WEBVTT
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When the harm of racism meets the harm of patriarchy meets the harm of anti blackness, the result is not the sum of three harms.
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It is something different, something multiplied, something that has produced a structural position so specific that the dominant analysis of either race or gender systematically fails to see it.
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Black women remain the most under-appreciated, undercared for, and underprotected group of women in the world.
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Malcolm X said something close to this in 1962 about the United States.
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The line has not been retired.
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It has only been globalized.
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And yet, black women continue to show up for everyone else.
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Most black women are predictable in that they will always stand up for what is right.
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They will show up politically to vote for justice.
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They will hold up a world that continues to not see them.
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Black women know that when things get bad, it gets worse for them.
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I believe the comedian Trevor Noah said this in his departing speech years ago.
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In the United States in 2025, black women earned 66 cents for every dollar paid to white men.
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White women earned 81 cents.
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Black men earned roughly 73 cents.
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The gap between black women and white women is not the gender gap.
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The gap between black women and black men is not the race gap.
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Black women fall through both analysis and the place where they fall is the subject of this episode.
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More than 300,000 black women in the United States have lost their jobs since the beginning of 2025.
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The glass ceiling that has been named for white women, the concrete ceiling that has been named for women of color in corporate research, does not describe what black women face.
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What black women face is a wall.
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They can rarely exhale in a world that does not see them as soft, a world that extracts from them just as quickly and as mercilessly as it calls them aggressive for stating what in the white woman would be called passionate.
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In Africa, the story is structural in a different shape.
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Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship in the world.
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African women make up 58% of the continent's self-employed population.
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They run roughly 70% of informal cross-border trade.
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They contribute 13% of the continent's gross domestic products.
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When a woman is educated, the return compounds.
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She elevates her household, the health of her children, the schooling of her daughters, the income of her entire lineage.
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And yet, in twenty twenty four, female-led startup on the continent received two percent of all African startup funding, forty eight million dollars to women, two point two billion to men.
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gender gap is 30%, six points wider than the global average.
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The work is being done by the women, the recognition, the financing, and the protection, are almost non-existence.
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in the United Kingdom black African women earn nine point three percent less than white British workers.
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And black women die in pregnancy and the postpartum period at nearly three times the rate of white women.
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In London, the ethnicity pay gap reaches 23.8%, the highest in the country.
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Diane Abbott, the first black woman elected to the British Parliament in 1987, and still the longest serving black member of that body, 45% of all the abusive tweets.
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Directed at women MPs in the run-up to the 2017 election, according to Amnesty International's research.
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In 2024, a Conservative Party donor was reported to have said Abbot should be shot, and that looking at her made him want to hate all black women.
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This is one black woman in one country.
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The pattern is everywhere.
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I'm Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom.
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This episode is part of a series on the system I call white terrorism rather than white supremacy.
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And it stands on its own.
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So if this is the first one you are hearing, you will not be lost So let's jump in.
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I wanna talk about the impact of compounding harm on black women.
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My claim that compounding is multiplicative is structural, not arithmetic.
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The misogyny applied to black women is not the misogyny applied to white women applied to a black body.
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It is its own technology.
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The racism applied to black women is not the racism applied to black men applied to a female body.
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It is its own technology.
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The compound is what this technology uses when they meet.
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Misogynoir is the cleanest example.
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Moya Bailey coined the term in 2010 to name the specific contempt for black women that operates as neither generic misogyny nor generic anti-blackness, but on its own a cultural production.
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The angry black woman trope is misogynoir There is no parallel angry white woman trope of the same cultural weight.
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And no parallel angry black man trope in the same register.
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The mammy archetype is misogynoir The Jezebel archetype is misogynoir.
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The sapphire, the welfare queen, the strong black woman trap that demands and then punishes its as - unfeminine are all misogynoir Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thoughts in 1990 called this controlling images.
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They are an apparatus that does structural work.
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They tell employers the kind of worker a black woman is.
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They tell juries the kind of defendant she is.
