notes on how to be a Black woman
for Oghenewhaire
No Woman, No Cry
No Woman, No CryBlack women’s tears are rarely met with empathic enquiry. We navigate a world where it feels unsafe for Black women to cry openly, our pain is policed, our vulnerability fetishised and our emotions ignored or voyeuristically examined.
While White women’s tears amplify the narrative of White women as victims, we are handcuffed to the archetype of the strong Black woman. For many of us, it will never feel safe to cry in public, for we know our tears will not save us.
Author: Dionne St.Hill
Read time: 15 mins
I stopped myself from crying the other day. It wasn’t easy. As I held my tears, I could feel my face contorting into odd twists of anger and unease; like a cartoon character, reduced to the whims of an animator playing with the extremes and augmentations of my face.
My eyes felt like they were swelling under the pressure of the tears I was holding back, my head felt like it was blowing up from stifling so much emotion, and my lips quivered and bulged as I tried to somehow bite them, swallow them, anything to reduce them, and get these trembling parts of me, to turn in on themselves and morph from full companions into thin strangers. But nothing felt like it was working. I was a mess.
If this moment had a soundtrack, Mary J Blige’s Not Gon’ Cry would be on full blast. But there was no music to accompany this, just awkwardness, disappointment and shame.
I have no words
For all the while, my face felt like it was competing in a gymnastics floor show; I sat in front of someone benignly inviting me to feel the catharsis of my tears. Cry, they suggested. But I couldn’t, I wouldn’t, I refused. The conversation between us, moments earlier had moved me into a space that felt unsafe, trust had evaporated, and I was determined to stop myself appearing any more vulnerable than I already was.
This uninvited emotional response, maddened me, I had come into this meeting determined not to cry, and now I felt flooded. When the woman in front of me, said my face was saying so much, I silently agreed and imagined it so.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked. ‘I have no words’ I replied. The truth was I had no words for her. All that found a way out of my mouth was the weight of the moment: ‘This is heavy’, I told her.
I left the room, walked to a private space carrying a rictus smile, and cried as soon as I closed the door. I wept freely. I allowed myself to collapse into my emotion, but only for a few moments, for I had work to attend to. But for that time, that edited time, I allowed myself the purging of tears with no prompts, no surveillance, just me.
studied your scars and tribulations
For I, like many Black women before me and beside me, have learnt to bare my soul before an emotional voyeur with an unquenchable thirst for Black pain, is to risk turning my deepest wounds into a recurring spectacle.
‘They encouraged you to put some weight in their hands and as soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations, mapped your wounds, and traced the hurt. Then they held their hands out for more’ Toni Morrison wrote in Beloved. “
My relationship with tears and trust has always been complicated. Raised to swallow, tears, I was warned, are a sign of weakness, an inevitable catalyst for a rise in anger and a rapid decline in respect. I was told not to cry, but that does not come naturally to me, so my tears always provoked consternation, dismissal, anger and derision.
Stop crying before I give you something to cry for
I was too sensitive, and my tears betrayed me, but even though I have come to understand my sensitivity is my superpower, I find it impossible to fall into a loving embrace when I cry, the message is still rooted in my being that my tears do not deserve comfort or solace.
‘Stop crying before I give you something to cry for’ echoes in the archive of my mind. When I cried as my hair was being parted, combed, tugged and detangled after being washed, I would be told to leave the room and come back when I had stopped crying; I smile sadly when I think of the little girl who would return to the source of my pain after forcing myself to stop crying. Only to begin crying again minutes later.
I have come to realise my relationship with tears is not just complicated, it’s prohibitive too. When my father received the telephone call from an Oncologist telling him he only had months to live, I was sitting right next to him. I heard the doctor tell my father that his Stage 4 Bowel Cancer had stolen the remaining years of his life, he only had 6-18 months to live, and the 18 months would only be possible with chemotherapy.
like open wounds inviting circling vultures
I cried when I heard this; I cried when I looked at my dad and imagined his premature departure from my life. I cried when I saw the shock and the sadness in my dad’s face. But I cried for the shortest of moments.
My dad told me to stop crying. As he held onto his tears, he needed me to do the same with mine. Our tears left us exposed, like open wounds inviting circling vultures. Just as my father’s tears as a child could not shield him from his father’s blows, our tears would offer us no refuge now.
I felt like I was swallowing a pain so deep and profound, I could not digest it. In that moment I had to follow his instruction, gobble up this vast expression of fear and become stoic. I had to show strength in my immunity; but it was fake.
