May 20, 2021 • 38 mins
It’s a rarely talked about type of racism. Experts warn everyone is complicit. Meet a pregnant college professor who was treated like an “incompetent black woman” by her doctors, and a physician whose confrontation with a flight attendant went viral. Social justice leader Tamika Mallory reveals how the experience of feeling invisible led to her struggle with addiction. Plus Gammy shares the troubling way she was treated by doctors while pregnant with Jada.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, fam, I'm Jada Pinkett Smith and this is the
Red Tabletop podcast, all your favorite episodes from the Facebook
watch show in audio produced by Westbrook Audio and I
Heart Radio. Please don't forget to rate and review on
Apple podcasts. Hearing your stories, this sounds evil to me.
Didn't even make me angry, like it hurt my feelings.
(00:21):
Outrage And she's like, well, why don't you have your
credentials with you? You don't have your diploma with You're
out of here. Tragedy, ultrasound show that I had been
in labor for almost two days. Shocking stories that will
shake you to your core. When I had Jada, I
was not treated well. I was denied the pain that
I was having. He made me step off the flight
(00:42):
and he asked me, did I know how to behave
the invisible black woman? The epidemic we need to talk about.
Well today it's gonna be a great show. Yeah, I'm excited,
and we're gonna talk about the invisibility of black women.
Now that's a topic. Yeah, it's just so deep rooted. Yeah,
(01:04):
it's great to see you and have you back at
the table. Thank y'all for inviting me back. I didn't
know you get to come back again. Well, it just
didn't depends. It just depends. Our friend Tamika Mallory is
one of the most powerful social justice leaders of today.
Her new book spells out the urgent state of black
(01:25):
people in America. One of the things that I love
is that you show up for the invisible black woman.
You really do. You know, you were out there for Brianna.
If it was up to the world, Brianna Taylor would
have been forgotten. She was murdered on March thirteenth. I
think because there was no video, a lot of people
(01:46):
were like, uh, you know, I don't know, They're there
was a young woman, she had six bullets in her body,
she was sleeping in the bed. They woke her up
for nothing. That's what happened, right. Black women are ignored
and disrespected in general. People don't want to talk about
McKay Bryant right now, you know. They want to say that, well,
you know, she had a knife, and it's justified, and
(02:07):
a lot of it is trauma. I spent some time
talking with her family and she had told them she
was also in communication with her biological mom. Although she's
in foster care. She had told them that she was
experiencing something, she was going through something, and that adults,
not children, has been attacking her bothering Right now, officer arrives.
(02:27):
He doesn't know any of this, right, but here's the
bottom line for me. Would he have shown up where
there was white women and shot center mass at a
young woman. It's unfortunate that this young girl's story ends
this way. And in fact, I attended her funeral, And
the reason why I went is because I know that
if she was sixteen years old and perfect, the perfect victim,
(02:48):
everyone would be all over it. Everyone would be all
over it. People would have been there to support. She
deserves the same care and attention and for someone that's
to advocate for her and her situation, even though she
might have she may have had a knife, you know, right,
it's that she's a child and we saw her laying
on the ground. The fact that you went to the
funeral for that young sister, because I just feel like
(03:13):
there's always an excuse of why not to show up
for us, For black women, there's always freaking excuse, but
yet we are always expected to show up. So to
Mek and when were the times that you felt invisible,
and I think I feel invisible all the time. That
(03:33):
invisible feeling is one that I have probably felt my
whole life, from school days all the way until now.
And people don't understand what feeling invisible means because they
because it's like I'm loud, I talk a lot, talk
all the time, and then like you can't be invisible
because we can't miss you. You're always there. But my
feelings are not always value my opinion of things. I'm
(03:58):
constantly having to raise my temperature in order for people
to know that I know what I'm talking about. You
know what I mean. It's been difficult for so long
to feel like, um, I've been ignored, and when I
was with the Women's March, I experienced that, you know,
I really did. I think there were days when I
started being like, why am I here dealing with y'all?
(04:19):
And I got my own problems and like I'm getting
beat up left and right. It was just too much
to think about. So I started taking Zanex, taking whatever
you could do to sleep, because that sleep is an
issue when you're stressed and not able to rest. Any
pill that somebody would give me that had the ability
to make you calm down and to deal with anxiety.
(04:39):
I wanted them I got addicted, and now you want
me to go get unaddicted, Like I don't even understand
the concept of how this happened to me, of all people,
but I was. And so then I had to go
to rehab. And while I was in rehab, they were like,
you need PTSD support because you're having a problem that's
deeper than this drug. You're going through some soul issues.
(05:02):
So I had to do all of that, and it
was like tearing down and building me all back up.
But look at me, I'm still cute. You are. It's
interesting when you talk about needing to turn up the temperature,
because I don't know how many times I felt like
(05:23):
I've had to turn up the temperature and then ostracize.
It makes me just it breaks my heart, that stereotype
because that has been stuffed down and repressed and all
that and feeling invisible and then it's like, oh, you're
just the angry black woman, but it's so much deeper.
(05:44):
I was having a conversation with my boy Dwayne Martin
the day because he called me. He was like, what
y'all talking about at the Ranta and then talk a
bit about the invisibility and black women. He said, can
I just tell you something, He said, I realized that
society has used the best parts of black women. He said,
from historically, you know, you guys using your breast to
(06:08):
feed other children and raising other children. And he said,
from the surgeons who steal your body parts and put
them on other people, from the ass to the lips,
to the hips to the thighs. And he said, and
you know what, they steal the best parts of you
guys and throw the rest away. That's exactly right. And
he said it's like you know, in slavery women, they
(06:30):
would take the best parts of the pig or the
chicken and they give us the scraps, the scraps. But
when he broke it down like that, just like dang,
I was like, that's deep. So that goes along with
that foundation of invisibility. One of the most shocking consequences
of black women being invisible is when it comes to healthcare.
(06:53):
Check this. Trussey mcmillancottom says she was pregnant and in crisis,
and all the doctors all was an incompetent black woman.
When I got pregnant, I wanted the very best for
my baby. That's why I chose the hospital uptown where
the white women went to have their babies with white doctors,
(07:13):
thinking I would get better care. And I got anything.
But I was about four months pregnant when I started bleeding.
My husband rushed me to the doctor's office, where I
sat in the waiting room for about thirty minutes. The
doctors the nurses really ignored the crying, bleeding, pregnant woman
in the waiting room. I was in extreme pain. I've
(07:34):
never felt more invisible. After I bled onto the chair
in the waiting room, the doctor finally saw me, but
he dismissed my concern, told me that spotting was normal,
especially for someone as fat as I was in his words,
and he sent me home. As the pain got worse
throughout the night, I went back to the hospital. The
doctor was again dismissive and told me that probably just
(07:57):
eaten something bad. After are constantly pleading and begging with
the doctor, he did finally agree to give me an ultrasound,
and what we saw in the ultrasound was shocking. The
image showed what looked like three babies, except I was
only pregnant with one the other two were fairly large tumors.
(08:19):
I was checked into the maternity ward, where I asked
repeatedly for an epidural. I was pushing before I knew
what was happening, and my daughter was here. She died
shortly after her first breath. Oh yeah, sorry, so sorry,
thank you. Ultrasound showed that I had been in labor
(08:43):
for almost two days and my baby was worn too
early to survive, and I left the hospital without my daughter.
