he'd encourage me to get through each wave. He was there when I was ready to push. It feels like he knew just what to do. He didn't freak out, and I trusted him.
By the time they moved me from the antenatal unit to a birthing suite, I was already 10 cm dilated, but I didn't know that, so I had asked for the epidural. I wish I hadn't because I was almost there. I remember feeling like things had changed. I felt a shift in my vagina as if I was ready to push. I wish I had known that I was transitioning. I wish my doula had been there to tell me to keep going.
But I was in so much pain. And it took them forever to give me the epidural. I was on oxygen because I had started to desaturate. When I finally got it, God, it was good! I kept pressing the button because I needed relief, but the problem is that when came the time to push, I couldn't feel the pressure. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it, but my husband pulled his little notepad off his pocket and reviewed all the notes we had taken from our sessions with the doula. He helped me breathe. And then she arrived right before I pushed our son out.
He was so tiny that he crowned for a very long time and would always slip back in. Things were starting to get serious, and my doctor gave me one more chance to push as they used the vacuum. And I did it.
Right before they pulled him out, they knocked the bed down and the door busted open with ten people from the NICU team rushing in. They checked him out to make sure he was alright, and because they are a really, really baby-friendly hospital, they put him on my chest for 30 seconds. I got to hold him and say hello for the first time, and then they whisked him out to the NICU.
He'd suffered uterine growth restriction, so he was smaller than he should have been. Thirty-three weekers are usually born at 4 pounds, but on the day of his birth, he had just hit 3 pounds.
Our son was born at 5:30 in the morning and, several hours later, everybody was tired. My husband and brother were asleep on the chairs in the room, but I was wide awake, pumping. I couldn't get a nurse to get the milk to the NICU fast enough, so three hours after delivering a baby, I stood up and walked that milk down the hall.
Come to think of it now, I shouldn't have done that. The nurses there were like, "Way to go, mom!" But it was just my adrenaline. I wasn't thinking about me. I just wanted to see my child and give him the nutrition that he needed.
In life, I am beyond perseverant and determined, but when we left the hospital without him, I cried. I cried in the car, and I quietly kept crying after I got home. My family was with me, but you know, nobody really understood us. My mom and dad were there. My maternal grandmother came the following week. My godmother and her husband drove from NYC to visit us only for a couple of hours and then drove back that night. It was encouraging, but it was still hard.
This is a very emotional topic for me because at now 16 months old, our breastfeeding journey is coming to an end, but it wasn't easy at the beginning and I worked so hard to build a breastfeeding relationship. Coming out of the NICU by myself, I felt so perseverant. I overcame so much self-doubt and mom guilt: I used to judge myself and my self-worth, and I would get angry at him because of his latch. Despite meeting with lactation consultants, I was wondering why we couldn't do this together.
I remember feeding him in the NICU with a syringe so he would eat. I have these memories of waking up every three hours in the middle of the night, alone, pumping and crying, thinking, "It's hard for all the moms out there and they're tired too, but at least they got their consolation prize and are with their baby."
I would pump all night and drive to the hospital every morning. We were in PG county at the time, and GW doesn't have parking, so we would pay for street-parking and walk a long way to drop off milk and see him. It was so hard emotionally and draining physically. I felt envious of all these moms who'd leave with their baby to head home do skin to skin while I could only watch my baby on a camera.
Thank God GW had these cameras! But even if it’s nice to be able to watch your baby from afar, it's still so difficult. I'd notice that the night nurses didn't pay the same kind of attention as the day nurses, and although they were all phenomenal, they were not his mother! I had to call a couple of times and ask them to make sure I could see him because the camera would flip. I would also try to look at him while I pumped to increase my milk production.
He stayed in the NICU for five weeks.
It was bitter-sweet to leave because you think about all the mommies you leave behind. During these weeks, I saw many parents come and go, and I don't know what it was about our bed, but every baby put next to our son would be allowed to leave after like three days. I felt so envious. And yet, I always thought about those mothers we left behind when it was actually our turn to leave the hospital, wondering if they felt like we did.