My tears needed to escape, but as my dad could not tolerate seeing or hearing them, they had to come later, silent, private, illicit tears.
Yet a haunting memory of the heavy tears my father held will forever remain with me.
‘Go’, he would say, as I hovered by his bedroom door, late at night, reluctant to say goodbye after every visit following his devastating prognosis.
I didn’t want to leave, and he didn’t want me to go. But the liminal space was unbearable. He would turn his head, in a bid to hide his tears. But I saw them, we both saw them. We both felt them. Yet we both remained silent. Now I wonder about the tears he may have wept freely, when I was gone, and he was alone.
I have come to understand that the complications around my relationship with tears go beyond my own; it is an outstanding and intolerable inheritance. I am protective of other Black women and their tears, particularly under the glare of the White gaze. But also, I have discovered, frozen in the presence of them.
Silent screams
Weeks before my disordered crying experience, I shared an experiential training space unpacking trauma. The room felt full and knotty; it was a space full of therapists, and their kindly yet nervous and defensive energy hung entangled in the air. Black women, White women and White men sat there, prepared and unprepared to talk about our intimate correlations with trauma.
So, when fellow therapist Oghenewhaire hit a painful bump and began to cry, I wanted her to stop. It’s not safe. I was silently screaming; don’t let the others see you like this. My colonial training told me I could not console her—no hugs, no tissue offering, no words of empathic comfort; I would be interrupting her process. Just give her space for catharsis and consciousness.
But my sense of Black sisterhood battled with my well-worn training. This wasn’t space; this was emotional isolation. The room became a darkened stage and Oghenewaire sat in the middle of it, the only illumination, the imagined spotlight she sat in the centre of. Those in the audience closest to her were White, and I, on the other side of the room, felt rooted to my spot in the cheap seats.
I wanted to scoop her up and take her to a place of safety away from the penetrations of the White Gaze. But I sat there in the ‘gods’ and did nothing more than lower my gaze and wait respectfully, but impotently.
Emotional isolation
‘Being observed by White women, I felt embarrassed,’ Oghenewhaire remembers of that moment. ‘The charade was over. I was no longer in control, and found myself in a difficult space, mentally and emotionally. But nobody came to my aid, just overlooked.’
Oghnewhaire deserved relief from this intolerable hurt, but no pain relief was offered. ‘All women have the right to cry, but as a Black woman, this isn’t a privilege I am afforded. Where was the compassion and concern I deserved? Do I need to be ready to jump off a bridge for my pain to be seen?’
The unease many Black women hold around crying publicly is deeply rooted in the sense of emotional incarceration many of us feel. Deeply rooted in oppression and injustice, we are conditioned to suppress or contort our emotions to stay safe.
No one is coming to our rescue
Vulnerability is not a viable option. Internalised oppression and conditioning leave us feeling unable to support other Black women in public, who may be emotionally distressed.
“We are portrayed as stoic’, says Oghenewhaire, “but I felt awkward, self-conscious, weak and vulnerable.” with no time to attend to her needs, Oghenewhaire became preoccupied with emotional regulation, “I was guarding my emotions, telling myself this episode needs to pass quickly. I need to gain control.’
Black women are not given the grace and the space to process their pain safely; punitive introjects, and powerful judgments dominate the soundtrack in our minds, and empathic failure becomes self-imposed.
‘How did I let this happen publicly,’ Oghenewhaire wonders. ‘I am a strong, confident woman who doesn’t display my emotions. I wanted gravity to work in reverse and roll my tears backwards.’
Soulful connection
Oghenwhaire’s reflections soon tumble into self-judgement. “I felt I had let us down – the image of Black women, by allowing myself to cry. I felt ashamed of myself; I needed to hide, retreat, feel safe, compose myself and pull myself together, so I excused myself from the space and continued my tears privately, away from the gazing eyes.’
There is a soulful connection that aligns Oghenewhaire, I and countless other Black women; as we interrogate our tears and demand an alternative response, we skip over compassion and land in judgement and shame. We move from disgrace into isolation, quietly and quickly attending to our tears with projectile release and a quick clean-up.
amplified, public sisterhood
As I hold Oghenewhaire’s reflections in my heart, I call to my mind my own weeping retreat and the urgent, visceral need to escape and be alone with my tears. I wonder about my absence of practical solidarity with a sister in a profound moment of vulnerability and reimagine that moment with me simply asking Oghenewhaire what she needed.
