Parachuting from the Pedestal: Creating a Community Safety Net
It’s a disorienting feeling to find oneself so far above the ground and having no knowledge of how you got there. There’s not a literal act of displacing a person onto a pedestal that occurs, however, there might as well be when discussing the reality of tokenizing Black woman excellence. This is what it feels like to be a person who embodies Black feminist work through advocacy, pioneership, or all-around mastery. We are subjugated to become a pillar of excellence, not because we are such, but because we fit into a trope dictated by the standards of others. There are repercussions to assume that the way in which we praise an individual is not only always correct but always welcomed. Placing a person on a pedestal, without consent, for experiencing life with tenacity and profound eroticism is potentially harmful to all those involved. So what are the ways in which #Blackexcellence and black women, are protected? How is self love shown as necessary when your accomplishments are no longer your own and you are now named “token?”
I somehow missed my invitation to the Pedestal Placing Ceremony, if you will, where there’s excessive “adoration” with private and public displays of affection/validation, and the expectation that I am delivering something not as an extension of myself but as a transference of myself to you. There’s an insanely voyeuristic component to tokenism that attempts to remove the eroticism of personal achievement and shift it to those consuming the history-making and radically important representation of excellence. To be clear, Black women are not only tokenized by their antithesis: cis-gendered, heterosexual, wealthy, able-bodied, Christian-American men, but can be tokenized by anyone.
Jane Flax in Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West criticizes black feminist practice in a way that reminds us of its purpose here. “‘What memories of history,’ she asks, will our daughters have if we do not find ways to speak of and practice [the sense of ‘we’]?” (p. 221). Flax’s question expresses the overarching concern of what ways can we prepare our own and save ourselves? It reminds us that Black feminist thought, when in conversation with Black woman’s standpoint should be expected to bend, withstand and embody all the things that Black women do, together. We must remember to talk with one another, write things down, and examine the things that we can not see, until we find the words, create the resources, and envision the futures we deserve.
My Black feminist practice forced me to write about the ways in which my isolation is pre-meditated by society and is reliant on my compliance. It demanded that I write down, research, and galvanize works that could give language to my everyday being. It expected me to share this with my peers, sisters, and past self in a way that validated that our denial of self is only a product of society and isn’t inherent to Black womanhood. I acknowledge my “token-ness” in an attempt to care for my health, my emotional well being, my ability to connect and identify with myself. Black feminist thought is an essential way to practice community love against a globally trained army of white supremacy, and who else will take care of us if not for ourselves? Who will provide the parachute or the safety net when our humanity knocks us off the pedestal we didn’t know we were on?
The answer to my question, is you, the one reading this post, the professor teaching this class, the friends discussing this topic, the Black women doing this work. It is us, with our interlocked and outstretched hands that will provide the net to catch people when they fall. Whispers of comfort and caresses of support will restore voids and undo damage created by being “token.” It will be us, as a community, that will support and protect each other until we build pedestals of our own; pedestals that only Black women could stand on. Pedestals that, quite frankly, Black women could never fall from.