Everybody from my family had left by the time we brought our son home.
My dad had stayed with us for a couple more days after his birth, and so did my brother. Soon after, though, they had to go, except for my mom and grandma, who stayed for a couple more weeks. These times were challenging but also filled with love and support. Last-minute, my family pulled together a baby shower, and people from Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and New York came. It was lovely.
But when we came home with our son, it was just the three of us. And that was really hard. I wish we had had somebody to celebrate us. And help us, too, because that's truly when you learn how to become a parent. My mom drove two weeks later, though, and it was so wonderful to have her back.
I developed signs of postpartum depression two months after he was born. I had intrusive thoughts, so I called the same OB friend who had helped me advocate for myself when I was pregnant. I remember this call vividly: I hadn't slept for two days straight, I was exhausted, and I didn't want this baby anymore, so I called her at 6 am. She said, "Go take him up to his dad, and tell your husband that he can't go to work today."
She also told me to go out and take a break from motherhood, whatever that meant to me. It just so happened that one of my friends had asked if she could come over visit that week, so we were able to "take a break" together. We went out for sushi, Facetimed with our mutual best friend from college, and had a great, great day. I felt a lot better that evening when I got back home.
That same morning I also had called my dad, who'd told me, "You know, I think you should come back to NYC and stay with us for a while. But I don't want you to drive; you should let me come to you." I told him I could drive back with my friend, that she would help me, but he insisted: "No no no, I will take you home."
My dad is retired now, but at the time, he was an executive for different divisions of the New York City MTA. He was obviously busy, but he had his assistant purchase an Amtrak ticket for that night, and the following morning, he drove us all back to New York.
I stayed home for a month. All my parents did was to take care of us. They made sure I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They took my son from me as many times as I needed—or as they needed because they always wanted to hang out and cuddle with him! He was still so tiny at the time.
During my stay, I also had a friend of mine who's a DNP in women's health who took me out on a date. She said, "We're gonna get all dressed up. You'll leave the baby with your parents and we're going to get food and a glass of wine, okay? Let's get you back to who you were."
I want to cry now thinking about it. I don't think she understands the magnitude of what it meant to have somebody say, "I'm so excited that you became a mom, but you're also more than that; let me honor that part of you too."
After that month, I went back to Maryland. But I knew in my heart that I didn't have any support system there, so I did the back-and-forth between my two homes on and off for months.
I've been in the mental health field for six years. I have a master’s in mental health counseling from GMU, and I work with children who face emotional challenges, many of them from traumatic events. I recently realized that I needed to work closely with parents first to help kids, and that's how my practice slowly shifted towards supporting mothers.
I opened my own counseling practice back in January, here in Reston, VA. During our sessions together, mothers can release frustrations and guilt, and I try to help them in their rediscovery of motherhood and womanhood.
As of three months ago, I was still seeing my usual clients—children, family, and couples—but COVID disrupted my professional life. I've continued to meet with client online but quickly realized that it was challenging to be a full-time counselor and stay at home mom, as well as trying being a part-time business owner, running off to see clients, and making sure my husband would be home on time to care for our son.
I'm out of breath simply listing all these things!
So I pressed pause.
My work and my journey as a mom are obviously interconnected. When I slowed down from doing "all the things," I had to face grimmer areas of my past related to my pregnancy, birth, and postpartum period that weren't quite healed—or not as healed as I thought they were. As I focused on my business and listened to more and more women processing their experience, I discovered that, being a NICU mom, I still had lingering bits of pain and hurt that were getting in the way of how I perceived other people's story.
One comment, in particular, made me realize that it was time to finally get counseling for myself. I was at a baby shower in January, and there were other families there with small children. This couple was talking about the birth of their baby, and the father randomly said, "Yeah we had him early!" I jumped right in and said, "Oh really?! Me too!"