What happened is both traumatic but not singular. Happened to
a lot of black women um which is something that
was totally preventable. If we had an ultrasound. When you're
(09:04):
supposed to do an ultrasound, they would have known mine
was a high risk pregnancy. Nurse, I know the difference
between bleeding and spotting. Spotting. She was bleeding when they
had to remove the chair after I left the waiting room,
right and I still did not signal to them that
was an emergency. By the way, still did not go
(09:24):
to the emergency room at that point. At every step
of the process, no one really took seriously that I
knew what was happening to me, one or cared enough
to at least do an assessment. Let's do an exam,
Let's do a test. They didn't even care enough to
do that. Childbirth is when you're most vulnerable. You really
are relying on people to see your pain, right, and
(09:48):
people's ability to see your pain relies on their ability
to see you as human. Yes, the experience for me
was a loss that shouldn't have been a loss, but
worse than that, a loss that no one treats like
a law. It is just traumatic. There's no aftercare when
it was a child. The nurse doesn't come to check
on you six weeks out, there's no postpartum right at
(10:10):
the time, I was working, you know, full time, as
most women aren't, especially women of color and black women.
It's no longer maternity leave when your baby dies. What Yeah,
it's no longer maternity leave. So it's not just the
trauma of the event, it's the way the world treats you.
I never even heard from the doctor's office again, except
(10:31):
for the nurse to call and tell me just so
you know, there was nothing we could have done. Okay,
So you know that's one of the reasons why I
never had another child, Because I was eighteen pregnant, and
the experience was so horrible that I was like, I'm
not doing that again. Imagine a young black girl, you know,
(10:53):
and they treated me really bad, just like sit over there,
we'll get to you in a minute. My water leaked
for a month. It was just so much trauma that
after that, I was like, never again. It's interesting that
you say that, because now that I'm thinking about my
own experience when I had Jada, it was pretty similar.
I was not treated well, I was not cared for,
and I was in a hospital where my father was
(11:16):
head of anesthesia at the time, so they knew exactly
who I was. I was denied um the pain that
I was having at the time, Oh, it's not that bad.
And there was so much invested in telling me that
that I wasn't feeling what I was feeling. You know
how they do the pain scale level of one to ten.
(11:37):
Where are you? I was in the middle of a
contraction and I'm vibrating. It hurts so bad, right I'm vibrating.
I knew if i'd say ten, they tell me I
was exaggerating. If I say anything less than five, they
leave the rum. And I remember negotiating with myself to
settle on seven because if they left the room, the
anesthesiologist wasn't gonna come. And she told me, if you
(11:57):
complain too much, he doesn't like complaint, he won't come.
And I was terrified that he wouldn't come because I
wanted the apaturial badly by that point, Yeah, I terrified.
I hate to bring it this far, but you're looking
at a woman in pain, the most vulnerable place she's
ever been in her entire life, and you're just going
to like that seems evil to me, Like that seems
(12:19):
like an evil thing to do. That did have to
start to think about how did I end up in
a room where there was no one to speak for me?
What could not have done differently? What is too much
to ask for from somebody else to advocate for you? Right?
I have a family health insurance, all those things that
are supposed to matter. Advocacy takes somebody willing to hear you.
(12:39):
You can say a lot of things. If people won't
hear it, it really doesn't matter. And I tell people
all the time I'm asked to testify before Congress and etcetera. No,
you don't bring me in unless you're serious, Because I
don't perform trauma for people who are not invested in
fixing the problem. That is so. Yeah, that was very
(13:00):
extant to the idea of performing trauma for the same
public that wouldn't have cared about what happened to me
in the hospital. Yeah. So it's not that people don't know,
it's that they don't care. Yeah. What is your advice
for black women who find themselves feeling invisible, especially when
(13:20):
it comes to medical issues. Has anybody ever told you
that if the doctor starts talking crazy that you should
get up, leave, should leave. I want black women to
treat doctors like we treat a service provider. Black women
don't play if the food is cold, right, you know,
I play if the service man, the cableman is late.
(13:43):
But the medical profession, it's shape for you to follow
directions to not question authority. But it is the one
place where questioning authority can save your life. You have
to do your research and if the plan that they
are creating for you doesn't work, then go to somebody
who's planning it does work for you. Yes, I tell him,
don't even let him finish you, right, like, get up,
you can get dressed in the hallway, get your clothes,
(14:05):
and you walk out. Exactly if we had the same
crisis facing middle class, suburbon white women, if they were
dying at the rate that we die trying to give birth. Yeah, yeah,
the inequity is undeniable. Yeah, there would be a public
health crisis, would be a public health campaign. Boards would
be conveniing tribunals. Right, they don't think it's a loss.
(14:28):
That's the crux of the process, that's at the cool
right there. Yeah, trustee, thank you, this was important. Thank you. Yeah,
thank you. And a Facebook post seen by millions, Dr
Cross revealed an incident on an airplane that left her
feeling more invisible than ever. Thank you for joining us today.
(14:52):
So explaining us what happened. I was on an airplane
and I heard somebody shrieking two rows a head of me.
It was a husband and wife and the husband was unresponsive,
so the wife was screaming. The flight attendant immediately rushed
over there. She said that she needed a medical personnel
(15:14):
or physician. Immediately. I just flagged her down. She said,
oh no, no, no, sweetie, we don't have time, you know,
to talk right now. We're looking for an actual physician.
I'm trying to explain to her that I'm the physician
that you're looking for. She just continued with her condescending remarks.
At that time is going on on the overhead where
they're saying we need a medical personnel. And I stared
(15:35):
her and pressed my button and so that's when she's like, oh,
you're an actual physician. That's when she started asking more questions.
It wasn't like, Okay, you're a doctor, great, come over here,
mind you he's still responsive, still unresponsive. She's like, well,
if you're a doctor, you know, well what are you
(15:56):
what are you doing? What are you Why are you hearing?
Why are you in de trade? And she's like, well,
why don't you have your credentials with you? You don't
have your diploma with you know, I don't like you
don't have a business card. No, I don't have a
business card on me. This continues back and forth, and
then there's a middle age Caucasian mail coming from the
front of the plane and she said, well, he's a physician,
(16:19):
he has his credentials, but of course my blood's boiling
on inside. That's ridiculous. Did you complain to the airline?
I did. She basically offered me sky miles an exchange
for the miscommunication, and I said, I'm good. I got
off the plane and then I went and reported it
to the gate agent, and the gate agent was like,
(16:42):
I'm so sorry for it and handed me a free
drink ticket for my next flight, and I was like,
y'all don't get it. So I put it on social media.
I got on my next flight, got off, and it
was viral that quickly. You had an issue to the
same thing happened to airline and the same thing. I
had to put some information on social media because I
tried and no one cared. A pilot threw me off
(17:03):
of a plane for no reason. In my situation, the
gay agent was the problem, and it was a black woman.
I was communicating with her and she was so nasty.
The white man who was the pilot happened to be
off the plane standing there next to her, and I
watched them as I walked through the door to go
get on the plane, have a little conversation that you
(17:23):
know whatever she said to him, and he just decided
to come and throw me off the plane. He made
me step off the flight and he asked me, did
I know how to behave, and he asked me to
repeat those words that I would behave and I did
and it threw me off anyway. I said, yes, sir,
I will behave and that was like he was like,
(17:44):
oh no, So to me, are you saying that they
threw you off the plane because you and the gate?
