14 Protected Care As Our Liberatory Pleasure Practice: A Sit-Down with 2 Black Femmes/Women

Roberta Suzette Hunte, Ph.D., MS & Mariotta Gary-Smith, MPH, CSE

(Fall 2023)

How This Whole Thing Started …

       Sister Professor Dr. Roberta Suzette Hunte is a personal hero of mine. She is a leading researcher on all things relating to Black Parenting people, families, and community in my home city in the Pacific Northwest, a respected community advocate, griot, and protector. She’s also a parenting person, a caregiver, and a beloved friend. That last one is important – as they are someone I get to call ‘my friend.’ We first crossed paths back in 2014 (I think) as part of a cohort doing important work in the Reproductive Justice movement space as active participants in the ‘We Are BRAVE Project’ that was housed at Western States Center. As we have been able to share time and space, we have played around with the idea of starting a podcast of some sort and talking about all things Black&Femme, and the impacts of these things on our loves, lives and community.
Fast forward to 2023 when an email hits my inbox from a beloved colleague who was curating content for their book. A light bulb went off in my head and I immediately reached out to SisterProfDr Hunte & said “We gotta do this! This is our podcast idea being elevated into reality!” She responded, “let’s make it happen!” So, we set a date to meet & share some thoughts about topics that were of interest and followed the parameters of the book submission. Our meeting, which we scheduled for an hour & ended up being 2 – because we talked about so many things.

       The main premise of our conversation was about how do we, as Black Femmes/Women, seek out joy and pleasure as a healing practice? As a means of survival and being able to thrive? We had a long and expansive chat about this, covering multiple aspects of our connection. We talked about parenting & raising community, the impacts of historical trauma and learning, and what unlearning looked like. We discussed the importance of holding space for loss, grief, and anger as a result of trauma and removal, as well as the importance of intimacy, sexual satisfaction and agency.

        We found ourselves touching on several points of connection (that we had time to talk about!): (1) the care work of mothering and Reproductive Justice (RJ); (2) the impacts of grief on Black mothering (3) the creation & maintenance of a brave community space; (4) the cost of our labor to make this space real for our joy & pleasure while grappling with the impacts of violence, trauma and exhaustion; and (5) how seeking out our joy and pleasure is a liberatory practice. In this paper, you’ll read from the transcript of our discussion together and hope you find something to hold close and learn from as much as we did.

       We started off discussing the care work of mothering, and some perceptions of Black parenting and mothering people. This connected to the understanding of RJ (Reproductive Justice) and how mothering is impacted by what is available to folks in their parenting journey, as well as how RJ (Reproductive Justice) has informed our experiences about mothering and parenting.

Mariotta Gary-Smith (MGS): I’d love to start with the topic of Black mothering, Black motherhood. You are a mother of several babies of various ages that you care for. I don’t have children by choice but am blessed to have young people in my life and have been for quite a long time. I’m an auntie and a godmother, and I take those roles very seriously because of the way those roles impacted my own life – from my own aunts and godmothers and other mothers. In his moment, I feel like there are different ideas around Black motherhood and Black maternal spaces – multiple perspectives that are being promoted, right?

You have really successful, accomplished folks who are Black mothers who mother successful children. For example, Coco Gauff – you hear about how wonderful her family is, how grounded she is as a young person, how her parents play really significant roles in how she shows up. She’s socially conscious, very down to earth, very sweet – all things I believe to be true. And I also found it interesting to hear these White presenting sport commentators talk about the value as they saw it of this young person’s family, and in particular her mother. They repeated the point about her mother that they related in terms of her (US Open) win. There’s that exemplary image, which is true and valid because that is who her mother is, her father is as well.

Then I think of Ta’kiya Young^[1], the 21-year-old woman who lost her life at the hands of a police officer in Ohio. She was a pregnant person who was killed by a police officer in a parking lot for alleged shoplifting. What is that image? These are two vastly different and wide-ranging meanings of Black motherhood. These conversations are happening in news spaces, but also in spaces that present this as what people need to see and understand about Black motherhood. There is also the consistent trope of Black mothers who are protecting their children or their community and are harmed or killed as a result of it. That’s been sitting with me lately.

