Who Taught Black Women To Hate One Another?

Our Greatest Wins Won’t Be Won Against Each Other.

If the way the world treats Black women is any indication of the way the world feels about us, what then does that say about the way Black women treat one another? Somewhere beneath our exaggerated “Yaaassss” and our beloved “Come through sis!”, flows an undercurrent that periodically pulls us just below the surface of our pleasantries, drowning us in the bitter reality of our broken state. We desire the depth of the sisterhood we proudly prop up on display, but for many of us, it’s an obvious struggle to recreate the dynamics of relationships we’ve never experienced. And in our attempts to perform sisterhood without true comprehension of the word, we continue to expose our disjointedness.

The embittered exchange between Black women extends beyond the barrette wearing days of Bible study and the harrowing hallways of our high schools where social female aggression was a basic requirement. We’ve carried this social aggression towards one another into our friendships and relationships, and in many ways allowed it to govern our parenting. Despite all attempts to dismiss the contentious way we maneuver shared spaces as efforts to make us appear estranged, handling one another with a certain degree of enmity has become our not so new normal. And if meanness truly masks insecurity, then we’ve got…