Because I had about because my seat. I have claustrophobia
and I was upgraded to first class and then all
of a sudden my seat got and I was complaining
about it. We were just having a quiet conversation, but
he happened to be standing there and he decided to
(18:06):
use his authority against me. The funny thing, though, is
that the flight attendant who's on there looking like what
is going on because she doesn't know anything, she recognizes
who I am. She's looking at me and she's like,
oh my god. She was a white woman. So you
need to fight this. She said, what he's doing to
you is wrong, and she began to cry. When he
came back with six police officers, six I verified. I said,
(18:31):
so you're throwing me off the fan and do anything
he told me? He said yes. I said, okay, I've
commenced to every MF F and so and so. I
told a whole plane up at that point that my
nice little four letter words. And at some point in it,
I said, and you will not forget me. I said,
you don't know who I am. And I told him,
I said, I will go to hell fighting. And he
(18:51):
looked at me, and then she said something and he
realized that I have messed up. And do you know
that that man had the audacity to say to me, um,
would you like to talk? Like, why don't you just
calm down and we can just have a conversation. And
I said a conversation, you know. But the follow up
of that was one no one called me back. They
(19:11):
didn't take it seriously until puff Puff Daddy did he
we call him puff right until he retweeted what was happening,
and then it became a thing. Yeah, it went viral.
One thing they did do they started instituting a branch
of changes, Like they looked at their policies and procedures
and they began to really work inside the company. Because
(19:32):
that's what I wanted. Wasn't about money, it wasn't about
any of that. Was like, this has to change. This
can't happen to another woman. And I was on the
way to a wedding that was really important to me
and I missed it. Then these changes happened in regards
to your incident. Yeah. Absolutely, But I went all the
way up to the CEO of the airline and went
down to Atlanta, met with them, and then two months
(19:53):
later they actually changed their policies because they did have
a policy saying that they're supposed to verify. I'm sure
there is some kind of policy. What I do want
to say, it was all that question about where you going,
why were you in Detroit? All that's insane. That's not
part of the policy. You know. In meantime, you're jeopardizing
somebody's life. Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming
(20:16):
and sharing your story, but thank you for having me so.
Dr Romeny, a good friend of the table. Has an
important message and it's something you might be doing that
is very harmful and not even know it. It's called
racial gas lighting. Dr Romeny, how are you? It's so
(20:36):
good to see it. I feel so privileged to be
part of this conversation. We are always so happy to
have you and you talk about racial gaslighting. Give us
some examples of what that looks like. When we're talking
about racial gas lighting, you're denying the experience as a
person has as a person of color, especially as a
woman of color. It's very very easy to guess like
(20:58):
any woman of color. So when we look at it
that way, then it's things like, you're making this about race,
and it's not. There's no more racism. We've had a
black president, they've changed the laws. Denying your experience of pain,
You're not in that much pain. You didn't earn that degree.
Why are you at this elite university? Was it affirmative action? Right?
The immediate assumption is you did not earn that. Somebody
(21:21):
cut you a break because you're and that already weakens
that person in that position and makes them less likely
to have their voice. That's a denial of your experience.
And then when a person of color fights back, calm down, Yeah,
that's gaslighting, because it's the whole idea is you're being
too sensitive, you're perceiving things that aren't happening. And it's
(21:43):
not one person doing this, it's the entire system is
doing this. What someone's done is they've taken away your reality.
And when you gaslight someone, someone has told me it's
really just not that serious. Yes, my head just wants
to explode. Think of this one. One of the ultimate
(22:03):
examples is when people say I don't see race, right,
I don't. I don't see color. Slighting you know, because yes,
you do, right right, be able to see you're wearing
a green shirt, you can see that. And I understand
what the intention is, but the fact is that it
invalidates a person's experience. When you steal someone's reality, you
(22:27):
steal their power, right because they're they're doubting themselves. They're
walking around saying, am I being too sensitive? Maybe I'm
the one who wrong? Right, So now you've lost even
more power and the person who's gas lighting gets even
more power back. Right. So it's that idea of calm down,
calm down, you're overreacting. Is it becomes, especially for black women,
(22:48):
this idea of being unhinged. I have to say, I
understand that people have their opinions, and I always respect
the opinions. But when I did hear certain politicians speaking
of how America is not racist. I get that not
all Americans are. There a lot of Americans that are not,
but it felt like it was denying the reality that
(23:09):
we are that they are living and watching right now,
right now, exactly every day. And it was hurtful. It
didn't even make me angry, like it hurt my feelings, yes,
and and those hurt feelings are real. But when you
take that into the system and say my feelings are hurt,
they'll say, Jada, you're being You're too sensitive. You know,
(23:32):
right here she going agin, Yes, that's right. And then
on the other side of it is this phenomenon called
healthy cultural paranoia, and it's the idea that particularly black women,
who hold the least societal power of any women. Right
when you think of the history of black women in
our country, they've always been at risk. So there may
(23:53):
be a tentativeness. You know, you're going a new situation,
you're being very very careful, right, And then what will
people say about a black woman. Then she's aloof she's
up pity, you know, right, she's not living to those roles.
You're not being the big hug you know, the mammy
that I can hug. You're not playing to the role
when you're not playing the sassy exactly. I mean, we
(24:15):
get this in Hollywood all the time. These boxes that
we put in many many times, women of color, especially
Black women, will go into a situation, a professional situation,
even a social situation, and they'll feel unsettled. I don't
feel comfortable here, I don't feel hurt here, I don't
feel respected here. And the other people in the room
(24:35):
will say, nothing's going on here. You're sensing something that's
not happening. You're being ridiculous. Stop making such a big deal. Gaslight, gaslight, gaslight,
and the whole systems in on it. So when that
woman tries to go to HR or goes to a
person in authority, they'll say, what documentation do you have?
I think you might have been misperceiving the situation. You're
(24:56):
talking about invisible black women. You want to make someone
invis sable deny their reality? Yeah, Can I ask the
question what about when it's not reality? Like if someone
is saying, well, you harmed me because you did these things,
and you're like, I didn't actually do those, they're still
gas lighting because you didn't do those things. They deny
the realitybody even saying you did something you didn't do.
(25:16):
Dr Romeny, you're a woman of color as well, and
I just want to know has there ever been points
in your life where you have felt invisible. Yeah, people
just see they see brown. And it's been my whole
life from people telling me this name of yours is
too difficult. We're going to change that name to something
we can say. As a child, people would say, I
can't say romany let's just change your name to something
(25:38):
that's easier for us. You're talking about airplanes. Anytime I fled,
I would say seventy of the time, when I'm in
that first class line to board, someone come up to
me and say, ma'am, this is the first class line
all the time. I get that right all the time.
It's like death by a thousand cuts, isn't it. How
many times do you have to experience those microaggressions before
(25:59):
it effect your own identity. There were times I'd go
back and look at the boarding pats. I'm like, maybe
I am in the wrong line. Wow, Yeah, I laugh
because I've experienced that true. And it's typically like a
bunch of European businessman, you know, they just kind of
(26:21):
move right on past. You may be walking up to
the line and they walking past you like you can
possibly they're all in first class, right, Nascy. So the
systems are designed to silence the voices and to leave
people of color in self doubt. So then everyone's walking
around confused, and if everyone's confused, it's really easy for
(26:42):
another group to hold the powers. That was really well said. Personally,
I think it's all really terrible, slimy design. I think
it's a design. Thank you, Dr. Thank you for having
us conversation. You have no idea that even if you
(27:02):
unguessed like one young black woman who's doubting herself today,
you've done something so powerful. So thank you. The brilliant
Dr Candice nor Cut has some critical information we all
need to hear about how black women become invisible. Hi,
thank you for having me. So happy to be here.