Their baby was born at 39 weeks, while mine was 33 weeks when I delivered him. I told the man, "Thirty-nine week is not early. Not early at all." But he was so adamant and wouldn't admit that there was a big difference between delivering a baby at 33 weeks versus 39.
I went back home carrying this exchange with me.
That's when I realized I had internalized my NICU experience and the fact that my son was born prematurely. By personalizing my trauma and transferring it onto this father, I couldn't see that he simply didn't know any better and meant no harm.
So I got some help. Counseling was helpful because it led me to settle concerns I had like separation anxiety and attachment issues. I knew that these had been intensified by the trauma of being in the NICU for so long, but I hadn't realized how they were still affecting my life: he is 16 months old now, and I haven't been away from him for more than 5 hours.
Before I got help, I remember my parents telling me they would take him back home to NYC so I could focus on building my business. It used to make me so angry. I kept telling them “no” in a roundabout way. But they kept asking, and I grew even more frustrated.
I know now that all these emotions were coming from a place of anxiety and trauma.
We've thought about going back to NYC altogether, but life there is too expensive. Then there's the whole COVID situation, and I'm glad we don't have to live in an apartment anymore. My husband pointed out the other day how much changed in the Bronx and how it was heavily affected. My parents are going to retire in the South anyway, where they're from.
That's what Black people used to do in the 60s: go North because opportunities in the South were not available. They had to uproot themselves and move to Chicago or NYC. My grandfather was a mechanic at MTA, and then my dad took it to the next level. But the South is still their home, and they want to build a big family homestead there. Life there is better than it used to be.
Still, the thing with the Black experience is that you already know, no matter where you go, and however educated and experienced you are, that you're going to encounter challenges. That's just a fact.
I grew up in a home where we talked about race often. We spoke about History, and I think what made our family unique was that my dad always asked this question to us: "What are you going to do for your People?" I was brought up having to constantly ask myself how I was going to help advance our cause as I grew up, and I've always carried that with me.
I'm not a protester, so what am I doing daily to improve my People's life? Even more so now, as the mother of a Black boy?
*Subchorionic bleeding is when blood collects between the uterus and the gestational membranes during pregnancy. This is a frequent cause of vaginal bleeding during the first and second trimester of pregnancy. A study of nearly 64,000 pregnant women found that 1.7 percent experienced a subchorionic hemorrhage.
PART 2
My biggest takeaway from this experience, particularly as a mental health professional, is that I can't believe that nobody ever came to check on my mental health as I was in the antepartum unit.
I was only there for two weeks, but some women spend months on their own. Hospitals need to do assessments for perinatal mental health, as we know that these mothers can't physically access counseling if they need it because most of them are on bedrest.
In a way, these traumatic events pushed me to build a business that focuses on the needs of mothers. My goal is to establish protective factors around patients like us because we know they are more at risk for postpartum depression and PTSD due to their NICU stay. We are such in a survival mode when the baby comes, and symptoms can kick in months—if not years—later.
We also need to diversify research because no matter what type of study in psychology you consult, the samples will always significantly lean towards a population of white individuals. Sure, it takes more work to have a more diverse sample, but this is why voices like mine in research matter—and also why I'm working on my GRE* to start my Ph.D. We need to do the work to make sure that women of color and Black women are taken into consideration as the treatment modalities that we're coming up with might not be as effective otherwise.
We're all aware that Black women have been marginalized in perinatal mental health. And in the times that we're in right now, it should become a national concern. You see a lot of hashtags on social media like #whitecoatsforblacklives, but many people in the birthing world are calling them out: we can't be just a hashtag. We need to decide, as a society, to dismantle the ways misogyny and racism impact birthing and maternal and mental health for Black women.
Being the mother of a Black son hurts, especially right now.
In January [2020], I took on a client in my counseling practice. She is also the mother of a Black child and was about three months postpartum. She wanted to talk about the challenges of raising a Black son in our current world. The conversation shifted around the articles written on Black motherhood and how everybody told us how cute our little boys were.
