“The Right to Turn My Face to the Wall”: Manifestations of Mental Ill-Health in Black Womanhood
In Negroland: A Memoir, author Margo Jefferson writes: “I craved the right to turn my face to the wall, to create a death commensurate with bourgeois achievement, political awareness, and aesthetically compelling feminine despair” (Jefferson 172). Though describing a period of severe depression in her personal life, Jefferson indicates a political awareness of the stigma surrounding mental illness as being both gendered and raced. Black women have historically been disproportionately susceptible to environmental factors that foster mental ill-health. The combination of systemic socioeconomic inequalities and unique cultural pressures distinctively denies black women the ability to express, name, and care for their mental illnesses. At the same time, however, racist and sexist notions of irrationality prescriptively deem them inherently mentally ill simply for being black and feminine, a trend exacerbated by emotionality and radicalism. Black women therefore embody a duality of being both denied access to mental illness and simultaneously being unable to escape its grasp.
Discrimination is a significant risk factor for the development of mental health problems (Arriola et al. 10, Wilson 36). As black women experience simultaneous intersections of discriminations, they are particularly vulnerable to conditions that foster mental ill-health. Mental health care systems consistently deny black patients the same standard of care that they offer to whites. Medical professionals often frame their diagnoses and treatment recommendations around racial stereotypes.
Black women are disproportionately expected to show strength in the face of adversity. Mental illness is seen a white woman’s issue that black women are not supposed to embody. The trope of the “strong black woman” has become an expectation (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 32–3) which, having originated as a protective measure, now places an unfair burden on black women’s mental health, stigmatizing mental illness as weak and antithetical to a racial legacy of strength. A cultural legacy of separating the inner self from the outward appearance (evoked in Darlene Clark Hine’s “culture of dissemblance”) pressures those living with mental illness to fake being mentally healthy, creating psychic disconnect that denies black women access to a complete sense of selfhood.
Black women’s voices are delegitimized and rendered irrational. Angela K. Thachuk writes that women’s “epistemic status is still tainted by the residual effects of historical accounts of “the female kind” as essentially irrational and overly sentimental” (Thachuk 155); author La Marr Jurelle Bruce writes that “black womanhood is double-crossed by myths of female hysteria and myths of black savagery and subrationality” (Bruce 371). Gendered and racialized presuppositions essentially read black women as mentally incompetent. Language of “craziness” can be appropriated to control and delegitimize radical activism. Already presumed to be inherently irrational, of black women who speak from radical positions are deemed “insane.” Emotionality and hysteria are equated within a patriarchal, white supremacist system committed to silencing the voices of black women, reinforcing historically gendered conceptions of rationality and dismissing passion and anger in the public work of black women.
By the definition of “madness,” anger is intrinsically linked to mental illness. Hip hop artist Lauryn Hill’s career embodies the conflation of anger with insanity, and her subsequent inability to be read as rational.
Hill publicly stated, “I’m just a black woman who’s super-smart, who can’t be bought and who can’t be bribed. I’m not a machine. I give people my truth. Today, if you’re all of those things they think you’re crazy” (Bruce 384). The disproportionate attribution of “craziness” to the actions of black women delegitimizes their art and devalues their anger.
A black feminist praxis can ameliorate current mental health care. Research is scarce, and most often conducted along the single axis of either race or gender (Bondi and Burman 9, Wilson 42). Future research must consider heterogeneity of the world’s population of black women. Therapists must be trained in the inequalities of racism, sexism, and classism in order to give their patients effective treatment and a comfortable environment.
The ethos of individualism (Bondi and Burman 7, Thachuk 156) makes it easy to hold black women responsibility for their own conditions, emphasizing the urgent need to raise group consciousness and promote forward progress. Embrace diverse mental states rather than viewing the mentally healthy ideal as normative. Why are we uncomfortable with mental divergence? How can we eliminate the stigmatization of mental illness at both interpersonal and systemic levels?
Sources:
- Arriola, Kimberly R. Jacob, Christina P. C. Borba, and Winifred Wilkins Thompson. “The Health Status of Black Women: Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling.” Black Women, Gender + Families 1.2 (2007): 1–23. Web.
- Beauboeuf-Lafontant, Tamara. “You Have to Show Strength: An Exploration of Gender, Race, and Depression.” Gender and Society 21.1 (2007): 28–51. Web.
- Bondi, Liz, and Erica Burman. “Women and Mental Health: A Feminist Review.” Feminist Review 68 (2001): 6–33. Web.
- Bruce, La Marr Jurelle. “The People Inside My Head, Too: Madness, Black Womanhood, and the Radical Performance of Lauryn Hill.” African American Review 45.3 (2012): 371–389. Web.
- Clark Hine, Darlene. “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.” Signs 14.4 (1989): 912–920. Web.
- Durr, Marlese, La Fleur F. Small, and Eloise Dunlap. “Inner-City African-American Women’s Adolescence as Stressful Life Events: Understanding Substance Abusing Behavior.” Journal of African American Studies 14.2 (2010): 202–219. Web.
- Jefferson, Margo. Negroland: A Memoir. New York: Pantheon, 2015. Print.
- Nicki, Andrea. “The Abused Mind: Feminist Theory, Psychiatric Disability, and Trauma.” Hypatia 16.4 (2001): 80–104. Web.
- Smith, Elsie J. “Mental Health and Service Delivery Systems for Black Women.” Journal of Black Studies 12.2 (1981): 126–141. Web.
- Thachuk, Angela K. “Stigma and the Politics of Biomedical Models of Mental Illness.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 4.1 (2011): 140–163. Web.
- Wilson, Melba. “Black Women and Mental Health: Working Towards Inclusive Mental Health Services.” Feminist Review 68 (2001): 34–51. Web.
- Cover Image from the Lefkoe Institute
