BLACK FEMINISM

They Protect Us, But Who Looks Out for Them?

I. The Women Who Carried Us: Matriarchy, Sacrifice, and the Roots of Black Feminism

They protect us, but who looks out for them? It is a question I have carried with me my entire life, tucked somewhere between gratitude and grief, between the pride of watching the women in my family work miracles with nothing and the ache of knowing the world rarely showed them respect. I come from a deeply matriarchal family. The women in my bloodline are certified hustlers—and I say that with the highest reverence. They get things done by any means necessary. They took care of us kids, providing love and being a disciplinarian. They cooked our meals, bought our clothes, cared for us when we were sick, and, in the case of my mother, worked three jobs while carrying a full course load at university. That was just what they did. That was just who they were.

Let me tell you about my grandmother. My mother’s mother, Julia Reyes—though we all knew her as Ina. No one in my family is called by their government name. It took me forty years to find out hers. Ina lived in a small village in Honduras. She would rise at the crack of dawn, strap my mother—who was a toddler at the time—to her back, and hike up a mountain to a small plot of land where she grew sweet potatoes, plantains, yuca, and breadfruit, to name a few. She fed her children with what she grew and what was caught from the sea. On special occasions, there was chicken or pork. My aunt, my mother’s oldest sister, left home at sixteen to find work in the big city of La Ceiba. There she baked and sold bread, sold what was called “chica”—a version of lottery tickets—and worked as a seamstress. Their other sister worked at the bank and cleaned houses on the side.

My mother was twenty years younger than her sisters. She tells me how her oldest sister carried the weight of the entire family on her shoulders, supporting not only my grandmother and her siblings but also my great-aunt and her family. She immigrated to the United States in the 1960s and from the very start worked four jobs to save enough money to bring over her kids and my mom. My mother, from an early age, was fascinated with studying. But because they did not have the money, university was out of reach. So she set her sights on the USA—the land of dreams. Once she arrived, she, too, worked multiple jobs and started saving up for school while also helping my aunt. My aunt was a true entrepreneur: she sold baked goods, cooked food for events like soccer matches and cultural gatherings. Everyone pitched in. Her son, my cousin Jr., would ride his bike around Upper Manhattan and the Bronx delivering baked goods. I was put to work glazing sweet breads and packaging them.

The men in my family worked, but they were barely around. I barely remember a lot of my uncles. But the moms? I know all of them. I come from a really large family—114 aunts and 96 uncles. The women taught me the value of hard work. They challenged me to think outside the box. They taught me about sacrifice, about compassion, and the importance of family. Watching them work and be providers while living in a society and culture that did not value them in the slightest was something I could not fully understand until adulthood, when I received a glimpse of the injustices they faced every single day.

The statistics confirm what my family lived: Black women in the United States earn on average $5,500 less per year than their white counterparts, experience higher rates of unemployment and poverty, and are more likely to be heads of household—effectively supporting more dependents with fewer resources. Black women face a maternal mortality rate two to three times higher than that of white women. Cardiovascular diseases alone claim more than 50,000 Black women annually. And in healthcare settings, 71 percent of Black women aged 18 to 49 report experiencing at least one negative encounter with a provider. This is the fatigue Mary-Frances Winters names in her groundbreaking work.

“Black women are stereotyped as ‘workers’ and have internalized this characterization by overachieving, self-sacrificing, and neglecting our health and dismissing the need for self-care. Black women must unapologetically prioritize rest as a part of the movement toward equity and liberation.” — Mary-Frances Winters, Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit

My grandmother, my aunts, my mother—they did not have a name for what weighed them down. They just kept going. They persevered by uplifting each other. This is Black feminism.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” — Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

II. The Daily Struggle: How Black and Brown Women Survive by Holding Each Other Up

Every day, Black and Brown women wake up and face a world that was not designed for their comfort, their success, or, frankly, their survival. They navigate workplaces where they are simultaneously expected to be exceptional and invisible. They walk into doctor’s offices where their pain is dismissed, into schools where their children are disciplined more harshly, into neighborhoods where the infrastructure fails them. And yet they rise. Not because they are made of some supernatural material—that myth is itself a form of oppression—but because they have built networks of care, of sisterhood, of mutual aid that stretch back centuries.