Dr Norcut, can you tell us what you think is
one of the factors behind the Black women invisibility epidemic.
(27:27):
One of the ways this happens is because they don't
fit into a prototype. The prototype for black is man
black man, and the prototype for woman and femininity is
white woman. There's something called the non prototypicality hypothesis, and
what that means is that we're really poor at seeing
things that lie outside of our norm, outside of the prototype.
(27:49):
Think about this as an example you being confused for
the other black woman in the office, right, or you
get called the name of the other black girl that
is the only other black girl in your class. You
don't look anything alike, but you get confused. So this
blind spot right, right, that blind spot so intense, as
(28:11):
really intense. And when you start to talk about systemic racism,
the system was designed to make black women feel like
they don't belong. And so Patricia Hill Collins called these
stereotypes that create these rigid roles for black women controlling images.
They not only control what society sees about black women
and kind of most distressingly, can impact how black women
(28:34):
see themselves. The mammy is one of the oldest controlling images. Right.
So black women are meant to be in domestic servitude, right,
and controlling images justifies the economic oppression of black women, right,
because they are meant to serve. They're meant to support
(28:55):
the white family and the nation's economy. They're not meant
to lead it. They're meant to supported on their very
black body. Right. They're not sexualized, they're not humanized, they're objectified.
The matriarch is an example of the strong black woman,
and this idea that there's this castrating strong man like
woman that's at the center of the family to make
(29:17):
the black man feeling masculated, like we don't need him.
What's so interesting is that, you know, later research showed
that there weren't actually that many people that fit the
stereotypes of mammy or matriarch. These were created stereotypes the media,
like literally the media, you'll notice. So the matriarch and
the mammy, they don't get to have sexual lives, right,
(29:39):
Their purpose is for the family. Their de sexualized. And
so when we bring sexuality into the picture for black women,
it's this Jezebel's a ductress, right, justifying the sexual violence
and abuse that was brought upon and put upon the
black female body. Right. And so it was the enslaved
(30:01):
person that seduced the white slave owner. She had to breed,
and her purpose was to breed to support chattel slavery
because that was a very economic force. All of these
support the place in which black women were meant to
be oppressed into. They say that the first thing that
you have to do in order to be able to
oppress any people, or to enslave any group of people,
(30:22):
is to demean them. You also have some current images
that you say affect black girls. Um, first, the angry
black woman. Mean, so these lords, these images aren't new,
they're evolved. When you just label somebody and pigeonholed them
as angry, you don't get to inquire why, why, what
(30:46):
other emotions are happening that's causing this emotional reaction. And
look how young they started. That. That was me in
the Women's March. People would see when I was like
going off, and they'd be like, what's wrong with you?
All this happened right for the last week I've been
dealing with Right, But you get you see me, and
then you're like, oh, she's just too much, right, Yeah,
(31:09):
you know I've been through too much. All it is
is trauma. All it is is just unhealed wounds. But
whatever it is the reason for it's not for no
reason exactly. Defense. Then you have the strong black woman.
Oh that's the evolution of the matriarch. No, WHOA. So
(31:32):
we're castrating our men. We are unreasonable, we cannot be
compromised with. Therefore we get to dismiss any opinion from
casual conversation to the boardroom because she's just you know,
she's just you know, she's extreme, right, So again it's
the oppression. I've even felt that, like amongst the younger people,
(31:53):
I'm very opinionated about misogynistic rap music, and I've always
have been very vocal about how I just would rap.
They're not have that going into my mind while we're together,
and a lot of my peers when I come around,
it's like, well, she's here, so just don't worry about her.
She's just going off on her usual rant about whatever
(32:13):
it is. Yeah, it's interesting that Michelle Obama was on
the last slide because that's what they did to her.
That's what they did. She was too buffed, you know,
it was always like yeah, it was always something wrong,
and she's perfect exactly that part. So now we have
(32:33):
the baby mama. Mean, yeah, that's sir. So this evolves
out of the Jezebel, the breeder um. It's evolved into
the welfare queen or baby mama. This evolves into justifying
rules about welfare, justifying rules about types of contraception that's offered,
(32:55):
um forced on black women. Dang, that is dr norcutt um.
When did you feel the most invisible? My earliest memory
of invisibility was in high school. So I had applied
to seven Ivy League colleges and I got into the
mall and my friend said she got in because she
(33:18):
was black. Mind you, I was try varsity sport captain,
I was president of the school, and yet would that comment.
He erased all of that down to one part of me. Wow,
that's deep, that's awful, that's painful. Thank you, Dr Norcutt.
(33:38):
It's always a pleasure having you. Thank you so much
for having this conversation. Those images. Man, Yeah, that's heavy,
and now you get to associate it with like what
it means because that little girl I would have shared
that a thousand times, like y'allow online earves. Yeah, it's
really perpetuating a negative seal. It makes me feel like
(34:00):
I need to pay more attention to these means that
you're sharing on social media. We all do so. To Mika,
tell us just a little bit about your book. So
State of Emergency really is a revisitive history. There's so
many people who are just coming to this work into
the movement now, and they're like, where do I go?
What do I do? I'm ready, I'm in. It has
(34:23):
a prescription for how we work together to go forward.
The book is my gift to a lot of folks
who are trying to just figure it out. You are
actually one of those who have contributed your thoughts about
the book, and we appreciated my book. Now you made
(34:44):
the dedication to your son for State of Emergency. I
don't really talk much about my son in public. You know,
a lot of people don't even know I have a son.
But I'm starting to because I realized that I've been
fighting for everyone else's child and he has been has
lacked so much as a result of it, but he
still has always been such a great supporter. His father
(35:07):
was killed when he was too He started to get
older and noticed that other people had their fathers and
he didn't. He's like, you don't know what I'm going through.
He started going into this deep depression, and by the
time he was seventeen and eighteen, it was really bad
and there was nothing I could do. My child needed
his dad, and I realized there were things I just
couldn't teach him. I couldn't I couldn't talk to him
(35:27):
about him. We weren't seeing eye to eye, and that
caused a lot of conflict intention between the two of us.
The guilt of that weighs on me all the time.
So your son, your son, he is here, my child.
I've heard so much about you. I'm so glad we
(35:52):
finally get to me. What do you want us to
know about your mom? She's amazing through just having her
around as a role model every day. It pushes me
so much to keep striving to, you know, be on
the same level as she's on. I am doing a
song about you. A lot of my life. You know,
(36:15):
she's been going of course, and I've had to deal
with that. In my song. Um, I said, me and
mom used to fight a lot, but I know why
she left. Um, she was fighting for my rights. So yeah, beautiful. Well, Tarika,
I also want to say thank you for your sacrifice. Yeah,
because a lot of people don't understand the sacrifices that
(36:39):
family members make when important people in their lives make
the kinds of decisions that your mom has made to
be in service to the community in a way and
what she has. Thank you so much to all the
women of color out there. I hope you feel seen today.
And we've talked about so many things that we hope
(37:01):
will bring change, but most of all, just as we
love to do at the Red Table, deepening that love
and compassion for one another, deepening that understanding. That was
good the whole show. Wow to me, guy, Yes I'm back.
(37:22):
When I pulled them today, I tell everybody in the
car I'm moving here for thirty days and when ver time,
I got a space for you, We got a way
because like, oh, what's happening? What you said? Are you saying? Day?
