Shaquella Robinson & The Tragedies of Black Female “Friendships”
There is an African proverb that reads, “When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm.”
If you have walked the earth as a cisgender heterosexual Black woman, it does not take long for harsh reality to get shoved down your throat. Life experiences suggested to me early that many Black women hate other Black women and often it is something ingrained in them. Instead of accepting this, I went into adulthood thinking all I had to do was find the right “circle”.
Imagine having a “friend” that you have known for 5 years, going on a trip with them to a foreign country and then they savagely beat you while you are naked while others, including grown men, record it and jeer to you to “fight back!”
Exactly, you cannot imagine that because it is sick and cruel beyond words. The normalization of abusive behavior towards Black women knows no physical bounds and now is in the spotlight. In an era of woke wars where everyone is trying to “out woke” the next person, the fact of the matter is we have not done enough as a community to address the injustice that occurs within our own communities. Do Black lives only matter when the accused aggressor is white? I wonder if Shaquella knew she might die, but clearly she did not want to fight someone she considered a friend, the reward for her human compassion was a broken neck and fractured spine, they all left Mexico on a plane to go home knowing they had tormented her. Sadly, I can relate, coincidentally I later learned that the Black woman shown beating her is in nursing school, yet another mean-spirited person that wants to be in healthcare. How might this young woman treat Black female or patients of any background? Will she record them nude as she abuses them too?
This level of savagery can unfold and be recorded as a viral social media video because we and society at large are silent in the small and medium infractions that wear a way at Black women and make them the punchline of crude jokes, then act outraged when something large happens. Hate may be a strong word, but it is true and despite the youth of Shaquella Robinson, 25, and the so-called friends that killed her while on a trip in Mexico, the whole ordeal shows that this vicious cycle continues, this is an intergenerational tragedy.
“You are much more beautiful than your sister,” my father’s second wife would often tell me while I was in middle school. She was a smoky dark-complexioned woman with poor social skills and very little feminine qualities. The way she conducted herself is such that the women in my family still question why my father was even attracted to her in the first place, nearly 20 years later. He divorced her when I was in college. Close your eyes and picture it, a grown adult Black woman in her 40’s with advanced education was there trying to sow seeds of division between a pre-teen girl and her baby sister. If anything, I had learned that I had to constantly defend my sister because without anyone having to verbalize it, I knew other Black girls might have a problem with her just because she had long hair and a fair yellow-brown complexion with light eyes. There were times I later found out some other Black kids were bullying her for “being smart” and she had to beg me to not do anything. She later confessed that most people did not know that she was my sister, we look just alike, but many of our people are so obsessed with color and skin tones they did not connect the dots. Those that did know she was my sister rightfully left her alone. I always had a big heart, but enough people had learned the hard way not to cross me, including adults at the time. I went back to my high school to visit my old favorite teachers and even the male principle stood erect when he saw me, “Now that you are in college, who are you lawyering?” he questioned. A grown man that was 3 times my age, married with a pristine suburban house near the water, successful wife, kids that were athletic stars in our county did not want to be on my short list.
I kind of miss that force to be reckoned with young girl, president of the Black History Club that had honored Tuskegee airman veterans within the community during February’s Black History Celebrations at the high school. I had been a class president, which by default meant students of all colors had voted for me, I was no nonsense and unafraid. Adults would say “We need a young person that can do so and so…” my classmates would turn and just look at me, I was the clear leader of the pack and gutsy. Now that I am grown and have bills, been groomed as a “good corporate citizen”, I have learned to maneuver conflict with more advanced sophistication particularly in very pale workplace settings. There is always a method to my madness.
What happened to Shaquella could have happened to me or any of my close Black female inner circle. We all have survival war stories of encounters with vicious Black women that had pretended to be our friend. This community sends us mixed messages, on one hand we are taught that we “have the same things against us” and “need to stick together”, then you have older Black women, including grannies, that train you to be ruthlessly competitive with other Black women.
I always loved senior citizens and often volunteered at church as a teenager. One year, a couple of 80-something year old Black women had a major disagreement, it was a blistering holy roily blow out. In a fit of anger one of the sisters told me that in the 1970’s people used to tell her that the friend she was having a falling out with was sleeping with her husband and she never believed them until now. At the time as a barely 20-something dealing with the venting of a woman that could have been my grandmother or even great-grandmother, I was smiley as I said something to the effect of, “The Lord will work it out”, the sister moved her head back, then projected it forward snapping at me and said, “Oh no he won’t…you do know that reason you never see her son’s father is because that boy was the product of an affair, the man did not want anything to do with her so I helped her raise that boy and put him through college!”. This response knocked me on my two little girl heels, I was astonished by this dose of truth being aired out about a woman I had respected so much and that had given me little gifts over the years during recitals or graduations. Just like that, she was knocked off a pedestal by another Black woman she had called friend for over 40 years. So even if these elderly women were not going to have a physical brawl at the church for obvious bodily limitations, it was going to be an extreme battle of slander. I wonder if that elder had said that to me back then so that I would repeat it to other women in the church, that level of defamation would have made the other party look bad and her look like the nice friend that had helped her “harlot friend + sinner + never married fallen woman” get by for decades after an affair that resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. If grandmothers cannot keep it together during times of conflict no matter how minor the infraction, then what is being role-modeled for the rest of us 80 and under? “I would be different”, my younger dumber self believed, but the damage had already been done.