Black feminism has always understood what mainstream feminism often overlooked: that the struggles of Black women cannot be reduced to gender alone, nor to race alone. The Combahee River Collective wrote in 1977 that Black women’s liberation would free all people, because it would require the destruction of all systems of oppression. That idea—that fighting for the most marginalized means fighting for everyone—is the revolutionary core of Black feminist thought. It is the understanding that the grandmother selling bread to feed her family and the professor writing critical theory are engaged in the same sacred work: survival, dignity, and freedom.

Bell hooks, one of the most essential voices in this tradition, challenged us to think about feminism not as a narrow political agenda but as a way of seeing and reshaping the world.

“Feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure that women will have equal rights with men; it is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels—sex, race, and class, to name a few.” — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

This is what I witnessed growing up. The women in my community did not call themselves feminists—many of them had never heard the word. But they practiced its deepest principles every day. They pooled their resources. They watched each other’s children. They showed up at each other’s doors with plates of food and no explanation needed. They created informal economies, bartering skills and labor, building something out of nothing. When one woman was struggling, the others closed ranks around her. That is not just survival. That is a political act.

Angela Davis, whose scholarship and activism have shaped generations of freedom fighters, reminds us that these collective acts are the true engine of change.

“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” — Angela Davis

And still, the daily toll is immense. The research is staggering: Black women carry disproportionate burdens of chronic illness, from hypertension to diabetes to fibroids—conditions exacerbated by the cumulative stress of living in a society that undervalues them. Medical experts report that experiencing discrimination triggers the same neural circuits that process physical injury and translate it into pain. The fatigue is not metaphorical. It is physiological. It is real.

Toni Morrison, the Nobel laureate who spent her life illuminating the interior worlds of Black women, captured the paradox of their existence with devastating clarity.

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” — Toni Morrison, Beloved

That is what Black and Brown women do for each other. They gather each other up. They piece each other back together. In a world that tries daily to break them apart, they hold the line—not with slogans or manifestos, but with casseroles and car rides and late-night phone calls and the quiet, fierce insistence that they will not be erased.

III. Overcoming Adversity Together: The Unbreakable Spirit of the Black Woman

If there is a single thread that runs through the entire tapestry of the Black female experience, it is this: we overcome together or not at all. The myth of the solitary heroine—pulling herself up by her bootstraps, triumphing alone against impossible odds—is a lie designed to isolate and exhaust. The truth is far more beautiful and far more radical: Black women survive because they refuse to abandon each other.

I think about this in the context of my own family. When my mother arrived in New York, she did not arrive alone, even when she was by herself. She carried with her the lessons of Ina, who climbed mountains with a baby on her back. She carried the entrepreneurial fire of her oldest sister, who turned bread and lottery tickets into a lifeline. She carried the quiet determination of every woman in our village who had ever planted a seed in hard soil and waited. And when she got here, she found other women—from Honduras, from the Dominican Republic, from Puerto Rico, from Mississippi, from Ghana—who were carrying their own ancestral wisdom, their own unshakable resolve.

Maya Angelou, who understood both suffering and transcendence, gave us the words that have become a kind of anthem for this collective resilience.

“Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.” — Maya Angelou

That is the mathematics of Black feminism: one woman’s courage multiplies. One woman’s refusal to be diminished makes space for another woman to stand taller. This is not abstract theory. This is lived experience. I have watched it happen in kitchens and church basements and hospital waiting rooms and the halls of universities and the corridors of corporate offices where Black women are still, in 2026, fighting for a seat at the table.

Nikki Giovanni, the poet and activist whose voice has been a clarion call for Black liberation for over five decades, speaks to this unbreakable spirit with characteristic fire.