Roberta Suzette Hunte (RSH): Yes – the assumptions of threat, of criminality, of incompetence are tropes, or microaggressions, that haunt Black women. As we mother and nurture, there is a lack of grace and care for us. As we mother, nurture and care for our children, these tropes can pose a threat to our own lives. It threatens us as it did with Ta’kiya. She should have been protected and instead was killed. Both the potential of her life and that of the life she was carrying were taken. She is a member of a family, of a community, there are people who are looking for this young person. She did not have the support that she needed and was not seen. It is profound. There’s also the uplifting of Black motherhood as exemplary and exceptional. Coco’s mom as an example of some kind of exemplary Black motherHood.

MGS: I so appreciate your lifting her name up, Ta’Kiya Young. And a total YES, in that this happens, where these experiences and losses are just that, but their names aren’t offered, and the memory of who they were in their communities and families; and their contributions aren’t recognized or remembered in that way.

RSH: In truth, all of it is Black mothers mothering. We are often not given the structural supports that we need to mother safely. I think about the framing of sexual and reproductive justice that was born from the thinking of Black women in the US and grew to include women of color and the members of the LGBT community to really create a robust framing of sexual and reproductive justice, which is about the right to have a child, to not have a child, to parent the children we have in a safe and sustainable environment, free of state and community violence and environmental degradation, and bodily autonomy, control over our bodies and the freedom to express our autonomy over our bodies. And I think of sexual and reproductive justice as a core, it’s grounded in human rights and it is core to our humanity and our protection and thriving of ourselves and our communities.

We also touched on the impacts of grief as Black people, and parenting/mothering folks in particular.

RSH: I think about the Black church and my family on my mother’s side are primitive Baptists or were. And that meant that their bodies were the instruments. Within that tradition, people would be taken over by the Lord wail their grief.

MGS: Yes! Releasing trauma from the body.

RSH: Black maternal health is one of the areas that I study. I think about racism related stress and the impact that the assaults on Black people, Black women, are experienced not just on the individual, but collectively. The psychic harm and violence of that is felt in the body and carried in the body across generations. Racism related stress increases cortisol causing adverse health outcomes and comorbidities in pregnancy, birth and postpartum.

This is happening within an environment that is not for our survival. We think of Audre Lorde in A Litany for Survival^[2], where she says, “we were never meant to survive.” We as Black people who nurture are fighting that, in some ways transforming it, and always resisting that.

From there, we moved into the creation & maintenance of a brave community space, which was specific to our experiences and influences of how we choose to raise and parent now in our personal lives.

MGS: The summer I hit puberty, my mother was part of a collective of Black women working in health justice, advocacy and community organizing. I watched her work with these other Black women who were mothers and all of the children were daughters. So when the mothers were together, the daughters were together – we were between 10 and 13 at the time, and we had to figure out how to be in relationship with each other. We weren’t necessarily friends – our mothers were working together. We’d literally be sitting in a room looking at each other and had to navigate these relationships. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were part of a movement within a larger one of how Black women continue to be the ones who push movement spaces forward in a very real, tangible way and the labor that goes into that.

I remember hearing at 11 about Audre Lorde’s Uses of The Erotic^[3] and the idea of joy being a healing practice. This happened in the early ’80s. Having this understanding and foundation presented to me so young said I had the right to seek joy and pleasure simply because I wanted to. I could utilize that as a place to heal myself or to offer that space to other Black people for their healing. It was transformational. I didn’t have that language, but knew it was different from what other young people were experiencing.

What does that mean in terms of folks who are parenting and mothering people? How do you connect those places of joy and pleasure as a mother, as a parent with young people? How do you teach, continue to teach? How am I teaching my kiddos in my life? What does it mean to seek joy and pleasure as an active, engaged space? Because you have the right to it, and that doesn’t have to be connected to a sexual encounter. It’s perfectly good if that’s what you want, but certainly not the only reason that you have the right to seek it out.

RSH: This opens my heart so much. I’ve been thinking a lot that I am worthwhile. I feel that, not just thinking about it. I am worthwhile. I’m teaching a Black Families in the US class. On one hand, this might sound trite, me saying, ‘you are worthwhile.’ But we are in a country that regularly reflects back to us that we are not worthwhile. We, as Black people, are all about the abundance and fulfillment and potential and opportunity of this life. When we connect to that, we are powerful. Keeping us disconnected from that is about the violence of patriarchy and racism and what bell hooks calls, the white supremacist, capitalist, hetero patriarchy^[4].

MGS: That sounds right.

RSH: The work of that system is about disconnection – disconnection from self, disconnection from the body, disconnection from community. Sexual and reproductive oppression is grounded in that.

Next, we delved a little into what the cost is for us (our labor) to curate and sustain space for our own joy and pleasure within the impacts of violence, trauma, and exhaustion.

