Black Femme Organizers are Grieving

by Zuri Davis, she/they

This op-ed was originally written for the May edition of the Jax DSA Newsletter. Zuri is a member of Jax DSA.

My organizing fellowship had a three-hour discussion about grief this week. The class is solely made up of queer and BIPOC people. There was noticeably more participation in this particular session. After all, we are organizing to dismantle the systems and culture of this country, all sustained by colonial violence, white supremacy, patriarchy and gender violence, capitalism, and desolation of land. We are grieving the way these have harmed our communities.

Americans are currently experiencing collective grief due to the fascism, economic crisis, and loneliness epidemic plaguing us. While we all agree that these griefs are real (though our dominant culture does not know how to live alongside grief), marginalized groups feel the present at a heightened level.

An executive order that may just be another news cycle for a white person means life or death for an immigrant. A white person who owns a home and clocks in to a salaried 9-to-5 is not feeling the same impact of rising gas prices like a Black person who rents while working a service job. A white person’s joke about moving to Canada is a trans person of color’s reminder that they must stay and fight, in part because there is no viable financial path to “escape” to somewhere else.

We all share space, but there are so many ways that the daily, deep-seated cultural griefs of marginalized comrades remain invisibilized.

I think now of the grief shared by many Black femmes my age.

We suffer from the misogynoir of mammification. Mammies are Jim Crow-era caricatures of Black women who are desexualized, thus devoid of beauty or romantic consideration. Mammies are depicted as having the singular joy of self-sacrificing care and rest needs to serve others.

As a Black woman exploring the practice of caretaking as cultural work, I don’t think that caregiving is inherently exploitative. I am able to do this work when I can because I have a community that sees my needs intimately and helps fill my cup.

But there are many spaces where I and other Black femmes are denied collective care. Yet we’re still expected to give to others what we do not receive.

This tends to happen very frequently in leftist organizing spaces.

I have both seen and experienced people asking too much of Black femmes without checking in. We’re treated as hostile, bitter, or crazy when the same people repeatedly activate this trigger. We burn out and are forced to let go of projects that we love because people fail to examine this dynamic.

These exchanges bring stress, pain, and cultural grief.

I see Black femmes so heavily involved in organizing spaces because of love, yes. But also because the survival of our communities depends on our action.

Many of us come to organizing while already doing some level of one-sided financial or emotional caregiving to adult relatives. While yearning for romantic partners*. While experiencing racism at work…and being severely underpaid. All of us dreaming of softer lives, and better economic opportunities to live those softer lives, and people that give us love and room to just be and grow in our security.

(*This is not to worship the romance myth. Kill the couple in your head. As a queer person, I live different kinds of deep, non-romantic relationships. In this culture, however, few people practice intentional love with anyone who isn’t a partner. Few people want to show physical affections to a friend. And many participate in the cruel cycle of telling Black femmes, who hold righteous anger over the trauma of being repeatedly told we are unworthy of love, that we are in fact too unhealed to receive affection.)

This month, I grieved for multiple friends who receive very little in the way of caregiving, but keep on having to sacrifice their needs to care for adult family members.

I grieved for the various all-Black AFAB group chats I’m in that are quiet, because we are all being activated in some way.

I grieved all of the times I’ve had to perform emotional labor for others when the only thing I wanted in return was to be held by someone when I was tired.

This week alone, I grieved having to be the one person to initiate hard conversations with my family (again), after old scars of neglect and abuse triggered multiple people over one mistaken text message.

I grieved letting go of an incarcerated solidarity project I know I can’t pursue, because I cannot provide that level of emotional support to people who are suffering without a partner to hold me after a long day.

I grieved letting go of a distro project because it kept activating this cultural trauma.

This led me to then grieve a painful memory from an old organizing group I loved. I grieved how I was tasked to do the emotional labor of holding everything together during a conflict, even though I was living alone, severely depressed, and in financial stress following a layoff. I grieved how a person I held so much grace for in that conflict devalued my contributions to the group and my political beliefs behind my back less than a year later.

I grieve how someone will read this and still fail to examine why the Black femmes around them seem so tired all of the time.

I have had to let go of a lot that I love this season because this grief sits in my spirit. While I go through these transitions, I share my grief in community. I share it with the ocean and the St. John’s River.

And I use the little bit I have left to water the DSA community garden once a week, so that one day my small contribution will help someone else eat.

This article was written by a DSA member and does not formally represent the views of Jax DSA as a whole or its subgroups.