“A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you’re in and take advantage of it.” — Nikki Giovanni

What Giovanni understands—what all these women understand—is that adversity is not the end of the story. It is the beginning. Every obstacle overcome becomes a lesson passed down. Every scar becomes a map for the next generation. My mother did not just survive poverty and displacement and the grinding machinery of American inequality. She transformed those experiences into fuel. She earned her degree. She raised her children. She taught me that the world would try to tell me what I could not be, and that my job was to prove it wrong.

Michelle Obama, who carried the weight of being the first Black woman in the White House with extraordinary grace, articulated this transformative power in a way that resonates with every Black and Brown woman who has ever been underestimated.

“There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish.” — Michelle Obama

She is right. And the proof is not in any single biography, no matter how extraordinary. The proof is in the collective—in the millions of unnamed, uncelebrated Black women who have held families together, built communities from scratch, and bent the arc of history toward justice through sheer, relentless, magnificent will.

IV. From Struggle to Starlight: Black Women Who Turned Pain into Purpose

For all the hardship, for all the fatigue, for all the systems stacked against them, Black women continue to shatter ceilings and redefine what is possible. And what makes the most extraordinary among them truly remarkable is not just their individual success—it is their insistence on reaching back, on lifting as they climb, on building structures that will outlast them. Here are five women whose journeys from adversity to influence have created lasting change for Black women and girls everywhere.

Oprah Winfrey — The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls

Born into poverty in rural Mississippi, raised by a single teenage mother, and surviving abuse as a child, Oprah Winfrey’s early life offered few reasons for hope. But she transformed every wound into wisdom and every setback into a springboard. Beyond building a media empire that made her one of the world’s first Black billionaires, Oprah founded the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa in 2007, providing world-class education to girls from disadvantaged backgrounds. She has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to educational causes, and her philosophy—that every girl deserves the chance to dream—has transformed countless lives.

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter — BeyGOOD Foundation

Beyoncé grew up in Houston, Texas, where her relentless work ethic was forged in the crucible of talent shows and church choirs long before the world knew her name. Through her BeyGOOD Foundation, she has invested millions in scholarships for young women at historically Black colleges and universities, disaster relief, mental health resources, and small business grants for Black-owned enterprises. Her visual album Lemonade was a cultural event that centered the stories, pain, and triumph of Black women in a way mainstream media had never before attempted. She turned art into activism and proved that Black womanhood, in all its complexity, is worthy of celebration.

Serena Williams — Serena Ventures

Serena Williams grew up in Compton, California, training on cracked public tennis courts in a sport that had historically excluded people who looked like her. She endured racism, body shaming, and a near-fatal childbirth experience that highlighted the very maternal health disparities Black women face. Rather than retreat, she founded Serena Ventures, an investment firm that specifically funds companies led by women and underrepresented founders. She has also been a vocal advocate for maternal health reform and equal pay, using her global platform to demand systemic change.

Viola Davis — JuVee Productions and Advocacy

Viola Davis grew up in poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island, often going hungry as a child. She has spoken openly about the shame and stigma she experienced. But she channeled that pain into her art, becoming the first Black woman to win the Triple Crown of Acting—an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy. She co-founded JuVee Productions with her husband, Julius Tennon, dedicated to producing content that gives voice to underrepresented communities. Her memoir, Finding Me, is a testament to the power of honesty and self-reclamation, and her advocacy for equitable pay for Black actresses has shifted industry norms.

Rihanna — Clara Lionel Foundation

Rihanna grew up in Barbados in a household scarred by her father’s addiction and domestic violence. She has spoken candidly about how those early experiences shaped her. Today, as a self-made billionaire through Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty—brands built on radical inclusivity—she also runs the Clara Lionel Foundation, which funds education, climate resilience, and emergency response programs in communities of color worldwide. Named after her grandparents, the foundation reflects a deep personal commitment to ensuring that the next generation of Black and Brown girls has access to opportunity, safety, and dignity.

