The vast majority of the images, individuals, and accomplishments showcased by the Black Girl Magic movement are of able-bodied black women. Gymnasts who can tumble and fly through the air as though natural law bends to their will, and not vice versa. Actresses who express themselves with great fluidity throughout a range of scenes. Politicians whose words, ringing clear like a bell, can have the impact of a tidal wave. Musicians who can sing, play, and move with great versatility. Activists whose bodies are at the front lines of nationwide protests and pepper-sprayed, handcuffed, and sent to jail, only to rejoin as soon as they are released. While these black women may not be as heralded as their white female counterparts, they are overwhelmingly more prominent and praised than black women with disabilities. Physically disabled black women are virtually invisible in our cultural landscape. We do not usually see them making music onstage, as love interests in movies, or as emblematic black beauties in fashion campaigns. They do not become Barbies, congresswomen, award-winning scientists. We have no Amy Purdy or Marlee Matlin or Jacqueline du Pré or Jamie Brewer. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2014, black women ages sixteen and up had the highest participation in the labor force at 59.2 percent. White women trailed behind at 56.2 percent. However, that same year, 22.2 percent of black women with disabilities participated in the labor force, almost seven points behind the participation rate of white women with disabilities at 29 percent. Black disabled women also have the lowest income out of any other race/gender disability category.2
Still, tracing the black female body politic from slavery to present day, we think of how our vaginas were raped by white slave masters, how our stomachs became swollen with children who were sent out in the fields as soon as they could walk, how our backs were rent and blood would gush from our torn flesh, how our breasts were drained by white children. How our hair is seen as wild and animal-like, our asses as emblematic of our inherently grotesque nature, our skin color the basis of all white people’s problems with us, and our womanhood an extra incentive for them to invest their hatred in us. We are constantly remembering how our bodies were never our own, and movements like Black Girl Magic are reclamatory because they demonstrate what we can achieve with our bodies when we have autonomy over them. But for black women with disabilities, autonomy is a battle fought both from without and within. Every morning, I can rise from my bed, make myself breakfast, take a shower, do my hair, and dress. None of these tasks is a struggle. But for a physically disabled black woman, just getting out of bed in the morning—an ability I take for granted—may require a herculean effort. She must wrestle with her own body before she can expend any energy on how the outside world perceives it and the space it occupies there.
Black women face a dizzying conundrum. We reside outside the margins of a white patriarchal society and thus we are often dehumanized. To regain our humanity, we focus on what it means to be a black woman, where black women can find safe spaces, and how black women can protect ourselves within white spaces. These are worthy concerns, but they assume a black woman’s physical body is still perceived within our own community as “normal.” As Crystal R. Emery said in her 2016 essay for Time, because she is a black woman with a disability, a “wheelchair-riding quadriplegic,” she is stigmatized in three ways: for not being white, male, or able-bodied. The dismissal of Dr. Chavers’s words reinforces our ableist privilege. Her second piece should have prompted us to recontextualize her original argument, but unfortunately it received less than 126 Facebook shares; her first essay received over 9,000. We do not teach young black women that they should recognize and aspire to the achievements of black women with disabilities, perhaps because we know so little about them—and we must change that.
I used to call it my “second tongue.” My left inner labium protruded approximately four centimeters from my body, and I do not remember it ever looking different. It was thick, wrinkly, and long, and I thought the extra skin was fun as a child, a bigger appendage that I could play with. When I pulled back the flap of my left labium majora, my left labium minora would immediately unfurl like a tongue. My mother would frequently pop into my bedroom when I was changing for church or gathering my towel to go into the bathroom to bathe and ask, “That thing doesn’t hurt?” With my legs together, I would look down at myself, my vulva seemingly neat from that vantage point, and shake my head. That “thing” did not hurt, until it did.
The pain began somewhere around middle or high school. If I wore stockings underneath my plaid skirts or dress pants, the nylon would rub up against my inner thighs and the friction would cause my vulva to protrude and my “second tongue” would unfurl again, sometimes even sticking out of my panties. When this would happen, I could only readjust the elastic band and hope that that this would push my left labium minora back into its original, hidden position. Wearing shorts was its own kind of torture. Denim chafed against it, pain surging and swelling from the inside out. I figured that if I began a strict exercise regimen I would lose weight in my thighs and that would eliminate the chafing altogether. Unfortunately, I soon realized after several weeks of elliptical and treadmill sessions and calorie cutting that most of the weight I lost was from my stomach and face. No dietary regimen could stop my “second tongue” from growing.
When I moved into an apartment in Harlem that had no air-conditioning, the humid ninety-degree weather presented another challenge. It didn’t matter if I wore stockings, shorts, a tight skirt, or a maxi dress: my left labium minora would still stick to the inside of my panties. I would trudge the two flights of stairs to my bedroom, close the door behind me, place my two fans on the opposite sides of my desk chair and turn them on to the highest intensity, sit at that desk chair, remove everything from the waist down—my left labium minora hitting the seat before any other part of my body—and delicately massage in whipped shea butter until the pain subsided. I never thought that this ritual was problematic because I never assumed that this pain was a problem. I never assumed that it was a problem because I assumed that pain was an integral element of womanhood.