First-person essay by Tahirah J. Walker
My wish for Women’s History Month (and my birthday) this year was to be what many folks call “unbothered.” I discovered that I needed to think carefully about what exactly that means to me.
I thought of that scene in “Sorry to Bother You” when Danny Glover’s character is explaining how to capture the ‘white voice’ that brings in the sales for telemarketers. “Got your bills paid. You’re happy about your future. You about ready to jump in your Ferrari out there … Breezy like you don’t really need this money.” But as Glover’s character put it: “It’s not really a white voice. It’s … what they think they’re supposed to sound like.”
I had many potential ways to build a definition for myself. From this financially carefree white masculinity version to others floating on the ends of hashtags and pop songs, unbothered seemed to appear everywhere and nowhere at once. I had the sense that, as a soon-to-be-47-year-old Black woman, I was as bell hooks described, “at odds with everything around me.”
For me, a major part of that sense of being at odds has been a buildup of microaggressions, negative experiences and degrading interactions that happen to Black women daily for no reason other than the fact that we dare to exist. When we start adding sexuality, faith, limitations like poverty and disability along with hosts of other social and wellness issues, the ability to find that unbothered voice becomes an extraordinary and unique power. It is a power I have witnessed so many Black women exercise. As I look to enjoy a new chapter of life, I know that not only do I wish for this power of unbothered voice, but also my future birthdays may depend on it.
Before I graduated from high school in 1993, some principal or administrator or teacher or all of the above decided to offer students an opportunity to take an African American studies class (Props to the…
Read the full article here