My own blood cousins threw me in a circle when I was less than 7 years old, there was no way I was going to get out of that circle unless I fought the other girl and WON. This event caused me tremendous pain because I did not want to fight her, I wanted to play with dolls like I saw other little girls do, watch cartoons, and eat sweets. I did win the fight that day, but I never forgot the fear and shame in the other girl’s eyes as my cousins jeered on the fight. I told myself that I would not fight again, but as the years went by, whenever some other Black girls in school had my back up against a wall for “acting white” or “thinking I was better than them” or something just stupid in general, out of the sight of any mature adults, I knew there was only one way out, I had to fight. As a teenager, I even saw other Black girls fight to the extent that if one was losing, then her mother might jump into the altercation to give her daughter the upper hand.
It is as though fighting was a Black girl’s sick rite of passage, looking back I notice that the Black girls that were considered conventionally beautiful, super girly or really good students were forced to fight the most. I have a new relative in-law that had a Black mother and a white father, she confided me in that whenever her mother left her with her side of the family, her own cousins would beat on her, push her down the stairs and shout at her that she needs to prove that she is not afraid and fight back. Just like Oprah’s character, Sophia, from the movie, The Color Purple, “all our lives we had to fight” and “a girl child ain’t safe in a house full of mens”. These stories are far from unique, the number of Black women that have confided in me about physical and/or sexual abuse as children is disheartening. After she told me this I went to my sister and said, “Did you know we now have someone in the family more traumatized than us?!?!” It is clear to me at this grown age that they were jealous of the physical attributes that came with having recent mixture with a White male. She was punished for being bi-racial.
“You better watch what you say otherwise you might get beat up!” My finger wagging older god sister that grew up in the inner city told me when I was leaving elementary school and going to middle school.
In a lot of Black communities if you do not want to fight, then you are labeled a “punk”. (Translation: Coward)
That label came with lethal consequences once you were known as a “punk” even other “punks” or kids low on the social totem pole would then feel they had the freedom to try to get under your skin. I once watched my much older female cousin, that had pushed me the hardest to fight that day when I was 7, lace up her tan Timberland boots in our grandmothers living room after I had answered the door and quickly shut it when two older girls I recognized told me to tell my cousin to “come outside”. My cousin marched outside like she was going to fight in Vietnam or something, but she wasn’t, she was going to voluntarily be assaulted by two girls at the same time because I now know she rather go down fighting than be labelled a “punk”. She came back in the house bloodied and the next day I tagged along with her to the nail salon because she was so mad “she messed up her acrylics handling them girls last night.” The two girls had played with me the summer prior at my mother’s house a few blocks away, for all I knew these girls were my “friends” because they were her “friends”. My cousin was a pretty girl, that was not the first or last time young women from the neighborhood would show up at grandma’s house to fight her. One night it was so loud that my granny ran outside in her nightgown without her dentures to yell at the girls to leave her property. Just flapping bright pink gums and a flying Caribbean tongue outside at the top of the steps in a long “nighty” ,as we call it, with yellow light skin and baby powdered underarms waving. Prior to that, I did not know that most of my granny’s teeth were not real.
As a result of education, corporate life, and philanthropy, the circles I now move in are paler and it as though I hardly encounter this type of “Black girl fight” energy anymore to the extent when some things happen it still shocks me. I never had a female “friend” from another racial group raise their hand to or try to fight me, and trust if you ever work with or serve on a board that is mostly women of any background there will be plenty of disagreements.
Whether it was jealous Black girls in school, former frenemies that I did not know secretly hated me mean-mugging me at night venues, as a young adult, and now catty professional Black women that sneer if a white person at the job openly expresses positive impressions of me, or if one of the two Black men allowed to work at the company compliments my appearance or looks me up and down too many times. Oh God please forbid they sense that a white male in a high position seems a little attracted to me, and most recently, being assaulted by a Black female OBGYN at a hospital, I finally can swallow the red pill that has been sitting in my throat for over 20 years.
A lot of Black women do not know or were not taught how to love themselves, so they project their self-hatred on to other Black women, particularly those they perceive as weaker than them.
True friendships among us are very rare, and I have to guard my heart.
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Proverbs 13:12 reads, at this point I have seen and experienced so much, I often wonder how I still have a pulse.
