Black Women Will Save the World by April Ryan

Author:April Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

When the World Doesn’t Love You Back

Black women are not given grace.

Christian Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW)

Rarely do I hear that truth spoken. Ever since, her words have haunted me.

What is grace? Grace can be a verb, an action of goodwill or mercy. On a deeper level, divine grace is the forgiveness we receive because of our humanity. God forgave Jesus his sins because he was human. To deny Black women grace is, quite simply, to deny our humanity.

Yet America denies Black women grace, every day. Every Black girl learns that the very first battlefield is the one in our mind, the lived experience in a society that struggles to value our humanity. From an early age, we learn to navigate. We learn to adjust. We learn to live with and, at times, confront the tiny voice in our head that whispers to us that we are not worthy—that we are not enough. That tiny voice is amplified all around us and reflected back to us through the culture and by our peers. At work, at home, in the world, we learn to resist the notion that, somehow, we are lacking.

We have fought for our humanity for centuries. Before Black women came to save the world, we had to learn to save ourselves because the evidence is clear: “Black women are not given grace.”

In 2013, the Center for American Progress published an extensive report on the “State of African American Women in the United States.”2 Considering Black women as a population, the think tank evaluated key indicators in health, education, entrepreneurship, economic security, and political leadership.

It’s a complicated story for Black women, who represent 13 percent of the female population in the United States.

On the one hand, Black women confront considerable challenges: Of all groups of women, Black women suffer from hypertension at the highest rate (46 percent compared to 31 percent and 29 percent for white and Brown women, respectively). Black women suffer from a higher mortality rate from breast cancer than white women, despite the fact that incidence of breast cancer is higher among white women. The mortality rate of Black women suffering from cervical cancer is twice the rate for white women. African American women represent 65 percent of new AIDS diagnoses among women.3

Black women are four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes, such as embolism and hypertension, than any other racial group. African American women have the highest rates of premature births and are more likely to have infants with low or very low birth weights. African American infants are more than 2.4 times more likely than white infants to die in their first year of life.4

These statistics represent a failure of systems that are not designed for Black women.

From the research and study of health issues to the training and development of practitioners to the people who deliver health care, Black women see themselves underrepresented—and at our significant peril.

Health conditions that disproportionately impact Black women—uterine fibroids, for instance—receive only nominal investment from the government.

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