Fear of The Attractive Professional Black Woman

So many people have chattered and tweeted about #teacherbae, the APS paraprofessional whose classroom selfies have gone viral in recent days.

I find it utterly ridiculous that this woman is being shamed at all. From my vantage point she has done nothing wrong.

Patrice Brown wore a whole dress. That is all she did to cause the ruckus that has the PTSA up in arms. The images shown of Ms. Brown present her in various dresses of appropiate lengths, fully covering her body. Several pictures also show her in workout attire that fully covers her body. I might add, no children are present or included in any of those photos, leaving me to believe those photos could quite possibly have been taken entirely on her time, before or after school.

These are not the days of Mary Tyler Moore and not since that time has “the professional woman” of any color been presented in the media fully clothed. Images from over the years of Cybill Shepherd, Calista Flockhart, Gina Torres, and Kerry Washington, all playing attractive characters with different body types, who strut into their professional settings wearing form-fitting attire or at times, half-a-dress, come to mind as folks post and repost crticisms of Patrice Brown.

The average woman of any color can’t win if she is going to live up to the images being force fed daily on our televisions, or those available on YouTube, the Big Screen, Twitter, and Facebook. A sexier style of clothing is even marketed and sold in many of our more affordable stores, with only pushup training bras, revealing shirts, and skinny jeans available for even the preteen consumer.

It is the naggingly precarious intersectional positioning of the Black woman in American culture that shines the floodlight of scrutiny, distrust, and stereotypes that give credence to rumors of:

The Wild Black Woman: Sexual Creature

(Coming to a school near you.)

Enough is enough when beauty googled will only produce countless images of blond-haired, red-haired, or brown-haired White women.

All in all, it is fair to say that Black women and beauty have never been synonymous in this country, leaving it up to Black women to reframe our mirrors and to construct our own runways and stages where we can proudly “strut our stuff,” proclaiming our own acceptance of an all-encompassing revision of beauty standards.

So why don’t we just talk about what is really bothering folks about attractive professional Black women like Patrice Brown?

American culture would like to maintain the chokehold it has had on Black women, but it is unable to do so. Black women have begun to embrace themselves in totality. Black women are the most educated. Black women vote more. Black women head households, win bread, parent children in partnership and alone. Black women are doing it all in spite of this country’s apparent disdain for our very essence.

If we are honest, America has never unconditionally accepted the abundant and varying beauty and strengths of Black women, reducing her to overt caricatures based on stereotypes. In fact, the images of beauty in American culture have nothing to do with the average Black woman because the Black woman was only brought to this country as human capital who were required to serve as cooks, wet nurses, and sex toys for white slave owners.

Today, of course, women like Halle Berry are presentable, even with the constant reminders of her exotic derivation of a White mother and Black father. But even her beauty is only seen through a fetishizing lens that forces into her lap a surplus of roles as the overcharged sex kitten who doesn’t mind being groped and humped by hungry White men (with a wide lens of course) and only then is she rewarded for her hard work.

Now that Black women like Patrice Brown, educated and hardworking, dare take an admiring look at themselves, people are in an uproar.

Maybe folks are just upset that professional Black women are feeling attractive and gaining autonomy, enjoying themselves when they used to only be exploited.

I say our time is better invested in other ways than criticizing beautiful images of an attractive professional Black woman.

Maybe we should all be putting more focus on what we are doing to support the efforts of education professionals like Ms. Brown. Like finding ways to fairly compensate our teachers so they are better able to provide for their families and for themselves as they continue to transform our children into productive and positive citizens. And because there is not a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, or a judge that got to where he or she is without having gone through a teacher, we all should be thanking Ms. Patrice Brown and other educators just like her.

So, I will be the first to say: #SLAYTEACHERBAE