She asked, "When do our sons turn from cute to striking fear in their hearts because of the color of their skin?"
That's emotional for me to quote her because this is exactly what brings me hopelessness, even during this time [at the heart of the BLM movement.]
So I created The Breakthrough Mama to help me break through the pain from my experience. My Instagram account helped me so much and gave me a community that I felt I didn't have when I moved here.
I began doing live interviews on my personal IG, and moms would come back and tell me, "This was the breakthrough I needed from my experience." So I just called myself that and created a coaching practice on top of my counseling one.
What I do is twofold: I help mamas enjoy the gift of motherhood and break through their own negative self-talk, expectations, and limited beliefs about themselves.
The ways you grew up impact how you raise your children, so I'm helping them to feel free as women, rediscover, and integrate that person that they've transformed into motherhood. We were all someone before becoming a mom, and it's important to know how to incorporate this person into this new role, with our passions and purposes in life.
Then, of course, I have expertise with children, so I offer counsel on parenting and how to approach behavioral and emotional challenges. I've had a mom come to see me because her six-year-old was about to get kicked out of school because he couldn't handle his emotions very well, and mom was going to lose her job because she always had to go pick him up. But within two months or so of working together, it was gone.
Then the work is to build upon that or reconciling that parent-child relationship. That's also my way of helping mothers.
Most of my clients are Black. I've recently worked with a little Black boy who lives in the suburbs of Ashburn. His mother is an executive, he is gifted and talented, with a 148 IQ. He came to me the other day and said,
"Mrs. Anese. I always thought the police were my friends, that they were good people and would protect me, but now I'm afraid. I think, 'Am I going to be next? Are they going to do it to me?'"
He's in third grade.
He wanted to be out there protesting, but his parents were afraid. So we decided that he was going to make signs and put them up in his neighborhood. He wrote poems and sent them to his teachers at school.
The crazy part is that his parents first sent him to me specifically because he was having issues with race at school, as there are barely any other Black kids, and the school itself is colorblind. Like, they don't celebrate Black History Month, but they have an International Week where they'd talk about cultures worldwide, including some Black figures.
Can you believe that? We're not international. We don't identify as Internationals. In fact, International Week makes us feel worse in our identity.
What do you think you're doing to young Black children's psyche and physiological identity in school when you don't even recognize their place in American History?
Before COVID hit, his parents tried to work with the school. They had a few meetings with the administration, and they committed to doing better. They haven't seen yet what it'll look like in the online curriculum, but they're hopeful it'll change because the boy loves school. He's getting a great education, but the issue of race deeply impacted him. He was becoming so angry and frustrated.
My own family is in a similar situation. The neighborhood we currently live in is white, and that's an issue: what kind of communities do Black people have access to? PG County, where we used to live, is one of the richest black counties in the US. You wouldn't know that, right? There are a couple of pockets like that where you find bigs homes with Black lawyers and doctors. It's beautiful. But if you drive up out of our little cul-de-sac of big homes, it looks like poverty. The roads are bumpy, and the school system is trash. Yet, we pay higher taxes there than any other counties in Maryland. So after we had our son, we thought, "We can't stay here." Even if we loved our neighborhood, the redlining made it impossible for him to access good education.
It's institutional and it's a problem. But it's also complicated.
Before we moved to Reston, a couple of people tried to gentrify one of the areas about 10 minutes down our street. Many of us were thinking, "Okay, we know what gentrification usually means, but this is a Black neighborhood; maybe it'll be positive for us." We wondered if we'd get a Whole Food or a Wegmans. We would have community meetings and talk about it on the NextDoor app. We advocated for better stores and supermarkets, but eventually, we realized: they won't come. These stores denied us over and over again. In a way, they were telling us that we didn't count. You're talking about a neighborhood with some of the wealthiest Black people in the nation, and they still refused to come.