MGS: Often there is not an opportunity for us as Black people, to grieve the weight of the losses that occur in our community. We’re not given space to do that internally within our community or externally. There is the expectation of forgiveness that comes from the history of Black folks being so decent in the face of such harm and trauma. I’ve become more aligned with the understanding of how that is not necessarily productive or healthy. Black people deserve to have the time to feel the rage, to feel the anger, to feel the loss, to mourn. We actually don’t have to forgive. This perspective is something I learned from another beloved of mine, Dr. Lexx Brown James^[5], a wonderful sexuality therapist and educator. Dr. Lexx talks about forgive and forget as a practice that doesn’t necessarily work in terms of how Black folks exist. For Black folks, it’s remember, reflect, and reconcile.

This is something that I’ve adopted and try to engage with around sadness, loss, harm, or trauma as much as joy and pleasure and excitement. Remember what happened, remember what part I may have played in it. Reflect on the learning, whatever that may be, and then you recover from that place to move forward. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to forget because, you don’t forget trauma and harm, they exist, they move around like weight. Weight moves around on our bodies, losing it or gaining it, it moves and it settles in different places for me. Trauma and harm, they don’t leave necessarily, they just move around. They might grow larger or smaller. If someone harms me, I’m not going to forget it. That can be a motivation for me to do better.

When I first heard Dr. Lexx offer a different way for Black folks to engage in healing modalities, it made sense to me – forgive and forget is something you see when there’s such a significant, tragic harm and then you see people maybe at a trial or maybe outside the courthouse or maybe in an interview and the harmed person says, “I forgive this person.” I don’t think that’s the best way to do it. We actually need to honor the feelings and the emotions and the energy that comes from those spaces. We haven’t had a brave space to do that.

MGS: Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks were two people who taught Black women how to utilize their own voice and lived experience as the catalyst to move their lives forward. This connects back to the work my mother was doing in the mid 80’s – a very organic concept of bringing Black women together and teaching them how to question, query and expect answers – what we now know as pushback. Their work centered on Black femmes/women having real conversations around their health, health care treatment and expectations, about understanding the trauma that is held in our bodies that we may not speak to, but are present in the ways we show up. And how to figure out connections between those and how to manage them as they show up. Audre Lorde and Bell Hooks were two of the modeling cornerstones of this learning.

RSH: The questions connect to radical self-care: How can I discern where I need to be in this glorious life that I am living, this incarnation that I’m living? Where do I need to be? It reminds me so much of the work of Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry^[6].

MGS: Yes. I love, I love, I love all things Nap Ministry!

RSH: Yeah – actively call forth Black rest.

MGS: Yes – rest as a practice of resistance and to honor the immense labor of caring and holding space for others.

RSH: Yeah! Black women, Black femmes are often held as the caregivers for the young, the caretakers for the old and the doers of the work of preserving our communities. That work is not all ours to do.

MGS: No. No. No. It must be a collective, it has to be a collaborative partnership within our communities to do the work of our communities. It should not be the job, or the burden depending upon where folks are, for that work to be the labor of Black women and femmes. That’s no longer ours to hold in the way we have in the past.

Finally, we talked about the immense importance for each of us in seeking out our joy and pleasure as a liberatory practice.

MGS: In the midst of all the things that we know, and have lifted up in our too short time together, what does care for ourselves look like as a liberatory practice? What does care for ourselves look like?

RSH: I think caring for ourselves looks like … But for one thing, I have been getting it on. That has been helping (laughs).

MGS: Yes! It is a real thing – okay? There is a purpose for all things.

RSH: Sex has a necessary purpose. But another thing, I had a psychedelic journey with a therapist last week. It gave me a place for my grief, grief over so many things: the loss of my stillborn daughter, the loss of a nephew and others gone too soon in my community from violence. Our young dying breaks my heart. Giving myself a place to grieve, to connect to my wholeness and to my safety is critical. I do this healing work on my terms, not on someone else’s. This helps me develop a skill of boundary setting. We live in this society that emphasizes boundaries that are steeped in individualism: it’s really my boundaries to do whatever I want and to keep others out [chuckle] right? My life is interdependent. I am not an island and I don’t want to sacrifice myself for my community. I need my boundaries to help me establish what I need so that I am able to have more mutuality in relationships with the world.

