The first time the father of my children verbally accosted me, I had suggested locs for our then-unborn daughter. We were driving through our Jersey City neighborhood and I was six months pregnant.
“You want to make all the decisions!” he screamed while angrily speeding down the road. When I tried to explain to him that he may not understand what it takes to care for a little black girl’s hair, he bellowed, “You tryna say I’m gonna be a bad father?”
Violent, angry outbursts became normal in our interactions once I became pregnant. In an instant, the father of my children would go from being the warmest, most dedicated man to a monster. Then, after every eruption, he pretended like it never happened or promised it was the last time.
It never was.
On his first Father’s Day, he became enraged after waking up to find me absent from our shared bed. I had slipped out earlier that morning to buy us groceries to make a big breakfast.
“Tell me who you were with!” he screamed.
The father of my children has raged in front of my family, my neighbors, my friends, and even strangers. He uses aggression and manipulation to control me.
“Abuse is never okay,” my therapist told me when I shared these stories.
I nodded in response. But the phrase triggered a cascade of confusing thoughts. If abuse is never okay, why does popular culture repeatedly refer to black women as “bytches,” “hoes,” and “thots”? If abuse is never okay, why do the police abuse black people, sometimes even kill us, and then resort to victim-blaming or gaslighting to excuse their behavior? If abuse is never okay, why does America continue to abuse its black citizens?
Abuse is all I’ve ever known as a black woman in this country. I alone do not have the power to fight against it. It’s a cycle that will take more than me to end it.
These cycles are what black people are trying to eradicate when we talk about the need for reparations. Reparations are not just about righting the wrong of slavery itself, they are also about addressing the longstanding systemic racism that continues to impact the lives of black people to this day. It is this legacy of abuses against black people that has resulted in a complex, racist system that wreaks havoc on black lives and makes our relationships tragically set up to fail.
What it means to normalize abuse as a black woman
Normalizing abuse is what often happens when you exist in racist, misogynistic American society as a black woman. I have been sexualized and degraded ever since the age of 11 when I became a part of the statistic that 60 percent of black girls are sexually assaulted before the age of 18. I have never known stability because my family had to constantly move in search of a home after being priced out of neighborhoods in Florida, New Jersey, and New York by gentrification. My mother had to work three jobs just to make ends meet, like countless black single mothers do, and I pretty much raised myself. I never had the chance to celebrate honor rolls, dean’s lists, or professional successes because they felt so small next to giant stacks of unpaid bills and obligations that can barely be met.
Black women face the highest rates of domestic violence and intimate partner violence compared to any other demographic. We are also the most likely to suffer serious injury or die at the hands of our partners. A 2003 study analyzed the prevalence of domestic violence in the black community and found intimate partner violence in black relationships is not only more common, but also more violent than among white couples. The University of Maryland and Indiana University researchers explained that “the anger, hatred, and frustrations of African American men, caused by institutional racism, are being displaced onto their wives and lovers.”
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19335024/GettyImages_1130353312.jpg)
This domestic violence victim has filed a lawsuit against the DC Housing Authority after losing her housing voucher that was in her abusive ex-husband’s name. Washington, DC, March 13, 2019.
Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via Getty Images
As a black woman, I’ve spent my life battling both covert and overt racism and misogyny, a wretched combination, inside and outside of my own home. Sometimes I believe it is this perfect-storm combination that makes me an easy target for abusive relationships.
Abuse doesn’t have to ever be “okay” for it to be normal. It just has to be a fact of life.
Abuse was a fact of life for my kids’ father as well. His parents used corporal punishment as a form of discipline as long as he could remember. They beat him with belts, belt buckles, tree branches, and wires. They made him kneel on graters for hours at a time. And while studies have found that black parents are twice as likely as white parents to use corporal punishment, they also highlight the truth that this is a practice adopted from white Europeans during slavery.
In other words, slavery is not “just in the past.” What black people adopted as a result of enslavement continues to haunt us and torment our physical and psychological well-being beginning in childhood and well into adulthood.
Reparations are about righting cycles of oppression
My kids’ father was raised in the poor, urban part of Jersey City where violence was the norm — an area “ghettoized’ by discriminatory New Jersey banking policies that made it practically impossible for minorities to get loans for “good” (i.e. white) neighborhoods. For his Haitian immigrant parents, purchasing an affordable home was their taste of “The American Dream.” They left their homeland — a country forced to pay the modern equivalent of $21 billion in reparations in 1825 to former French slave owners after Haitians won their freedom from the colonial power, consequently making it the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere — just to realize that dream. For their son, who had to navigate the trauma of living in the “hood,” like getting stopped and frisked by police since grade school and getting jumped over false accusations, it was more of a nightmare. He learned to always be suspicious and on edge.
