The Reason Black Women and White Women Can’t Get Along…
Is Because White Women Won’t Shut The Fuck Up
Let me preface this piece by saying I have a large group of white friends from all over the world who know precisely how to shut the fuck up.
However, that being said, it was a process that we had to learn together.
I didn’t know eight years ago that I needed Black friends. I had friends, I went out, I partied, I had a life. I worked, and I had work friends. My life was good.
I was making money — not much, but enough to party, and in my 20s that’s all I cared about.
But, about eight years ago I got on the train while talking to my girlfriend on the phone. My best girlfriend at the time, and I can’t remember why but we started talking about our different realities.
She was a white woman as white as the driven snow, with beautiful black hair and gorgeous blue eyes, but she was still a white woman. I, however, am mixed.
I refer to myself as Black because that’s how the world sees me, and for decades when I was being abused by white supremacist cult leaders and gang members, they made it very clear that if I’d been white, and only white, it wouldn’t have happened. It still would have happened, but it took me many adult years to figure that out.
During this conversation, another white woman had sat down next to me on the train and had been listening, because let’s be honest, I’m a loud one and she didn’t have much choice.
For 45 minutes I regaled my best friend and this stranger white woman with stories of what it was like to be Black in Canada, on my own, without any Black friends or family members to encircle me.
By the end of our conversations, two things happened.
My friend told me she didn’t know I had it so bad.
The stranger woman stopped me as I was getting off to thank me for letting her listen to my reality because she didn’t know either.
I left that day feeling good. Thinking my best friend and I had come across a new barrier to our friendship, thinking that this was a person I could trust with my true trauma.
We ended our friendship three weeks later when I realized I needed more help than she could or was willing to provide.
To this day I am convinced that the reason we are no longer friends is because she couldn’t handle my reality as a Black woman.
Not many people can. Khadisha from Afro Cannada Budsistas told me my trauma is “Too heavy for our group and best spent elsewhere.”
Most people don’t understand how difficult it is to navigate the world as a colored person, especially as a Black person who is hated by everyone, for being Black.
Not because I’m cruel or mean, not because I’m selfish or lazy, but because I’m Black.
It’s fucking exhausting, it’s soul-crushing, and it’s destructive in ways I don’t fully have words for, but when we try to share that trauma what we’re doing is saying “Can you please carry some of this so I don’t have to carry it alone?”
The answer is almost always no — at least for people like myself.
And white people? hate when we do that.
Almost all of Black trauma — not all of it, but almost — comes from generations of past trauma that all started when the first enslaved humans were forced away from their homes in Africa and other places, to the Western world.
From England to America, Canada to France, and Germany to Istanbul, there are Black people who are descended from folks who were enslaved by white people, and that’s a shared trauma that Black people are still not only dealing with but trying to process.
But white people — especially white women — never want to give us space to do that.
When we take space, we’re called aggressive, bullies, and we’re told we “Attack for no reason,” when in reality all we’re doing is trying to say “This is our experience.”
When Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon told the group that she didn’t trust this rather large group of white women with her family? I understood that to my fucking core.
It wasn’t just the ignorance of Erika Jayne’s violent language around the teenage son, it was the dismissal of how that behavior affected the kid, and his mother, your friend.
When Sheryl Underwood was told by Sharon Osborne “Don’t you dare cry,” Black women across the world felt that because white women are constantly telling us Black women that we don’t deserve our fucking tears when white women are often the cause of those tears.
I didn’t want to write this piece, because honestly you white women are low-hanging fruit at this point. Between the Summer of Karen and all the false 911 calls that put the lives of Black men, women, and children, in danger at the hands of police, to the death of George Floyd in particular, Black people have never been allowed to grieve.
When we do take time to have our own spaces white people always find a way to get in — even I thought it was important for my Black friends and my white friends to meet and greet with each other, and now I understand why.
More than ever when I am with my white friends I am lucky that they give me space to share my trauma and they are willing and able to carry parts of it, but not every Black girl has that, and in fact, most Black girls don’t.
On November 4, 2018, Tamla Horsford was discovered dead in the backyard of the Cumming, Georgia, home where she had been attending a slumber party with other “football moms” the night before. The 40-year-old was a mother of five. Cumming, Georgia, U.S.
Tell me as a white woman, how you respond to this. Seven white women, one Black woman, and the only one to end up dead is the Black chick but no one’s talking no one knows how it happened, and no one cares enough to share the truth so that her family can get some justice, peace, and rest.
Ask me now why when I first moved into my new apartment, my white neighbors invited me to go camping and it wasn’t just a no it was a resounding “Fuck No stranger white people,” I love them now but it took some time and some trauma trust on my part.
Black people are generally nervous around white people because we never know how you’re going to treat us.
Are you going to be kind because it’s the right thing to do?
Are you genuinely surprised to see that we’re Black because you’ve never seen a Black person before? Or are you just surprised at our audacity to walk around freely instead of the cages your ancestors had us in?