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They tell doctors what type of patient she is.
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They tell schools what kind of a student a black girl is before she enters the classroom.
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The controlling image is the technology by which the compound is administered.
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I also want connect this to the arguments the rest of the series has been building because the compound is not a separate phenomenon from the system I have been naming.
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is instead that system concentrated.
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in the first episode I argued that what we call white supremacy is accurately called white terrorism and that it required patriarchy to function because you cannot run a system of domination without a hierarchy to run it through.
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In the last episode, so in episode four, I argued that racism is the operating system that white terrorism builds and that anti-blackness is its foundational case.
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The compound is what happens at the point where racism, patriarchy, and anti-blackness converge on a single body.
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That point is where white terrorism does its most concentrated work and it hides it most completely because the woman standing at that point is the exact person the racial analysis is trained to read as a man, and the gender analysis is trained to read as white.
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She disappears in the gap between the two.
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The compound is the gap occupied.
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The numbers tell the same structural story.
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The Institute for Women's Policy Research has projected, based on the current rate of progression, that pay equity for black women in the United States will not arrive until the year 2227.
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In English, 201 years from now, six generations.
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current rate of progress is not a rate of progress for black women.
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black women are not on a trajectory towards equity.
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They are on a trajectory that flattens before it gets there.
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So I want to talk about the lineage.
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The argument I am making is not new.
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It is an expression of a tradition that has been building for at least five decades with roots in black women's writing and organizing going back much further.
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the compound has been taught about, named, and analyzed across continents by women for a long time.
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the April nineteen seventy-seven Combahee River Collective statement is the earliest rigorous articulation of what we now call intersectional analysis.
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The Combahee River Collective was a group of black lesbian feminists in Boston, including Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and - Demita Frazier.
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Their statement named the interlocking systems of oppression and argued that the sentences of those oppressions create the conditions of black women's lives.
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That argument is the structural claim of this episode.
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Bell Hooks published Ain't I a Woman?
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Black Women and Feminism in 1981, taking her title from Sojourner's Truth 1851 speech at the women's convention in Akron, Ohio.
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and making the argument that black women have been erased from both white feminism and black liberation.
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Hortense Spillers in her 1987 essay, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe, Extended the analysis to the specific way slavery and its afterlives produced black womanhood as a category outside the protection of gender as the culture defined it.
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Hall, Bell Scott, and Smith edited All the Women Are Whites, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave in 1982, with the title carrying the entire argument.
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Lord wrote, There is no hierarchy in oppression in 1983, naming the interlocking nature of the work and refusing the luxury of fighting only on one front.
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Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 coined the term intersectionality in an article in the University of Chicago's Legal Forum that demonstrated through US anti-discrimination law how black women were systematically erased by courts that asked them to choose between being discriminated against as a woman or as black people.
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Her 1991 piece in the Stanford Law Review extended the analysis.
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Patricia Hill Collins published Black Feminist Thoughts in 1990, naming the matrix of domination, the controlling images, and the outsider within.
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African black feminism has its own genealogy.
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Oyeronke Oyewomi's The Invention of Women in 1997 argued that Western gender as a body-based binary was imposed on Yoruba society by colonialism, and that the gender hierarchy operating in African societies now is part of a colonial inheritance.
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Ifi Amadiume's male daughters, female husbands, in 1987 documented evil social roles, including women who married women and women who held positions, the colonial binary erased.
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Amina Mama has spent decades documenting how the postcolonial African state administers its specific gender violence.
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Sueli Carniero coined an enegrecer o feminismo, to blacken feminism, arguing that the Brazilian women's movement had centered white women and erased black Brazilian women.
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And Leila Gonzalez made related arguments through the 1980s.
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Moya Bailey coined misogynoir in 2010 - This is the lineage.
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The compound has been named for at least fifty years on at least three continents.
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The argument here is the present tense iteration of a tradition the present tense has not caught up to.
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So what does the compound do?
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The compound is not just a statistical position.
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It is a set of mechanisms that operate every single day.