My husband is an engineer, and, at the time, he was working at John Hopkins. We asked ourselves, "Did he work this hard to put our son in a school that ranks number two out of ten?" Absolutely not! So we moved.
But moving away from our community wasn't easy. Here, I'm friendly with my neighbors, but it's not the same. In the wake of what is happening, I don't even feel they acknowledge how it impacts us. The other day, I was walking with CJ, and I know that my neighbor saw us, but I guess she didn't want to face her discomfort, so she just kept watering her flowers. It's hurtful. It's hurtful because, to some degree, I also don't know what to say to her, and I feel complicit. What do I do if they just want to smile and not ask me how I'm doing for real? Am I also complicit in smiling back and acting like nothing's wrong, and nothing's hurting us?
They have the luxury not to think about it, but as a Black person, we don't.
This is the kind of complex decisions you face as a Black parent: you want the best for your children, but that means you have to live in majority white neighborhoods.
It's hard. And it can be quite harmful.
I want to live in a world where I'm not petrified by fear of sending my son to school. I want to live in a world in which I'm not wondering every day about what the teacher will do to him or if her bias will affect him and hold him back instead of pushing him forward, as I've experienced it myself in school.
My privilege has always been socioeconomic. I was lucky that my mom could come to school and high school to deal with racist teachers and fight for me. My socioeconomic privilege was to have a dad who went to work and a mom who stayed home and tended to our needs. To have parents who told me that I could be in honors classes and had the education to push me forward.
I recognize that privilege.
I know that I would be able to do that for my son. But at the same time, something roars inside of me: "Why do I even have to do that?!"
As I share my birth and pregnancy story, I think, "I went through too much to birth this child for somebody to tell him what he can't do in this world because of the color of his skin." You know that sending him to a predominately white school will create racial dissonance. I'm so afraid of that, so I'm gearing up to homeschool him.
My husband is unimpressed by what's happening. Obviously, George's Floyd's death is upsetting, but he doesn't think that anything will change other than apologies, and vocal apologies aren't doing much to improve our lives. Many things have to change on a systemic level before we can allow ourselves to have faith in the system: better education, fair employment, legal policies. His first job was paid at a lower rate than he was supposed to be hired, and even after he told his employers there had been a mistake, they still refused to change it.
As for myself, I have mixed emotions regarding the current state of the country. I use my social media platform for my business and connect with other mothers, giving me a sense of community. Of course, some of the comments are disheartening, but it's also encouraging because I've seen white people in my field saying they want to make a change from the inside and not just perform their activism. One white woman, in particular, was writing that it's not enough not to be racist, that you have to be anti-racist. She's doing her homework and implementing changes in her practice.
I will engage with that kind of person. If a person has already done their self-work and wants to have a conversation based on the fact that they understand how they've been benefiting from racism, and want to dismantle it so I can benefit from the world too, then I'm willing to engage.
But if someone comes up to me and wants a battle about racism, I'm not doing that. Or if you're white and seriously want to dismantle racism but come to me to ask how to do it, I won't do it either. We are not there to educated white people. Every time we talk about the Black experience, we have to revisit our pain, and every time, we are retraumatized. To be put back into a position where we have to pour out our lives yet again for white people to understand that we are worthy human beings is excruciating.
The answers are already out there. There is research from experts. Hundreds of books have been written on what it looks like to dismantle racism in this country. One on one conversations are important, but even more important is to make sure that you're not relying on your interactions with Black people as your sole strategy for dismantling racism. Because maybe the Black person you're talking to doesn't even know what she's feeling. Maybe it's just too much right now for her to process. Maybe she doesn't even know what it looks like to dismantle racism.
We tend to forget that we are not just Black people. I read many articles and posts recently about the generalization of "Black People," and I'm like, "What about Black Individuals?"
When you say, "Black People," who are you really talking about?
There's a uniqueness to each person and their experience as humans. By considering us only as a group, you strip the person from existing as an individual, and more importantly, as a Black individual in America. This is the complicated nature of being Black in this world, and particularly in the US: we don't have the luxury of individualism.