Where I know you needn't girl way with me. To
(37:48):
join the Red Table Talk family and become a part
of the conversation, follow us at facebook dot com slash
red table Talk. Thanks for listening to this episode of
Red Table Talk podcast, produced by Facebook, Westbrook Audio, and
I Heart Radio.
Hey, fam, I'm Jada Pinkett Smith and this is the
Red Tabletop podcast, all your favorite episodes from the Facebook
watch show in audio produced by Westbrook Audio and I
Heart Radio. Please don't forget to rate and review on
Apple podcasts. Hearing your stories, this sounds evil to me.
Didn't even make me angry, like it hurt my feelings.
(00:21):
Outrage And she's like, well, why don't you have your
credentials with you? You don't have your diploma with You're
out of here. Tragedy, ultrasound show that I had been
in labor for almost two days. Shocking stories that will
shake you to your core. When I had Jada, I
was not treated well. I was denied the pain that
I was having. He made me step off the flight
(00:42):
and he asked me, did I know how to behave
the invisible black woman? The epidemic we need to talk about.
Well today it's gonna be a great show. Yeah, I'm excited,
and we're gonna talk about the invisibility of black women.
Now that's a topic. Yeah, it's just so deep rooted. Yeah,
(01:04):
it's great to see you and have you back at
the table. Thank y'all for inviting me back. I didn't
know you get to come back again. Well, it just
didn't depends. It just depends. Our friend Tamika Mallory is
one of the most powerful social justice leaders of today.
Her new book spells out the urgent state of black
(01:25):
people in America. One of the things that I love
is that you show up for the invisible black woman.
You really do. You know, you were out there for Brianna.
If it was up to the world, Brianna Taylor would
have been forgotten. She was murdered on March thirteenth. I
think because there was no video, a lot of people
(01:46):
were like, uh, you know, I don't know, They're there
was a young woman, she had six bullets in her body,
she was sleeping in the bed. They woke her up
for nothing. That's what happened, right. Black women are ignored
and disrespected in general. People don't want to talk about
McKay Bryant right now, you know. They want to say that, well,
you know, she had a knife, and it's justified, and
(02:07):
a lot of it is trauma. I spent some time
talking with her family and she had told them she
was also in communication with her biological mom. Although she's
in foster care. She had told them that she was
experiencing something, she was going through something, and that adults,
not children, has been attacking her bothering Right now, officer arrives.
(02:27):
He doesn't know any of this, right, but here's the
bottom line for me. Would he have shown up where
there was white women and shot center mass at a
young woman. It's unfortunate that this young girl's story ends
this way. And in fact, I attended her funeral, And
the reason why I went is because I know that
if she was sixteen years old and perfect, the perfect victim,
(02:48):
everyone would be all over it. Everyone would be all
over it. People would have been there to support. She
deserves the same care and attention and for someone that's
to advocate for her and her situation, even though she
might have she may have had a knife, you know, right,
it's that she's a child and we saw her laying
on the ground. The fact that you went to the
funeral for that young sister, because I just feel like
(03:13):
there's always an excuse of why not to show up
for us, For black women, there's always freaking excuse, but
yet we are always expected to show up. So to
Mek and when were the times that you felt invisible,
and I think I feel invisible all the time. That
(03:33):
invisible feeling is one that I have probably felt my
whole life, from school days all the way until now.
And people don't understand what feeling invisible means because they
because it's like I'm loud, I talk a lot, talk
all the time, and then like you can't be invisible
because we can't miss you. You're always there. But my
feelings are not always value my opinion of things. I'm
(03:58):
constantly having to raise my temperature in order for people
to know that I know what I'm talking about. You
know what I mean. It's been difficult for so long
to feel like, um, I've been ignored, and when I
was with the Women's March, I experienced that, you know,
I really did. I think there were days when I
started being like, why am I here dealing with y'all?
(04:19):
And I got my own problems and like I'm getting
beat up left and right. It was just too much
to think about. So I started taking Zanex, taking whatever
you could do to sleep, because that sleep is an
issue when you're stressed and not able to rest. Any
pill that somebody would give me that had the ability
to make you calm down and to deal with anxiety.
(04:39):
I wanted them I got addicted, and now you want
me to go get unaddicted, Like I don't even understand
the concept of how this happened to me, of all people,
but I was. And so then I had to go
to rehab. And while I was in rehab, they were like,
you need PTSD support because you're having a problem that's
deeper than this drug. You're going through some soul issues.
(05:02):
So I had to do all of that, and it
was like tearing down and building me all back up.
But look at me, I'm still cute. You are. It's
interesting when you talk about needing to turn up the temperature,
because I don't know how many times I felt like
(05:23):
I've had to turn up the temperature and then ostracize.
It makes me just it breaks my heart, that stereotype
because that has been stuffed down and repressed and all
that and feeling invisible and then it's like, oh, you're
just the angry black woman, but it's so much deeper.
(05:44):
I was having a conversation with my boy Dwayne Martin
the day because he called me. He was like, what
y'all talking about at the Ranta and then talk a
bit about the invisibility and black women. He said, can
I just tell you something, He said, I realized that
society has used the best parts of black women. He said,
from historically, you know, you guys using your breast to
(06:08):
feed other children and raising other children. And he said,
from the surgeons who steal your body parts and put
them on other people, from the ass to the lips,
to the hips to the thighs. And he said, and
you know what, they steal the best parts of you
guys and throw the rest away. That's exactly right. And
he said it's like you know, in slavery women, they
(06:30):
would take the best parts of the pig or the
chicken and they give us the scraps, the scraps. But
when he broke it down like that, just like dang,
I was like, that's deep. So that goes along with
that foundation of invisibility. One of the most shocking consequences
of black women being invisible is when it comes to healthcare.
(06:53):
Check this. Trussey mcmillancottom says she was pregnant and in crisis,
and all the doctors all was an incompetent black woman.
When I got pregnant, I wanted the very best for
my baby. That's why I chose the hospital uptown where
the white women went to have their babies with white doctors,
(07:13):
thinking I would get better care. And I got anything.
But I was about four months pregnant when I started bleeding.
My husband rushed me to the doctor's office, where I
sat in the waiting room for about thirty minutes. The
doctors the nurses really ignored the crying, bleeding, pregnant woman
in the waiting room. I was in extreme pain. I've
(07:34):
never felt more invisible. After I bled onto the chair
in the waiting room, the doctor finally saw me, but
he dismissed my concern, told me that spotting was normal,
especially for someone as fat as I was in his words,
and he sent me home. As the pain got worse
throughout the night, I went back to the hospital. The
doctor was again dismissive and told me that probably just
(07:57):
eaten something bad. After are constantly pleading and begging with
the doctor, he did finally agree to give me an ultrasound,
and what we saw in the ultrasound was shocking. The
image showed what looked like three babies, except I was
only pregnant with one the other two were fairly large tumors.
(08:19):
I was checked into the maternity ward, where I asked
repeatedly for an epidural. I was pushing before I knew
what was happening, and my daughter was here. She died
shortly after her first breath. Oh yeah, sorry, so sorry,
thank you. Ultrasound showed that I had been in labor
(08:43):
for almost two days and my baby was worn too
early to survive, and I left the hospital without my daughter.
