Summer Walker’s HardLife EP and Sojourner Truth’s Ain’t I a Woman need to be discussed
Summer Walker’s song, HardLife, the second song on her new EP reminds Black men, You say you want me soft, but give me a hard life.
Black women can now take off the cape, lay down the weapons, and give up the strong sister trope now that singer/songwriter, Summer Walker has declared the soft life for us in a song that might become my new anthem.
In 1851, Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and women’s right activist, born Isabella Baumfree, delivered a very similar message in her infamous speech, Ain’t I a Woman.
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Then, Mrs. Truth was reminding White people that she too, though Black and once…