You know, people love to talk about "Black on Black" crime when things like these [a Black man being killed by a cop] happen. But the whole point is that every race commits crimes against each other: you commit crimes in proximity to whom you are around, and white people commit just as many white on white crimes. Yet, we don't hear about it. Black on Black crime is only used as a deflection for the real issue, which is that Black people aren't also seen as individuals.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, a white person can perpetuate a crime without it being translated as a collective issue. You have expressions like "He was a lone-wolf" or "He was mentally ill." We're not scared of every white person out there after a mass shooting [somehow.] It's always just "one bad apple." But it's not. Things that repeatedly happen do so for systemic reasons. Of course, there are exceptions, but once again, these exceptions are only available to white folks.
I think that is also why white people have such a hard time with racism inside the police force: they can't see that when the whole system is complicit, it means that the entire system is racist: it's not just "one bad cop."
One woman was writing on a Facebook post the other night that she was afraid for her husband, who's a police officer because he had gotten flicked twice the night before. I was like, "Wait a minute, you're afraid for what?" Suddenly it's All Lives or Blue Lives Matter because he was flicked off? They show up in war gear at peaceful protests, they have protection, guns, they're the ones who can harm people, and you're telling me you're afraid because he received a middle finger?
This is why this movement might not feel as revolutionary for us as it does for white people: being afraid is our daily life. That's how we grew up. And we don't see how it'll change with a couple of hashtags.
When I was a kid, I was taught that I would have to work a million times harder to get the same opportunities as a white person. You quickly learn that you can't be stuck in shock when someone less experienced gets your job. You know that you'll have to perpetually survive in a hostile environment.
I went to the University of Vermont, which is now slightly more diversified, but it was 0.5% Black for 97% white back then.
One of the barriers for white people when it comes to accepting that racism is everywhere is that if you accept that you have white privilege, you then have to admit that everything that you believe you have done by the merit of pulling yourself from your bootstraps is not true. And most people are not willing to accept that.
However, they sure are willing to deflect it.
Being on campus, I've heard so many white students say that I was only there because of affirmative actions. But the thing they don't know is that white women, because they are considered a minority in many sectors, are the ones who benefit most from affirmative action, while Black people are at the bottom, even though they are the ones who sacrifice their lives for it.
And here's the whole gag: I was number three in my graduating class at the University of Vermont. I missed being a salutatorian by a smidget, I took every AP class there was to take, and you're going to sit here and tell me I'm here because of the color of my skin? You basically deny that I'm intelligent enough to get here on my own merit, but you will not accept that your skin color has impacted your level of success? That's ironic.
I've had many racist experiences on campus, but I remember one that really hurt me. I was on the bus all by myself, and I was the only person of color going to one of those big classes with 300 people—also as one of the only Black person attending. There was this white girl who kept grilling me, staring at me the whole ride.
You know, you think that in the face of racism, you're going to gather up and say something, but then you're so hurt and also so fearful that you freeze. I was on a bus full of white people: if something goes down, nobody's going to have my back. So I did something that I'm not proud of, and just turned my head and tried to look out the window.
We got off at the same stop on campus, and I tried to move away, but that girl waited for me. She waited for me, just to look at me up and down, and said, "Um. So ghetto." And then walked away.
We're talking 2010, in Vermont. Vermont, which is considered the most progressive state in the country.
When we talk about progressive and liberalism, we have to ask ourselves what it truly means and who it truly includes.
For the most part, liberalism is an area that impacts white people. For example, Vermont is progressive when it comes to the LGBTQ + community because it affects many white folks. If white people can be categorized into a minority group, you will inevitably find that cause in the liberal agenda. If you care about your brother or your sister who's gay, then you'll care about the issue and advocate for it. You're going to dismantle whatever creates barriers for you and your loved ones.
I've met so many people in Vermont who claimed that they weren't racist, and that was the farthest thing from the truth.