What happened is both traumatic but not singular. Happened to
a lot of black women um which is something that
was totally preventable. If we had an ultrasound. When you're
(09:04):
supposed to do an ultrasound, they would have known mine
was a high risk pregnancy. Nurse, I know the difference
between bleeding and spotting. Spotting. She was bleeding when they
had to remove the chair after I left the waiting room,
right and I still did not signal to them that
was an emergency. By the way, still did not go
(09:24):
to the emergency room at that point. At every step
of the process, no one really took seriously that I
knew what was happening to me, one or cared enough
to at least do an assessment. Let's do an exam,
Let's do a test. They didn't even care enough to
do that. Childbirth is when you're most vulnerable. You really
are relying on people to see your pain, right, and
(09:48):
people's ability to see your pain relies on their ability
to see you as human. Yes, the experience for me
was a loss that shouldn't have been a loss, but
worse than that, a loss that no one treats like
a law. It is just traumatic. There's no aftercare when
it was a child. The nurse doesn't come to check
on you six weeks out, there's no postpartum right at
(10:10):
the time, I was working, you know, full time, as
most women aren't, especially women of color and black women.
It's no longer maternity leave when your baby dies. What Yeah,
it's no longer maternity leave. So it's not just the
trauma of the event, it's the way the world treats you.
I never even heard from the doctor's office again, except
(10:31):
for the nurse to call and tell me just so
you know, there was nothing we could have done. Okay,
So you know that's one of the reasons why I
never had another child, Because I was eighteen pregnant, and
the experience was so horrible that I was like, I'm
not doing that again. Imagine a young black girl, you know,
(10:53):
and they treated me really bad, just like sit over there,
we'll get to you in a minute. My water leaked
for a month. It was just so much trauma that
after that, I was like, never again. It's interesting that
you say that, because now that I'm thinking about my
own experience when I had Jada, it was pretty similar.
I was not treated well, I was not cared for,
and I was in a hospital where my father was
(11:16):
head of anesthesia at the time, so they knew exactly
who I was. I was denied um the pain that
I was having at the time, Oh, it's not that bad.
And there was so much invested in telling me that
that I wasn't feeling what I was feeling. You know
how they do the pain scale level of one to ten.
(11:37):
Where are you? I was in the middle of a
contraction and I'm vibrating. It hurts so bad, right I'm vibrating.
I knew if i'd say ten, they tell me I
was exaggerating. If I say anything less than five, they
leave the rum. And I remember negotiating with myself to
settle on seven because if they left the room, the
anesthesiologist wasn't gonna come. And she told me, if you
(11:57):
complain too much, he doesn't like complaint, he won't come.
And I was terrified that he wouldn't come because I
wanted the apaturial badly by that point, Yeah, I terrified.
I hate to bring it this far, but you're looking
at a woman in pain, the most vulnerable place she's
ever been in her entire life, and you're just going
to like that seems evil to me, Like that seems
(12:19):
like an evil thing to do. That did have to
start to think about how did I end up in
a room where there was no one to speak for me?
What could not have done differently? What is too much
to ask for from somebody else to advocate for you? Right?
I have a family health insurance, all those things that
are supposed to matter. Advocacy takes somebody willing to hear you.
(12:39):
You can say a lot of things. If people won't
hear it, it really doesn't matter. And I tell people
all the time I'm asked to testify before Congress and etcetera. No,
you don't bring me in unless you're serious, Because I
don't perform trauma for people who are not invested in
fixing the problem. That is so. Yeah, that was very
(13:00):
extant to the idea of performing trauma for the same
public that wouldn't have cared about what happened to me
in the hospital. Yeah. So it's not that people don't know,
it's that they don't care. Yeah. What is your advice
for black women who find themselves feeling invisible, especially when
(13:20):
it comes to medical issues. Has anybody ever told you
that if the doctor starts talking crazy that you should
get up, leave, should leave. I want black women to
treat doctors like we treat a service provider. Black women
don't play if the food is cold, right, you know,
I play if the service man, the cableman is late.
(13:43):
But the medical profession, it's shape for you to follow
directions to not question authority. But it is the one
place where questioning authority can save your life. You have
to do your research and if the plan that they
are creating for you doesn't work, then go to somebody
who's planning it does work for you. Yes, I tell him,
don't even let him finish you, right, like, get up,
you can get dressed in the hallway, get your clothes,
(14:05):
and you walk out. Exactly if we had the same
crisis facing middle class, suburbon white women, if they were
dying at the rate that we die trying to give birth. Yeah, yeah,
the inequity is undeniable. Yeah, there would be a public
health crisis, would be a public health campaign. Boards would
be conveniing tribunals. Right, they don't think it's a loss.
(14:28):
That's the crux of the process, that's at the cool
right there. Yeah, trustee, thank you, this was important. Thank you. Yeah,
thank you. And a Facebook post seen by millions, Dr
Cross revealed an incident on an airplane that left her
feeling more invisible than ever. Thank you for joining us today.
(14:52):
So explaining us what happened. I was on an airplane
and I heard somebody shrieking two rows a head of me.
It was a husband and wife and the husband was unresponsive,
so the wife was screaming. The flight attendant immediately rushed
over there. She said that she needed a medical personnel
(15:14):
or physician. Immediately. I just flagged her down. She said,
oh no, no, no, sweetie, we don't have time, you know,
to talk right now. We're looking for an actual physician.
I'm trying to explain to her that I'm the physician
that you're looking for. She just continued with her condescending remarks.
At that time is going on on the overhead where
they're saying we need a medical personnel. And I stared
(15:35):
her and pressed my button and so that's when she's like, oh,
you're an actual physician. That's when she started asking more questions.
It wasn't like, Okay, you're a doctor, great, come over here,
mind you he's still responsive, still unresponsive. She's like, well,
if you're a doctor, you know, well what are you
(15:56):
what are you doing? What are you Why are you hearing?
Why are you in de trade? And she's like, well,
why don't you have your credentials with you? You don't
have your diploma with you know, I don't like you
don't have a business card. No, I don't have a
business card on me. This continues back and forth, and
then there's a middle age Caucasian mail coming from the
front of the plane and she said, well, he's a physician,
(16:19):
he has his credentials, but of course my blood's boiling
on inside. That's ridiculous. Did you complain to the airline?
I did. She basically offered me sky miles an exchange
for the miscommunication, and I said, I'm good. I got
off the plane and then I went and reported it
to the gate agent, and the gate agent was like,
(16:42):
I'm so sorry for it and handed me a free
drink ticket for my next flight, and I was like,
y'all don't get it. So I put it on social media.
I got on my next flight, got off, and it
was viral that quickly. You had an issue to the
same thing happened to airline and the same thing. I
had to put some information on social media because I
tried and no one cared. A pilot threw me off
(17:03):
of a plane for no reason. In my situation, the
gay agent was the problem, and it was a black woman.
I was communicating with her and she was so nasty.
The white man who was the pilot happened to be
off the plane standing there next to her, and I
watched them as I walked through the door to go
get on the plane, have a little conversation that you
(17:23):
know whatever she said to him, and he just decided
to come and throw me off the plane. He made
me step off the flight and he asked me, did
I know how to behave, and he asked me to
repeat those words that I would behave and I did
and it threw me off anyway. I said, yes, sir,
I will behave and that was like he was like,
(17:44):
oh no, So to me, are you saying that they
threw you off the plane because you and the gate?