That is about right-sizing relationships and expectations. When I go into the workplace, I am confronted continually with misogynoir^[7], misogyny and the erasure of Black women. As Black women and femmes we give so much. So much of our labor is taken and unacknowledged. We are also blamed for so much. The blame needs to go on this system in which we live.

MGS: Yes! You have me clapping my hands like I’m in church!

RSH: (smiling) I’m learning to do that, to provide that grace to myself. It’s a practice of self-care that is as critical as learning to get my blood sugar down. It is life and death, I think.

MGS: Oh my goodness – woooo! I’m dancing in my chair! I sparkle to EVERYTHING you said – so much. I’ve been having conversations with some of my work colleagues about stretching into a self care practice. I’m learning how to wrap my arms around myself and hold myself as I transition to an official youthful elder status. I’m excited about that. But what I’ve recognized is I’m consciously practicing saying what I need to say really clear; and also to not take on the responsibility of making it safe (in terms of what I’m saying) for the folks who experience me saying whatever it is that I need to say. There’s a lot of labor that happens for Black women and Black femmes when we are in these spaces of education or equity, EDI, DEI, EDIB, JEDI^[8] – whatever letters folks use. [chuckle] In the places where we find ourselves, there’s so much unspoken and unacknowledged labor around caretaking before we even enter. Then there’s managing the post effects of that space after we’ve been in it. I’m speaking to myself in that way, because that’s labor I’ve done for a long time.

Now, I’ve given myself permission to literally take my hands off of it. It’s been incredibly liberating for me to absolutely recognize that I’m not responsible for that. I probably never was, but like you said, there’s a lot that’s said to us, or a lot that we’re defined or characterized in a particular way. I’ve been labeled and defined in many ‘professional’ work spaces, including my current one, as disrespectful, aggressive, too assertive, overbearing, standoffish, unapproachable – whatever words that are used.
It’s been really liberating, healing and quite revealing for me to recognize how much energy I put into caring for spaces that have not cared for me. I’m now choosing to turn that energy back and reflect it towards myself and the people who do care about me and who do love me. It is not the job or burden for that work to be laid in front of Black women and femmes. That’s no longer ours to hold in the way we have in the past.

RHS: Yes! I’m choosing to care for myself, and therapy is a part of that work for me. I fully believe in therapy as part of my self-care practice. Observing myself as I move through these spaces has been significant for me.

MGS: We deserve to live and thrive. Part of that means that the conversations and the responsibilities of how we do the work has to be shared. People get to say if they wanna do it or not. That’s the other thing that I’ve learned. I am comfortable with people saying that they can or can’t do something because I’m fully comfortable in doing the same thing. Sometimes for me, that means that things are not gonna get done. It’s not about it’s put on hold. It’s not about ‘wait until I get done with this thing.’ It’s actually not gonna get done. It’s okay. It is absolutely okay.

RSH: Yes, it is.

MGS: It really is, and that’s been hard for me to learn. I’m not saying that I have received my certification in releasing things ’cause I haven’t. [chuckle] I’m still learning but it’s a real conversation that we need to keep having and keep curating space for us to have. It is a brave space where people can say when they’re ready to let things go, and how we can support each other in releasing it. We may not need to hold it, whatever it is, anymore.

RSH: Yessss – it is beautiful when we live into our liberation. We are working towards our freedom and as we do it, we are also making space for others’ freedom. I think about the Black feminists who have held that and worked to address sexual violence within our communities, transphobia and other forms of gender oppression, have challenged economic class, and put forward a way for us to think about how we can all be free.

MGS: Yes. I keep quotes that I look at ‘touchstones’ as I’m working. I have a quote from you, right here taped to my monitor. I had to write them down because you’re always speaking truth! (laughter). I have two of them from you. The first quote of yours I wrote down is ‘nothing within my liberation is not connected to yours.’ I don’t remember when you said that. The second one I wrote down from you is ‘what are you willing to divest from in the name of my liberation and freedom? and for yours too?’ That one is from 2016, and it’s part of my support foundation.

RSH: Wow. Wow. [laughter] Wow!

MGS: I’m showing you so you know – these are taped on my monitor and I see them everyday when I sit at my desk. [chuckle]

RSH: What? [laughter] That is amazing … and wonderful. Thank you for sharing that with me. Oh my goodness, this was so powerful, and needed and FUN.

MGS: Yes, sis – it was! Thank you for doing this with me – you were the first person I thought of. I am so happy that you were open to it, and ready to get down deep with me in this. I’m so honored … and ready for our next step on this journey. I love you, friend.

RSH: And I love you.