White people don't understand that the white race itself is racist. Sure, you probably don't think of yourself as actively racist on an individual level, but the very presence of your skin color in this world is racist.
So if you show up today at a protest and want to help, you have to be willing to talk about that fact and accept that you uphold the system by not acknowledging that you benefit from white supremacy. You have to understand that your skin color comes with privileges that are inherently racist.
You hear a lot of people say that it's not like they have themselves enslaved people. But they have to recognize that they are still benefiting from my ancestors' enslavement by theirs, who handled the white privilege bridle to their children—which is them. We all work hard in life to give back to the next generations, so if your forefathers created a system to ensure that you will be benefited, there's a good chance that the reason why you can safely walk into a room today and not even have to think about how people will perceive you is white privilege. If you don't have to worry that your name will cause you not to be hired or bypassed by someone with a whiter name and less experience: that's white privilege.
Black women carry the load of the world on their shoulders. Most revolutionary movements like the one we are currently experiencing have happened on the back of Black women. But we are not seen, and our work benefits everyone else, including Black men, before it benefits us.
Breonna Taylor is the perfect example: the state just decided this morning that they were going to investigate, and I thought to myself, "She was murdered in her sleep and it took all this time just to get an investigation."** Oftentimes, when Black women are murdered by police brutality, we don't get the same uproar.
But people need to scream for us too.
We hear a lot about Black men being murdered by cops but not as much about how Black women are being murdered daily at a much faster pace in this country—and by that, I mean murdered by the medical field.
Women are dying at astronomical rates in a first world country, and almost no one talks about it.
We know that the maternal mortality rate for Black women is high. If you add to these statistics the emotional wounds, how are we supposed to raise healthy children if we aren't well cared for? The development of the Black family is so multilayered. I pray that feminist studies open up more about that because, for many Black women and mothers, the feminist movements have been of little help because the Black family structure does not align with the way white feminism talks about motherhood and womanhood.
On my shirt, it says, "My Revolution Is Black Motherhood," and on his, "My revolution is Black Boy Joy."
Part of our resistance is Black joy. Joy in boyhood and joy in motherhood. I insist on the word "Black" because some cultural differences are unique to Black people, and it's important to uplift them. Laughter is one of them. We laugh so much. We laugh from our belly, and we won't refuse to laugh as much as we won't refuse to fight by laughter.
We are fighting for that laugh. We are fighting with that laugh.
Black boys are dying, and we need to talk about it, but we also have to celebrate their joy. In the same way, we have to honor every mother who has to have difficult conversations with their sons.
What I'm trying to say is that I want my child to be multi-dimensional. I want his joy to be talked about as much as his chance to be murdered in the streets.
I want mothers of Black children to be celebrated for their profound responsibility and power in this movement: because revolutions can start in our own hearts and our own homes.
Of course, Black women already know that. But I believe in inclusive feminism, and I want to inspire white mothers to understand that too. If you believe in equality, if you believe that you can revolutionize this country and racism, you have to believe that you can fight it through motherhood.
Look in the mirror, reflect and recognize your privilege, and change how you raise your children.
Reflect on how your kids interact with my son. It's your duty to raise a child who won't be complicit in racism. Children are not born thinking that they are entitled to bully Black kids. They are taught they have the power to do so.
*Yesterday [10.28.2020], Anese posted on her Instagram page: "Thank you to so many of you who offered support, encouraging words, and prayers as I prepared for the GRE. All done with that, now I've still got to finish up my applications for these doctoral programs 😬. [...] Studying with a toddler was no easy feat. In fact I'm not sure how I even did it...but I did!"
**A grand jury indicted a former Louisville police officer in late September for wanton endangerment for his actions during the raid. He pleaded not guilty. No charges were announced against the other two officers who fired shots, and no one was charged for causing Ms. Taylor's death [source NY Times]. On October 2d, the grand jury proceedings were released. Since, two grand jurors anonymously came out stating that police actions on the night she died were 'negligent' and 'criminal.'"