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The controlling images that Collins documented in 1990 remain operative.
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The Mammy is now the corporate black woman expected to absorb her white colleagues' anxieties and never raise her voice.
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The Jezebel is the cultural insistence that black women's sexuality is excessive and not entitled to consent.
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The sapphire is the angry black woman trope that converts any expression of disagreements into evidence of unprofessional aggression.
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The welfare queen was always a tool for dismantling the social safety net by racializing it.
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The strong black woman trope pretends to be a compliment.
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It tells black women that they can carry anything, which has the practical effect of telling everyone else that they do not have to help her carry it.
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Cheryl Wood Giscombe's research on what she calls the Superwoman schema, has linked the internalization of the script to delayed help seeking, untreated stress.
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And worse health outcomes.
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The compliment is the cage.
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The dual erasure that the 1982 anthology named is still operating.
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When black women raise gender based violence, they are told they are dividing the black community.
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When they raise racial discrimination, they are told that they are dividing the women's movement.
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Whichever movement they turn to expect them to drop the other half of their existence at the price of admission.
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I want to talk about some of the mechanisms of how it shakes out.
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First, the labor extraction without recognition mechanism.
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Black women across the diaspora do disproportionate amounts of political organizing, community caregiving, family stabilization, and emotional labor across racial and gender lines.
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African women contribute 13% to the continent's GDP and receive 2% of formal investments.
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Black American women vote at higher rates than any other US demographic group.
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Black South African women hold up household economies in the post apartheid period in ways national statistics on - undercounts The work flows one direction and the reward flows another.
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Another mechanism is the political mobilization paradox.
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Black women, particularly Black American women, are reliably the most engaged voting demographic in US progressive politics.
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In 2020, roughly 9 in 10 Black women voted for Joe Biden.
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In 2024, roughly 9 in 10 black women voted for Kamala Harris.
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A black woman who's lost some analysis attributed in part to misogynoir The very compound this episode describes.
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Black women have been called upon repeatedly to save American democracy in moments of national crisis.
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They have shown up.
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The democracy they show up for has not shown up for them.
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The maternal mortality rates do not improve.
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the pay gap do not close.
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The police violence against black women, including Breonna Taylor, killed in her own home in March 2020, does not produce structural reform.
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the mobilization of black women is reliable.
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The protection of black women is not.
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I also want to talk about the inheritance of compound trauma.
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The pattern of harms are reproduced across generations through structural mechanisms, through segregated neighborhoods, underfunded schools, inherited debt, And cultural mechanisms, the controlling image, the strong Black woman script, the silence around sexual violence inside the Black communities.
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The compound is not just what is happening to black women today.
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It is what was done to their grandmothers and to their great grandmothers and the women on the ship and the women in the cane field, the women in the township, the women in the favelas, the women whose granddaughters are listening to this.
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The line is continuous.
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Next, I want to talk about the adultification and the structural assault on black girlhood.
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The compound begins before black women are women.
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The structural assault begins before consent, before agency, before the language a girl has to name what is happening to her exists.
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In 2017, the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality
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The Erasure of Black Girls' Childhood.
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the researchers, Rebecca Epstein, Jamila Blake, and Thalia Gonzalez surveyed adults in the United States about their perceptions of black girls and white girls of the same age.
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Adults perceived black girls as less innocent than white girls, beginning at the age of five.
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Adults believed black girls needed less nurturing, less protection, and less comforting than white girls, beginning at the age of five.
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Adults believed black girls were more knowledgeable about adult topics.
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including sex than white girls beginning at age five.
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The phenomenon is called adultification.
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A twenty nineteen follow up study confirmed that black women had experienced exactly this treatment in their own childhoods.
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So five mechanisms make up the structural assault on adultification.
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Number one, the perceptual mechanism.
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Black girls are seen as older than they are.
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A black 10-year-old is perceived as 13 or 14.
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A black 13-year-old is perceived as a young adult.
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The perception is the precondition for all the other mechanisms.