Because I had about because my seat. I have claustrophobia
and I was upgraded to first class and then all
of a sudden my seat got and I was complaining
about it. We were just having a quiet conversation, but
he happened to be standing there and he decided to
(18:06):
use his authority against me. The funny thing, though, is
that the flight attendant who's on there looking like what
is going on because she doesn't know anything, she recognizes
who I am. She's looking at me and she's like,
oh my god. She was a white woman. So you
need to fight this. She said, what he's doing to
you is wrong, and she began to cry. When he
came back with six police officers, six I verified. I said,
(18:31):
so you're throwing me off the fan and do anything
he told me? He said yes. I said, okay, I've
commenced to every MF F and so and so. I
told a whole plane up at that point that my
nice little four letter words. And at some point in it,
I said, and you will not forget me. I said,
you don't know who I am. And I told him,
I said, I will go to hell fighting. And he
(18:51):
looked at me, and then she said something and he
realized that I have messed up. And do you know
that that man had the audacity to say to me, um,
would you like to talk? Like, why don't you just
calm down and we can just have a conversation. And
I said a conversation, you know. But the follow up
of that was one no one called me back. They
(19:11):
didn't take it seriously until puff Puff Daddy did he
we call him puff right until he retweeted what was happening,
and then it became a thing. Yeah, it went viral.
One thing they did do they started instituting a branch
of changes, Like they looked at their policies and procedures
and they began to really work inside the company. Because
(19:32):
that's what I wanted. Wasn't about money, it wasn't about
any of that. Was like, this has to change. This
can't happen to another woman. And I was on the
way to a wedding that was really important to me
and I missed it. Then these changes happened in regards
to your incident. Yeah. Absolutely, But I went all the
way up to the CEO of the airline and went
down to Atlanta, met with them, and then two months
(19:53):
later they actually changed their policies because they did have
a policy saying that they're supposed to verify. I'm sure
there is some kind of policy. What I do want
to say, it was all that question about where you going,
why were you in Detroit? All that's insane. That's not
part of the policy. You know. In meantime, you're jeopardizing
somebody's life. Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming
(20:16):
and sharing your story, but thank you for having me so.
Dr Romeny, a good friend of the table. Has an
important message and it's something you might be doing that
is very harmful and not even know it. It's called
racial gas lighting. Dr Romeny, how are you? It's so
(20:36):
good to see it. I feel so privileged to be
part of this conversation. We are always so happy to
have you and you talk about racial gaslighting. Give us
some examples of what that looks like. When we're talking
about racial gas lighting, you're denying the experience as a
person has as a person of color, especially as a
woman of color. It's very very easy to guess like
(20:58):
any woman of color. So when we look at it
that way, then it's things like, you're making this about race,
and it's not. There's no more racism. We've had a
black president, they've changed the laws. Denying your experience of pain,
You're not in that much pain. You didn't earn that degree.
Why are you at this elite university? Was it affirmative action? Right?
The immediate assumption is you did not earn that. Somebody
(21:21):
cut you a break because you're and that already weakens
that person in that position and makes them less likely
to have their voice. That's a denial of your experience.
And then when a person of color fights back, calm down, Yeah,
that's gaslighting, because it's the whole idea is you're being
too sensitive, you're perceiving things that aren't happening. And it's
(21:43):
not one person doing this, it's the entire system is
doing this. What someone's done is they've taken away your reality.
And when you gaslight someone, someone has told me it's
really just not that serious. Yes, my head just wants
to explode. Think of this one. One of the ultimate
(22:03):
examples is when people say I don't see race, right,
I don't. I don't see color. Slighting you know, because yes,
you do, right right, be able to see you're wearing
a green shirt, you can see that. And I understand
what the intention is, but the fact is that it
invalidates a person's experience. When you steal someone's reality, you
(22:27):
steal their power, right because they're they're doubting themselves. They're
walking around saying, am I being too sensitive? Maybe I'm
the one who wrong? Right, So now you've lost even
more power and the person who's gas lighting gets even
more power back. Right. So it's that idea of calm down,
calm down, you're overreacting. Is it becomes, especially for black women,
(22:48):
this idea of being unhinged. I have to say, I
understand that people have their opinions, and I always respect
the opinions. But when I did hear certain politicians speaking
of how America is not racist. I get that not
all Americans are. There a lot of Americans that are not,
but it felt like it was denying the reality that
(23:09):
we are that they are living and watching right now,
right now, exactly every day. And it was hurtful. It
didn't even make me angry, like it hurt my feelings, yes,
and and those hurt feelings are real. But when you
take that into the system and say my feelings are hurt,
they'll say, Jada, you're being You're too sensitive. You know,
(23:32):
right here she going agin, Yes, that's right. And then
on the other side of it is this phenomenon called
healthy cultural paranoia, and it's the idea that particularly black women,
who hold the least societal power of any women. Right
when you think of the history of black women in
our country, they've always been at risk. So there may
(23:53):
be a tentativeness. You know, you're going a new situation,
you're being very very careful, right, And then what will
people say about a black woman. Then she's aloof she's
up pity, you know, right, she's not living to those roles.
You're not being the big hug you know, the mammy
that I can hug. You're not playing to the role
when you're not playing the sassy exactly. I mean, we
(24:15):
get this in Hollywood all the time. These boxes that
we put in many many times, women of color, especially
Black women, will go into a situation, a professional situation,
even a social situation, and they'll feel unsettled. I don't
feel comfortable here, I don't feel hurt here, I don't
feel respected here. And the other people in the room
(24:35):
will say, nothing's going on here. You're sensing something that's
not happening. You're being ridiculous. Stop making such a big deal. Gaslight, gaslight, gaslight,
and the whole systems in on it. So when that
woman tries to go to HR or goes to a
person in authority, they'll say, what documentation do you have?
I think you might have been misperceiving the situation. You're
(24:56):
talking about invisible black women. You want to make someone
invis sable deny their reality? Yeah, Can I ask the
question what about when it's not reality? Like if someone
is saying, well, you harmed me because you did these things,
and you're like, I didn't actually do those, they're still
gas lighting because you didn't do those things. They deny
the realitybody even saying you did something you didn't do.
(25:16):
Dr Romeny, you're a woman of color as well, and
I just want to know has there ever been points
in your life where you have felt invisible. Yeah, people
just see they see brown. And it's been my whole
life from people telling me this name of yours is
too difficult. We're going to change that name to something
we can say. As a child, people would say, I
can't say romany let's just change your name to something
(25:38):
that's easier for us. You're talking about airplanes. Anytime I fled,
I would say seventy of the time, when I'm in
that first class line to board, someone come up to
me and say, ma'am, this is the first class line
all the time. I get that right all the time.
It's like death by a thousand cuts, isn't it. How
many times do you have to experience those microaggressions before
(25:59):
it effect your own identity. There were times I'd go
back and look at the boarding pats. I'm like, maybe
I am in the wrong line. Wow, Yeah, I laugh
because I've experienced that true. And it's typically like a
bunch of European businessman, you know, they just kind of
(26:21):
move right on past. You may be walking up to
the line and they walking past you like you can
possibly they're all in first class, right, Nascy. So the
systems are designed to silence the voices and to leave
people of color in self doubt. So then everyone's walking
around confused, and if everyone's confused, it's really easy for
(26:42):
another group to hold the powers. That was really well said. Personally,
I think it's all really terrible, slimy design. I think
it's a design. Thank you, Dr. Thank you for having
us conversation. You have no idea that even if you
(27:02):
unguessed like one young black woman who's doubting herself today,
you've done something so powerful. So thank you. The brilliant
Dr Candice nor Cut has some critical information we all
need to hear about how black women become invisible. Hi,
thank you for having me. So happy to be here.
Dr Norcut, can you tell us what you think is
one of the factors behind the Black women invisibility epidemic.
