When do Black women get to be free?

Freedom has been dangerous for us..

Independence has been defined as freedom from the control or influence of others. Often, as a Black woman in medicine, I have spent many hours of my life looking for “opportunities” and “spaces” where I could be free.

This was the problem.

All my life, I have been looking for the opportunity- a space and time- when someone would give me permission to be free. As if my freedom was meant to be confined- only tolerable in certain areas, at certain times and with certain groups of people. So, here was the big epiphany for me- there is nor will there ever be any opportunity “given” to us. Instead, there will be angst, frustration, anger, fear and possibly, apathy, in every moment, where we refuse to claim the freedom, we rightly deserve- even if it costs us our comfort.

For Black women, one of the most dangerous things we can do is to walk, talk, think, act, and be in -total and complete- freedom from the control and influence of others. 

As I near 40, I am only now embracing this part of me and, as I see my academic career come to a close, I wonder how many missed opportunities I have had to support, protect and encourage other Black women in medicine to do the same. For me, this space has growingly been a place of tension, largely due to the fear of compromising everything I had worked so hard to attain, including my faculty position, my salary and my dignity. However, I continued to compromise my integrity, by not strongly voicing my concerns and the deficits of the system that I allowed to control me- year after year.

As I reflect now, I still find the choice of making decisions and taking actions independent of the opinion of others, extremely foreign, overwhelmingly daunting and highly anxiety-provoking. This is largely due to the internalized self-doubt created by messaging that we’ve received as girls and long into our womanhood. Moreover, because many of us as Black women are the breadwinners in our homes, our desire for more autonomy & freedom has been deemed selfish, by many, including women who look like us.

However, then I learned about “ubuntu” — a concept in which your sense of self is shaped by your relationships with other people. It’s a way of living that begins with the premise that “I am” only because “we are.” Dr. James Ogude explains it eloquently by saying, “In other words, as a human being, you — your humanity, your personhood — you are fostered in relation to other people.”

If who you are is shaped by others then there is equal potential for how our behavior and our courage can shape others. Dr. Brene Brown, often speaks about the fact, that we cannot give what we don’t have. As the mother of two young girls, freedom and independence are two tenets that I want to be salient in their lives. I also want them to know that their courage can only be as powerful as their vulnerability.

Over 100 years ago, Frederick Douglass remarked that Independence Day “reveals…, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which [we] are the constant victim.” This independence that we are supposed to carry as Americans has never been fully available to us within our workplaces, our communities, our training institutions and even in our relationships.

So to my fellow sisters, are you still waiting for the “right time” to show up as your free and independent selves? Or do we have to finally make a decision to do so even if it is a choice that both scares and exhilarates us at the same time? What can we do?