These women are not exceptions. They are evidence. Evidence that when Black women are given even the narrowest opening, they will widen it into a door for everyone behind them. They are the living proof of what Assata Shakur meant when she said that a woman’s place is in the struggle—and that struggle, in their hands, becomes creation.

V. A Call to Black Men: Standing With, Not Above, Black Women

If Black feminism is the backbone of our communities—and it is—then Black men have both the privilege and the responsibility to be its allies, its advocates, and its students. For too long, the conversation about Black liberation has centered Black male pain while sidelining Black female sacrifice. We mourn our brothers, as we should. But we must also protect our sisters, our mothers, our daughters—not as fragile things in need of rescue, but as the architects of our collective survival who deserve reciprocity.

Author and scholar Michael Eric Dyson articulated this imbalance with unflinching honesty.

“We offer authority and celebration to men at church to compensate for how the white world overlooks their talents. But we are relatively thankless for the near superhuman efforts of our mothers to nurture and protect us.” — Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like

That thanklessness must end. And it must end not with grand gestures or performative allyship, but with consistent, daily action. Here are five concrete ways Black men can stand in genuine solidarity with Black women.

1. Listen Without Centering Yourself

When Black women speak about their experiences with sexism, misogynoir, workplace discrimination, or healthcare neglect, the instinct to defend, deflect, or redirect the conversation to your own struggles is strong. Resist it. Listening—truly listening—is the foundation of solidarity. Their stories are not an indictment of you. They are an invitation to understand. Create space for their voices without making it about your comfort.

2. Share the Domestic and Emotional Labor

In too many households, Black women carry a disproportionate share of caregiving, household management, emotional processing, and community organizing. This invisible labor is exhausting and largely unacknowledged. Step up. Cook the meal without being asked. Handle the school pickup. Manage the appointment calendar. Do not wait to be directed. Initiative is a form of respect.

3. Advocate in Rooms Where They Are Absent

If you are in a boardroom, a barbershop, a locker room, or a family gathering where Black women are being diminished, spoken over, or disrespected, speak up. Your silence is complicity. Use your social capital to amplify their work, recommend them for opportunities, and challenge the misogyny that too often passes as casual conversation in male spaces.

4. Support Black Women-Owned Businesses and Organizations

Put your money where your values are. Patronize Black women-owned businesses. Donate to organizations that serve Black women and girls. Mentor young Black women. Invest in their ventures. Economic support is one of the most tangible and immediate forms of allyship, and it creates ripple effects that strengthen entire communities.

5. Do the Internal Work

Examine your own biases. Read the texts—bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Kimberlé Crenshaw. Interrogate the ways patriarchy has shaped your expectations of the women in your life. Healing is not just a woman’s project. As bell hooks wrote, healing is an act of communion. If Black men want Black liberation, they must understand that it is inextricable from the liberation of Black women.

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” — bell hooks

Black feminism is not a women’s issue. It is a human issue. It is the unfinished work of our ancestors, the daily practice of our mothers, and the inheritance we owe our daughters. It is the grandmother climbing a mountain with a baby on her back. It is the aunt selling bread to buy a future. It is the mother working three jobs so her child can sit in a lecture hall and dream. It is every Black woman who has ever been told she is too much and not enough in the same breath—and who kept going anyway.

They protect us. It is past time we protected them back.

Sources

1. Winters, Mary-Frances. Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2020. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/647356/black-fatigue-by-mary-frances-winters/

2. Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. Zed Books, 1987. https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/57925.Assata_Shakur

3. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/795426-ain-t-i-a-woman-black-women-and-feminism

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5. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. PBS American Masters: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/15-toni-morrison-quotes-about-race-writing-and-love/14901/

6. Dyson, Michael Eric. What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America. St. Martin’s Press, 2018. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/black-feminism

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15. 10 Enlightening Quotes by Author bell hooks on Black Feminism, Writing, and Love. The Black Wall Street Times. https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2021/12/16/10-enlightening-quotes-by-author-bell-hooks-on-black-feminism-writing-and-love/