“You want to make all the decisions!” he screamed while angrily speeding down the road. When I tried to explain to him that he may not understand what it takes to care for a little black girl’s hair, he bellowed, “You tryna say I’m gonna be a bad father?”
Violent, angry outbursts became normal in our interactions once I became pregnant. In an instant, the father of my children would go from being the warmest, most dedicated man to a monster. Then, after every eruption, he pretended like it never happened or promised it was the last time.
It never was.
On his first Father’s Day, he became enraged after waking up to find me absent from our shared bed. I had slipped out earlier that morning to buy us groceries to make a big breakfast.
“Tell me who you were with!” he screamed.
The father of my children has raged in front of my family, my neighbors, my friends, and even strangers. He uses aggression and manipulation to control me.
“Abuse is never okay,” my therapist told me when I shared these stories.
I nodded in response. But the phrase triggered a cascade of confusing thoughts. If abuse is never okay, why does popular culture repeatedly refer to black women as “bytches,” “hoes,” and “thots”? If abuse is never okay, why do the police abuse black people, sometimes even kill us, and then resort to victim-blaming or gaslighting to excuse their behavior? If abuse is never okay, why does America continue to abuse its black citizens?
Abuse is all I’ve ever known as a black woman in this country. I alone do not have the power to fight against it. It’s a cycle that will take more than me to end it.
These cycles are what black people are trying to eradicate when we talk about the need for reparations. Reparations are not just about righting the wrong of slavery itself, they are also about addressing the longstanding systemic racism that continues to impact the lives of black people to this day. It is this legacy of abuses against black people that has resulted in a complex, racist system that wreaks havoc on black lives and makes our relationships tragically set up to fail.
What it means to normalize abuse as a black woman
Normalizing abuse is what often happens when you exist in racist, misogynistic American society as a black woman. I have been sexualized and degraded ever since the age of 11 when I became a part of the statistic that 60 percent of black girls are sexually assaulted before the age of 18. I have never known stability because my family had to constantly move in search of a home after being priced out of neighborhoods in Florida, New Jersey, and New York by gentrification. My mother had to work three jobs just to make ends meet, like countless black single mothers do, and I pretty much raised myself. I never had the chance to celebrate honor rolls, dean’s lists, or professional successes because they felt so small next to giant stacks of unpaid bills and obligations that can barely be met.
Black women face the highest rates of domestic violence and intimate partner violence compared to any other demographic. We are also the most likely to suffer serious injury or die at the hands of our partners. A 2003 study analyzed the prevalence of domestic violence in the black community and found intimate partner violence in black relationships is not only more common, but also more violent than among white couples. The University of Maryland and Indiana University researchers explained that “the anger, hatred, and frustrations of African American men, caused by institutional racism, are being displaced onto their wives and lovers.”
This domestic violence victim has filed a lawsuit against the DC Housing Authority after losing her housing voucher that was in her abusive ex-husband’s name. Washington, DC, March 13, 2019.
Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via Getty Images
As a black woman, I’ve spent my life battling both covert and overt racism and misogyny, a wretched combination, inside and outside of my own home. Sometimes I believe it is this perfect-storm combination that makes me an easy target for abusive relationships.
Abuse doesn’t have to ever be “okay” for it to be normal. It just has to be a fact of life.
Abuse was a fact of life for my kids’ father as well. His parents used corporal punishment as a form of discipline as long as he could remember. They beat him with belts, belt buckles, tree branches, and wires. They made him kneel on graters for hours at a time. And while studies have found that black parents are twice as likely as white parents to use corporal punishment, they also highlight the truth that this is a practice adopted from white Europeans during slavery.
In other words, slavery is not “just in the past.” What black people adopted as a result of enslavement continues to haunt us and torment our physical and psychological well-being beginning in childhood and well into adulthood.
Reparations are about righting cycles of oppression
My kids’ father was raised in the poor, urban part of Jersey City where violence was the norm — an area “ghettoized’ by discriminatory New Jersey banking policies that made it practically impossible for minorities to get loans for “good” (i.e. white) neighborhoods. For his Haitian immigrant parents, purchasing an affordable home was their taste of “The American Dream.” They left their homeland — a country forced to pay the modern equivalent of $21 billion in reparations in 1825 to former French slave owners after Haitians won their freedom from the colonial power, consequently making it the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere — just to realize that dream. For their son, who had to navigate the trauma of living in the “hood,” like getting stopped and frisked by police since grade school and getting jumped over false accusations, it was more of a nightmare. He learned to always be suspicious and on edge.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19335163/GettyImages_1151068291.jpg)