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Number two, the protective withdrawal mechanisms.
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Because black girls are seen as more adults, they are nurtured less, protected less, comforted less.
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When a black girl reports harm, she is believed less readily.
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When she needs emotional care, she is given less of it.
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Number three, the sexualization mechanism.
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Black girls' bodies are read as adults before they are.
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girl whose body develops at the same rate as a white girl is seen as more sexually mature and more sexually available.
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It is what produces the situation where a black girl is targeted for sexual harassment by adult men in her community, and the community calls her fast rather than calling the men predators.
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four, the criminalization mechanism.
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In US schools, according to federal civil rights data, black girls are suspended at more than five times the rate of white girls.
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The largest racial disparity for any group of any gender in the school discipline system.
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And they are referred to the juvenile justice system at nearly three times the rate of white girls.
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the school administrator who suspends a black eight year old girl for an outburst that would have produced a hug for a white eight year old girl is acting on the adultification belief.
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And number five, the absence mechanism.
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Black girls are systematically absent from the research, the policy, the advocacy, and the cultural representation that is supposed to protect girls.
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The category black girl has had to be built in advocacy and in research against both gendered and racialized defaults.
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The Say Her Name campaign that was launched in 2014 by Kimberley Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum has had to do the work of making black women and girls killed by police visible because the broader Black Lives Matter discourse has centered black men's deaths.
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This mechanism operates across every case.
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The compound begins before black women are women.
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So, how does the compound look like in 2026?
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Let's look at five live sites.
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In the United States, black women earn, as I said, 66% per dollar paid to white men, and more than 300,000 black women have lost their jobs since the beginning of 2025.
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The federal workforce reduction of the second Trump administration disproportionately removed black women from the positions in the federal civil service where they were nearly twice as concentrated as in the labor force as a whole.
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And which has functioned for decades as one of the few sectors where black women could secure stable middle class employment with structural protection.
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The private sector treatment from racial equity hiring compounded the federal losses.
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The 400 year economic compound that began with the unpaid labor of enslaved black women and continued in different legal forms through every subsequent generation is what produced this year's numbers.
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In Brazil, on the evening of March 14, 2018, Rio de Janeiro's City Council woman, Marielle Franco, was shot and killed in her car along with her driver, Anderson Gomes Franco was 38, A black bisexual woman from the Marefavela complex who had built her entire political career documenting police violence in Rios Favelas and the militias that controlled large portion of the city.
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The investigation took six years to convict the two former police officers who pulled the trigger and two more years to convict the man who ordered her killing.
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on February 25, 2026, Brazil Supreme Court unanimously convicted former Congressman Chiquinho Brazao I probably said that correctly.
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incorrectly and his brother Domingo Brazao sentencing each to seventy-six years and three months.
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Justice Carmen Lucia, the only woman on the panel, asked publicly at the close of the trial, How many more Marrielles Brazil would allow to be murdered?
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The militias still operate.
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The land grabs Franco was opposing still happen.
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Black women in Brazilian politics still face political violence at scale.
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according to research compiled after the 2020 municipal elections, approximately eight in ten black women candidates experienced online violence.
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Six in ten experience moral and psychological violence, and five in ten experience institutional violence.
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The verdict matters, but the structure that produced the killings has not been dismantled.
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in South Africa, on November 20, 2025, at the G20 Social Summit in Johannesburg, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the government will classify gender-based violence and femicide as a national disaster.
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And the formal classification under the Disaster Management Act took effect the following day.
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The same day, a nationwide women's shutdown brought the country to a standstill.
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South African police data documents an average of 15 women murdered every single day.
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The femicide rate is among the highest in the world.
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The women that are killed disproportionately are black African women.
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Uyinene Mrwetyana a 19-year-old University of Cape Town student, was raped and murdered at a post office in August 2019, and her killings produced six years of policy commitments that did not produce structural change.
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The declaration is not a solution.
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It does not invoke emergency powers.
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It is an admission after thirty years of refusing to make it, that the structure is producing a body count the states can no longer ignore.
00:24:19.510 --> 00:24:32.195
The compound is the apartheid residue, the post apartheid economy with more than thirty percent unemployment, the cultural impunity around violence against women and the failure of the state's response.
00:24:32.195 --> 00:24:47.482
Across the rest of Africa, the compound operates without the racial discourse architecture that organizes it in the diaspora and that shaped the South African case because the political and economic actors around African women in most countries are also black.
00:24:47.482 --> 00:24:51.726
African women run more than half the continent's small businesses.
00:24:51.726 --> 00:24:55.990
They produce more than half its food and carry almost all of its caregiving.
00:24:55.990 --> 00:25:01.304
Child marriage remains at 31% across Sub-Saharan Africa as of 2024.
00:25:01.304 --> 00:25:04.435
Down from 38% a decade earlier.
00:25:04.435 --> 00:25:06.517
Niger seats at 81%.
00:25:07.448 --> 00:25:20.248
At 78%, Mali at 69%, Nigeria at 64%, with 22 million child brides, the highest absolute number on the continent.
00:25:20.608 --> 00:25:22.611
We should be ashamed.
00:25:23.073 --> 00:25:34.874
Female genital cutting continues to affect an estimated 200 million women and girls globally, the overwhelming majority of them in African countries.
00:25:34.874 --> 00:25:47.484
The compound here is the post-colonial state compound of patriarchy, economic exclusion, and a development model that extracts women's labor and returns minimal protection.
00:25:47.484 --> 00:25:51.086
For black, queer, and trans women, the compound has an additional layer.
00:25:51.086 --> 00:26:07.304
The Trans Murder Monitoring report published by Transgender Europe in November 2025 Documented 281 trans and gender diverse people murdered worldwide between October 2024 and September 2025.
00:26:07.345 --> 00:26:11.365
88% of the victims were black or brown.
00:26:11.365 --> 00:26:14.989
90% were trans women or trans feminine people.
00:26:14.989 --> 00:26:19.592
Brazil led the global count for the 18th consecutive year.
00:26:19.592 --> 00:26:30.028
14% of the murdered were activists or movement leaders, up from 9% in 2024 and 6% in 2023.
00:26:30.028 --> 00:26:36.582
The researchers explicitly noted that the apparent decrease from the previous year.
00:26:36.582 --> 00:26:44.010
Likely reflect reduced media coverage and underreporting rather than actual reduction in violence.
00:26:44.010 --> 00:26:52.698
I want to name something that this episode is obligated to name, which is the role of cisgender black women in the violence against black trans people.
00:26:52.698 --> 00:27:07.670
Across the diaspora, cisgendered black women have participated in the cultural production that marks black trans women as deceptive, as predatory, as not real women, as appropriating Black womanhood.
00:27:07.670 --> 00:27:11.494
The participation is not universal, it is also not rare.
00:27:11.676 --> 00:27:19.541
The compound black women carry does not exempt them from the analysis when they participate in producing other people's compounds.
00:27:19.541 --> 00:27:27.189
The black women's movement that does not include black trans women is not the black women's movement this episode is talking about.
00:27:27.189 --> 00:27:30.873
As usual, I anticipate some critiques, so let's get into them.
00:27:30.873 --> 00:27:33.102
The first, the oppression Olympics.
00:27:33.102 --> 00:27:45.031
the framing that black women are the most oppressed group in the world can be heard by someone, including some black feminist, as a competitive claim about suffering that forecloses solidarity.
00:27:45.031 --> 00:27:46.236
That is not my goal.
00:27:46.236 --> 00:27:52.000
Audrey Lorde for example, explicitly rejected the hierarchy of oppression in 1983.
00:27:52.074 --> 00:27:57.848
The argument this episode is making is about positionality, not about the ranking of pain.
00:27:57.848 --> 00:28:09.409
Black women sit at an intersection of racism, patriarchy, and anti-blackness that the dominant analyses of either race or gender systematically fail to see.
00:28:09.409 --> 00:28:16.473
And the failure produces compound harms that the dominant analysis cannot address.
00:28:19.688 --> 00:28:19.846
The second, the class and celebrity exception.
00:28:19.846 --> 00:28:22.248
Sure, Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire.
00:28:22.248 --> 00:28:24.170
Michelle Obama was first lady.
00:28:24.170 --> 00:28:30.698
Beyonce is the most awarded artist in Grammy history, and Kamala Harris was vice president.
00:28:30.698 --> 00:28:37.226
The structure can absorb individual exceptions without changing what it does to most black women most of the time.
00:28:37.226 --> 00:28:41.521
Class is a real axis of differentiation inside the compound.
00:28:41.521 --> 00:28:50.851
A billionaire black woman still experiences misogynoir but she experiences it inside a class position that buffers many of the structural harms.
00:28:50.851 --> 00:28:53.553
I am not going to pretend that this buffering is not real.
00:28:53.553 --> 00:29:00.010
and yet it does not mean the exceptions dilute the structural claim about the rule.
00:29:00.010 --> 00:29:09.205
the third the "but black men" critique naming black women's specific experience of compounded harm is sometimes received as divisive.
00:29:09.205 --> 00:29:11.268
The data on black men is real.
00:29:11.268 --> 00:29:22.373
Black American men are killed by police at nearly three times the rate of white men, And they are incarcerated at a rate far outside of proportion of their share of the population.
00:29:22.373 --> 00:29:28.005
The compound black women carry is structurally distinct from what black men carry.
00:29:28.005 --> 00:29:30.026
The two are not in competition.
00:29:30.026 --> 00:29:34.993
naming the compound makes black men's specific harms more visible, not less.
00:29:35.075 --> 00:29:41.336
Solidarity across gender within the black community require being able to name what each is carrying.
00:29:41.336 --> 00:29:43.939
The fourth is the intra-black critique.
00:29:43.939 --> 00:29:57.711
Cis Black women have participated in violence against black trans women, in colorism against darker skinned black women, in violence against black queer people, in the policing of black girls' bodies through respectability discourse.
00:29:57.711 --> 00:29:59.321
not a moral exemption.
00:29:59.321 --> 00:30:05.115
Black women are not exempt from being analyzed when they participate in producing harm.
00:30:05.115 --> 00:30:06.840
To other black women.
00:30:06.840 --> 00:30:08.910
There are no innocent parties at scale.
00:30:08.910 --> 00:30:11.060
The fifth is the agency critique.
00:30:11.060 --> 00:30:14.482
Black women are not just victims of compound oppression.
00:30:14.482 --> 00:30:20.125
They are intellectuals, organizers, leaders, mothers, builders.
00:30:20.125 --> 00:30:23.027
The Combahee River Collective was black women.
00:30:23.027 --> 00:30:25.048
Crenshaw is a black woman.
00:30:25.048 --> 00:30:26.989
Collins is a black woman.
00:30:26.989 --> 00:30:29.770
Oyewummi is a black woman.
00:30:29.770 --> 00:30:32.693
Marielle Franco was a black woman.
00:30:32.693 --> 00:30:35.660
Sueli Caniero is a black woman.
00:30:35.660 --> 00:30:39.457
The agency is not in tension with the structural diagnosis.
00:30:39.457 --> 00:30:44.276
The agency is what produced this structural diagnosis.
00:30:44.276 --> 00:30:50.391
So now I want to run this through my three clarities framework identity, context, and power.
00:30:50.391 --> 00:30:55.076
I have articulated every episode of this series.
00:30:55.076 --> 00:30:59.740
From inside the system I am naming, and this one is no different.
00:30:59.740 --> 00:31:01.056
I am a black woman.
00:31:01.056 --> 00:31:13.602
I have faced misogynoir including its violent forms, and my Nigerian upbringing, my education, my privilege, and my profession has not exempted me.
00:31:13.602 --> 00:31:15.324
but this section is not about me.
00:31:15.324 --> 00:31:23.169
I want to turn the diagnostic framework I use in all of my work, the three clarities, directly towards Black women.
00:31:23.430 --> 00:31:26.752
Because the system is not going to hand us any clarity.
00:31:26.752 --> 00:31:30.936
And clarity is the one thing the system most needs us not to have.
00:31:30.936 --> 00:31:32.647
So identity clarity.
00:31:32.647 --> 00:31:33.788
Who are you?
00:31:34.009 --> 00:31:37.393
When you strip away everything the system has told you that you are.
00:31:37.393 --> 00:31:41.576
You're not the mammy who exists to absorb everyone else's needs.
00:31:41.576 --> 00:31:46.257
You're not the Jezebel whose body is presumed available.
00:31:46.337 --> 00:31:51.618
You are not the sapphire whose every boundary is read as aggression.
00:31:51.660 --> 00:31:57.682
You are not the strong black woman who is permitted to carry everything and allowed to ask for nothing.
00:31:57.682 --> 00:31:59.665
You are not the angry black woman.
00:31:59.665 --> 00:32:01.708
You are not the welfare queen.
00:32:01.708 --> 00:32:08.214
You are not any of those controlling images, the systems built to manage you.
00:32:08.636 --> 00:32:11.760
Those images are not descriptions of you.
00:32:11.760 --> 00:32:14.535
They are instruments for administering you.
00:32:14.535 --> 00:32:19.976
Strip them away, all of them, and look at what is actually there.
00:32:19.977 --> 00:32:23.067
What is actually there is a person with capability.
00:32:23.067 --> 00:32:26.449
The system has spent centuries trying to make invisible.
00:32:26.449 --> 00:32:33.432
Standing at the end of a line of women who were never supposed to survive, and you survived anyway.
00:32:33.432 --> 00:32:39.846
This is an identity that many of us share, not what the system assigned to us.
00:32:39.846 --> 00:32:49.723
What you actually are and where you actually come from is from a history of giants.
00:32:49.723 --> 00:32:53.483
The system needs you to believe you are what it says you are.
00:32:53.727 --> 00:32:57.656
The first act of clarity is to refuse.
00:32:58.160 --> 00:33:02.229
Context clarity See the system for what it actually is.
00:33:02.229 --> 00:33:05.500
The maternal mortality rate is not your bad luck.
00:33:05.500 --> 00:33:08.583
The pay gap is not your failure to negotiate.
00:33:08.583 --> 00:33:13.737
The promotion that did not come is not because you did not show up every day at the office.
00:33:13.957 --> 00:33:19.500
The idea dismissed in the meeting and praised when a white colleague repeats it 10 minutes later.
00:33:19.799 --> 00:33:28.001
The moment you were mistaken for the assistance or the help in the room that you're leading, the harm you reported and were not believed about.
00:33:28.001 --> 00:33:29.932
None of it is personal.
00:33:29.952 --> 00:33:31.523
All of it is structural.
00:33:31.523 --> 00:33:35.345
The system is invested in reducing black women to dust.
00:33:35.345 --> 00:33:38.546
I am not using this language for effect.
00:33:38.645 --> 00:33:48.788
I am describing what the data in this episode shows the system does reliably across every geography in every generation.
00:33:49.128 --> 00:33:52.259
When you see that clearly, two things happen.
00:33:52.521 --> 00:33:58.464
You stopped spending your energy trying to fix yourself or a system that was never built to recognize you.
00:33:58.464 --> 00:34:09.391
And you stop waiting for the system to suddenly see you because a system constructed to not see you does not wake up one morning and go, hello, I see you.
00:34:09.512 --> 00:34:11.393
Clarity is protection.
00:34:11.393 --> 00:34:18.737
It is what makes you harder to manipulate, harder to gaslight, harder to mobilize against your own interest.
00:34:18.759 --> 00:34:21.219
See the system, name it.
00:34:21.302 --> 00:34:26.380
Do not let it convince you that what it does to you is something you did to yourself.