(27:27):
One of the ways this happens is because they don't
fit into a prototype. The prototype for black is man
black man, and the prototype for woman and femininity is
white woman. There's something called the non prototypicality hypothesis, and
what that means is that we're really poor at seeing
things that lie outside of our norm, outside of the prototype.
(27:49):
Think about this as an example you being confused for
the other black woman in the office, right, or you
get called the name of the other black girl that
is the only other black girl in your class. You
don't look anything alike, but you get confused. So this
blind spot right, right, that blind spot so intense, as
(28:11):
really intense. And when you start to talk about systemic racism,
the system was designed to make black women feel like
they don't belong. And so Patricia Hill Collins called these
stereotypes that create these rigid roles for black women controlling images.
They not only control what society sees about black women
and kind of most distressingly, can impact how black women
(28:34):
see themselves. The mammy is one of the oldest controlling images. Right.
So black women are meant to be in domestic servitude, right,
and controlling images justifies the economic oppression of black women, right,
because they are meant to serve. They're meant to support
(28:55):
the white family and the nation's economy. They're not meant
to lead it. They're meant to supported on their very
black body. Right. They're not sexualized, they're not humanized, they're objectified.
The matriarch is an example of the strong black woman,
and this idea that there's this castrating strong man like
woman that's at the center of the family to make
(29:17):
the black man feeling masculated, like we don't need him.
What's so interesting is that, you know, later research showed
that there weren't actually that many people that fit the
stereotypes of mammy or matriarch. These were created stereotypes the media,
like literally the media, you'll notice. So the matriarch and
the mammy, they don't get to have sexual lives, right,
(29:39):
Their purpose is for the family. Their de sexualized. And
so when we bring sexuality into the picture for black women,
it's this Jezebel's a ductress, right, justifying the sexual violence
and abuse that was brought upon and put upon the
black female body. Right. And so it was the enslaved
(30:01):
person that seduced the white slave owner. She had to breed,
and her purpose was to breed to support chattel slavery
because that was a very economic force. All of these
support the place in which black women were meant to
be oppressed into. They say that the first thing that
you have to do in order to be able to
oppress any people, or to enslave any group of people,
(30:22):
is to demean them. You also have some current images
that you say affect black girls. Um, first, the angry
black woman. Mean, so these lords, these images aren't new,
they're evolved. When you just label somebody and pigeonholed them
as angry, you don't get to inquire why, why, what
(30:46):
other emotions are happening that's causing this emotional reaction. And
look how young they started. That. That was me in
the Women's March. People would see when I was like
going off, and they'd be like, what's wrong with you?
All this happened right for the last week I've been
dealing with Right, But you get you see me, and
then you're like, oh, she's just too much, right, Yeah,
(31:09):
you know I've been through too much. All it is
is trauma. All it is is just unhealed wounds. But
whatever it is the reason for it's not for no
reason exactly. Defense. Then you have the strong black woman.
Oh that's the evolution of the matriarch. No, WHOA. So
(31:32):
we're castrating our men. We are unreasonable, we cannot be
compromised with. Therefore we get to dismiss any opinion from
casual conversation to the boardroom because she's just you know,
she's just you know, she's extreme, right, So again it's
the oppression. I've even felt that, like amongst the younger people,
(31:53):
I'm very opinionated about misogynistic rap music, and I've always
have been very vocal about how I just would rap.
They're not have that going into my mind while we're together,
and a lot of my peers when I come around,
it's like, well, she's here, so just don't worry about her.
She's just going off on her usual rant about whatever
(32:13):
it is. Yeah, it's interesting that Michelle Obama was on
the last slide because that's what they did to her.
That's what they did. She was too buffed, you know,
it was always like yeah, it was always something wrong,
and she's perfect exactly that part. So now we have
(32:33):
the baby mama. Mean, yeah, that's sir. So this evolves
out of the Jezebel, the breeder um. It's evolved into
the welfare queen or baby mama. This evolves into justifying
rules about welfare, justifying rules about types of contraception that's offered,
(32:55):
um forced on black women. Dang, that is dr norcutt um.
When did you feel the most invisible? My earliest memory
of invisibility was in high school. So I had applied
to seven Ivy League colleges and I got into the
mall and my friend said she got in because she
(33:18):
was black. Mind you, I was try varsity sport captain,
I was president of the school, and yet would that comment.
He erased all of that down to one part of me. Wow,
that's deep, that's awful, that's painful. Thank you, Dr Norcutt.
(33:38):
It's always a pleasure having you. Thank you so much
for having this conversation. Those images. Man, Yeah, that's heavy,
and now you get to associate it with like what
it means because that little girl I would have shared
that a thousand times, like y'allow online earves. Yeah, it's
really perpetuating a negative seal. It makes me feel like
(34:00):
I need to pay more attention to these means that
you're sharing on social media. We all do so. To Mika,
tell us just a little bit about your book. So
State of Emergency really is a revisitive history. There's so
many people who are just coming to this work into
the movement now, and they're like, where do I go?
What do I do? I'm ready, I'm in. It has
(34:23):
a prescription for how we work together to go forward.
The book is my gift to a lot of folks
who are trying to just figure it out. You are
actually one of those who have contributed your thoughts about
the book, and we appreciated my book. Now you made
(34:44):
the dedication to your son for State of Emergency. I
don't really talk much about my son in public. You know,
a lot of people don't even know I have a son.
But I'm starting to because I realized that I've been
fighting for everyone else's child and he has been has
lacked so much as a result of it, but he
still has always been such a great supporter. His father
(35:07):
was killed when he was too He started to get
older and noticed that other people had their fathers and
he didn't. He's like, you don't know what I'm going through.
He started going into this deep depression, and by the
time he was seventeen and eighteen, it was really bad
and there was nothing I could do. My child needed
his dad, and I realized there were things I just
couldn't teach him. I couldn't I couldn't talk to him
(35:27):
about him. We weren't seeing eye to eye, and that
caused a lot of conflict intention between the two of us.
The guilt of that weighs on me all the time.
So your son, your son, he is here, my child.
I've heard so much about you. I'm so glad we
(35:52):
finally get to me. What do you want us to
know about your mom? She's amazing through just having her
around as a role model every day. It pushes me
so much to keep striving to, you know, be on
the same level as she's on. I am doing a
song about you. A lot of my life. You know,
(36:15):
she's been going of course, and I've had to deal
with that. In my song. Um, I said, me and
mom used to fight a lot, but I know why
she left. Um, she was fighting for my rights. So yeah, beautiful. Well, Tarika,
I also want to say thank you for your sacrifice. Yeah,
because a lot of people don't understand the sacrifices that
(36:39):
family members make when important people in their lives make
the kinds of decisions that your mom has made to
be in service to the community in a way and
what she has. Thank you so much to all the
women of color out there. I hope you feel seen today.
And we've talked about so many things that we hope
(37:01):
will bring change, but most of all, just as we
love to do at the Red Table, deepening that love
and compassion for one another, deepening that understanding. That was
good the whole show. Wow to me, guy, Yes I'm back.
(37:22):
When I pulled them today, I tell everybody in the
car I'm moving here for thirty days and when ver time,
I got a space for you, We got a way
because like, oh, what's happening? What you said? Are you saying? Day?
Where I know you needn't girl way with me. To
(37:48):
join the Red Table Talk family and become a part
of the conversation, follow us at facebook dot com slash
red table Talk. Thanks for listening to this episode of
Red Table Talk podcast, produced by Facebook, Westbrook Audio, and
I Heart Radio.
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