When I was in Winnipeg I was walking from the university where we were staying, to a bar with a large group of white folks — I was always surrounded by white folks until recently I swear y’all —, anyways. We were walking and this woman and another large group walks towards us, she pauses, looks at me, pointed, and exclaims “You’re Black!” as if I didn’t already fucking know.
“Yes, I am, did you know that guys?” I said to my group before rolling my eyes and walking away. We walked away laughing, but I wasn’t feeling very amused.
I’d already dealt with my room being ransacked, the university threatening me, and now this…I was not in the mood.
About a year and a bit after that trip a young Black man who had been with me from another university saw me and my mom at Safeway, a local grocery store.
We said our hellos and my mom asked him about the trip and how we met, and we got to talking about racial disparity. Mom asked him why it was so much harder for someone like me to navigate the world than it seemed to be for him.
He chuckled, “She’s a woman. She’s mixed, and she’s mixed Black.” He said it as if that explained everything, because it fucking did.
My mom still doesn’t fully get it, because she’s white, and because although she knows racism exists, you can’t understand the full nuance of racism, until you’ve truly had someone look at you as if you are subhuman because you are Black.
When Black women on social media post “For Black Women Only,” which is something I think we should do more of, there’s always that 1 white lady asking why it’s only for Black women and why her experience doesn’t count.
Sometimes it’s a bot, let’s be honest here, but 99.9% of the time it’s a bored housewife who had too much wine and thinks the world belongs to her and thus she has the right to say whatever she wants, who elongates a “This is for Black women,” post into a “This should be about me,” thread.
White girls are taught by their parents, teachers, friends, allies, fans, and even Disney for fuck sakes, that they can be anything they want to be.
Little Brown and Black girls are taught they don’t exist unless a white girl did it first, and “did it Better.”
They didn’t do The Little Mermaid for Black girls, they did it to make money, they did it to capitalize on the Black dollar because they saw how much money Black Panther made and didn’t have anything else in the tank.
It made a splash, it made a few dollars, and mostly it was too fucking hard to see because, in 2024, it’s still too difficult to learn how to light Black skin.
Hollywood can put a girl on the moon, but it’s always going to be a white girl before it’s a Black girl.
Politics will always let the Black girl through the door, but they’ll censure her the moment that she speaks up for her people.
Libs of TikTok, one of the largest hate accounts in the entire world, is run by, you guessed it, an angry white woman who hates anything that’s not white, cis, and giving her money.
But none of the harm she’s caused changes the fact that people follow her by the millions. Because Hate breeds more Hate, it’s really easy to be a white woman in the Western world.
It’s actually a lot more difficult for women of color, to rely on our white counterparts than we discuss. As far as friendships go, when white women and Black women — in particular — choose to be friends, it’s often deliberately.
Whether or not it ends up being a healthy choice can be debated, but the choice to be friends with white women when you are Black is deliberate.
I say that a second time because I want you to understand that after everything we’ve been through, after all the times white women have let Black women down, we still deliberately choose to let you into our circles.
We do this because we see some of you fighting for us. We do this because we see some of you putting your names, your brands, your stories, your experiences, and sometimes (Heather Hayer rest in peace,), your bodies, to protect ours.
And so of course we want to invite courageous, powerful, beautiful, talented, wise, white women into our lives, but often what happens is that when we do, they can’t understand, or face, the realities of being friends with Black people.
They often jump to our defense at every slight, or they act like the slights don’t add up to the point that they matter often more than they would if they hadn’t started to add up.
I’m not saying Black women and white women can’t get along, but I think if white women took just a few steps back and said to themselves, “You know…it’s actually great for the Black woman to take the lead and get paid for it this time,” once in a while, we’d be in a much happier and more equitable place with each other.
I wrote a book called Uncomfortable (shameless plug click the link to buy the book) because I wanted my very white audience to understand that the person they looked up to, went through Hell to become, the person they looked up to.
I wanted them to understand how the power of whiteness protected my abusers for decades and continues to do so to this day because it’s so much easier to classify the Black woman as crazy than it is to actually investigate her claims, and find justice for the child that was defiled by grown men.
I wanted my WHITE audience to understand that I do not, will not, and never have, seen myself as anything other than a reflection of my environment, and until recently that environment was incredibly white.
Now, I have some of the best girlfriends in the world who also happen to be Black, they come from Chicago, South Africa, Toronto, all over the world, here even, and they carry parts of me while I carry parts of them and we choose to make it work.
We choose to support each other. We choose to be honest with each other and call each other on our shit, we choose to remain accountable, and we choose to fight the world together, instead of fighting against each other, for the world.
Interracial friendships are possible, but they take work, and they take the more privileged power holders on the ship, letting others have space. That’s it.
Make room. Make room for those who are different from you, let them have their spaces that don’t include you, let them share their parts with you on their terms, and the world becomes an infinitely better place.
Sending All My Love,
Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl
