Love, Bianca xo

Originally published on TheNewFeminist.com When a self-proclaimed feminist called me a Black w**** in front of our classmates, not one person said a word. What I learned that night changed everything I thought I knew about solidarity. Even when a Black woman goes out of her way to be “respectable”, misogynoir often surfaces the moment she challenges expectations about staying in her place. The term “politics of respectability”, coined by historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in Righteous Discontent , describes how Black women historically adopted white behavioural norms, such as temperance, cleanliness and sexual appropriateness, to resist racist stereotypes. Those expectations still shape Black women’s lives today, influencing everything from dating to education. Many people assume that shared social beliefs make someone safe. Shared ideology, I’ve learned, isn’t always sincere. I learned this the hard way when my classmates, a group of self-proclaimed liberal, open-minded feminists, d...

Originally published on Femest.com I never expected my graduation night to end with being slut-shamed and bombarded with racialized insults by a woman twenty years my senior, someone who had been in a one-sided competition with me that I didn’t know existed until it was too late. By the time I realized what was happening, I was walking alone to my accommodation, in the dead of night, in a foreign country, after a day of drinking and celebrating with people I thought were safe. I had come to Costa Rica to earn a second teaching certification, a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), travel, and learn more about myself, others, and the world. But that night forced me to see how even among women who presented themselves as a safe space of feminist and anti-racist values, a Black woman’s autonomy, especially sexual autonomy, was not protected from being monitored, moralized, and punished. The program cohort was small, and two people quickly stood out. Roman, a Latino American man i...