No rushing in with hugs and tissues, just genuine, amplified, public sisterhood and care. I imagine the loving light I would cover her with, unplugging the spotlight and replacing it with a bright white and warm violet healing halo of protection, seen and felt only by the ancestors and felt only by her.
For I imagine, it is in our reconnection with our ancestral power and natural healing practices that we will perhaps save ourselves from the limiting expectations of society; feelings that we must always embody strength, endurance and stoicism to survive. These tired and violent expectations leave little room for visible vulnerability and expressions of pain.
built into the systems that hurt us
Black women bear the weight of dismissal, our pain too often ignored or invalidated by social structures, supposedly designed to care for us. In hospitals, where we pray, we will give birth safely; in locked psych wards, where a disproportionate number of us are not listened to, misdiagnosed and silenced by a ‘chemical cosh’.
The very systems meant to care for us, instead betray us—this lack of safety cutting scars deeper than the wounds themselves. It is not only systemic; it is personal, a quiet violence scratched into the spaces where care should reside.”
In contrast, White women’s fragility is built into the systems that hurt us, their tears weaponised to evoke immediate sympathy and action that undermines and harms others.
White women’s societal portrayal as innocent and delicate has historically proved cover for racialised violence. While our emotional distress is met with radio silence, theirs often garners immediate sympathy and action from White dominated power structures.
racial and gender hierarchies
From the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, who was lynched after a White woman accused him of whistling at her, only for her to decades later admit that she had lied to the woman in Central Park, who in 2020 called the police on birdwatcher Christian Cooper and falsely claimed he was threatening her after he asked her to put her dog on a leash; the weaponisation of White women’s tears serve as a stark reminder of how racial and gender hierarchies are maintained through emotional manipulation and systemic and interpersonal complicity.
The modern ‘Karen’ archetype reflects an evolution of this painful phenomenon, showing how these behaviours persist in contemporary society with far too little public scrutiny.
“I feel that Black women’s pain is overlooked and at best marginalised’, says Oghenewhaire, ‘I have observed my White female colleagues cry, and everybody comes to their aid. I have seen them use their tears to manipulate a situation to meet their needs when challenged or vilify a colleague to gain the upper hand.’
re-examining the mask
‘That’s what White women do’ – is the message I have internalised about crying publicly, says Oghenewhaire. “Their vulnerability is permitted and acknowledged, and there lies my problem.’ There is a cultural expectation to wear a mask intimately tied to the archetypes that reduce us, but Oghenewhaire is re-examining the mask she wears.
For Maya Angelou, the masks we wear are complex devices, part survival mechanism, part societal imposition and part resistance. In her creative response to Paul Dunbar’s, We Wear the Mask’ the blurred lines between faux laughter and real tears are indiscernible.
Tired of flooding and fleeing, Black women deserve the freedom to cry with no risk of being seen, then ensnared and tethered to the whim of another’s gaze. Our vulnerability cannot be handed over for the fetishised amusement of another.
manifestations of our softness
Our tears are precious and spilling with paradox, refracted views through the prism of our lives. Look closely into the tracks of our tears, and you will see love, rage, sadness, joy, anger, liberation, pain, happiness, anxiety, laughter, regret and bliss. Our tears are physical manifestations of our softness and our capacity to feel and release.
Whilst I learn to disentangle my relationship with tears and the introjects that stultify my reactions and push back on offers of kindness, I think of Oghenewhaire; I know, as does she, that not everyone deserves to observe our tears.
But when a loving, empathic Black woman sees another Black woman cry, it may be helpful to reexamine and release much of what we have been told and experienced.
We can find ways to cry safely. For when we cry without fear and doubt, we reclaim our humanity, our womanhood and our vulnerability, when we cry, we reclaim our magic and our healing power.
It is okay to cry
We can cry and allow our intuition to sense the safety of potential witnesses to our tears; we can cry and trust enough to discern the difference between the benign and the malignant.
For when we find each other in love and vulnerability, trust, and kinship, we can summon our magic—offering orbs of protection and healing.
For it is okay to cry when a loving embrace is there to catch your tears, holding you with empathy, understanding, care and connection. And it can be safe, in the midst of your tears, to answer with honesty and breadth, when a tender voice asks with true concern and a willingness to respond: ‘What do you need?’
On rotation: Dive, Olivia Dean