00:34:26.380 --> 00:34:27.862
Power clarity.
00:34:27.922 --> 00:34:32.005
Know what you can actually move and what you cannot.
00:34:32.126 --> 00:34:35.128
You cannot move the system on its own timeline.
00:34:35.210 --> 00:34:37.512
It will not be dismantled this year.
00:34:37.552 --> 00:34:40.135
It may not be dismantled in your lifetime.
00:34:40.135 --> 00:34:46.023
This is the hard truth, and I will not soften it because softening it is its own kind of lie.
00:34:46.023 --> 00:34:49.135
But what follows from it is not despair.
00:34:49.135 --> 00:34:55.539
If the system is not going to change in time to save you, then waiting for rates is not a strategy.
00:34:55.539 --> 00:34:57.681
Building is a strategy.
00:34:57.681 --> 00:34:59.460
Black women already know this.
00:34:59.460 --> 00:35:03.603
African women have the highest rate of entrepreneurship in the world.
00:35:03.603 --> 00:35:11.887
Not because the formal economy welcomed them, but precisely because it did not, and they built anyway.
00:35:11.989 --> 00:35:13.030
That is the model.
00:35:13.030 --> 00:35:14.990
Build your own damn table.
00:35:14.990 --> 00:35:26.619
build your own businesses, your own institutions, your own networks, your own wealth, your own communities of women who see each other clearly and hold each other up.
00:35:26.619 --> 00:35:29.050
Support black women where you can.
00:35:29.050 --> 00:35:31.282
Buy from black women where possible.
00:35:31.282 --> 00:35:33.340
Move forward even when you fight.
00:35:33.340 --> 00:35:36.572
Because the fighting and the building are not in competition.
00:35:36.572 --> 00:35:37.847
They are the same work.
00:35:37.847 --> 00:35:42.389
And do the work, knowing you may not reap the benefits of it.
00:35:42.389 --> 00:35:48.393
The way the women before you fought for a future they did not leave to enter.
00:35:48.434 --> 00:35:51.797
They built the tables you and I are sitting up now.
00:35:51.797 --> 00:35:53.929
You and I will build the table.
00:35:53.929 --> 00:35:58.382
Our daughters and the women not yet born will sit at.
00:35:58.663 --> 00:36:00.885
The work outlives the worker.
00:36:00.885 --> 00:36:02.617
That is not the tragedy.
00:36:02.617 --> 00:36:08.344
That is how every table any black woman has ever sat at got built.
00:36:08.344 --> 00:36:17.568
So in closing, I wanna reiterate the compounded harm that black women experience is multiplicative, not additive.
00:36:17.568 --> 00:36:31.282
It is administered through controlling images, through the dual erasure in discourse around gender and discourse around race, through extraction without recognition, through the mobilization paradox.
00:36:31.282 --> 00:36:34.655
And through trauma inherited across generations.
00:36:34.655 --> 00:36:42.677
It begins in the adultification of black girls and it operates in 2026 across every geography this chapter has examined and more.
00:36:42.677 --> 00:36:55.945
The lineage that named it goes back fifty years in three continents, built by the women whose tools I employ in this episode, whose tools I employ in my work.
00:36:55.945 --> 00:37:14.041
And it is one part of the larger system this series has been naming white terrorism, doing its most concentrated work at the point where racism and patriarchy and anti blackness meet on a single body.
00:37:14.041 --> 00:37:15.981
So see the system.
00:37:16.402 --> 00:37:21.574
Refuse what it says that you are and build anyway.
00:37:21.621 --> 00:37:23.045
this was episode five.
00:37:23.045 --> 00:37:29.989
if this episode named something you've been carrying, share it with a woman who needs to hear it or who needs the language.
00:37:30.291 --> 00:37:34.135
As usual, subscribe to Overnight Wisdom wherever you get your podcast.
00:37:34.135 --> 00:37:43.233
join the weekly clarity newsletter at chisomudeze.com where I bring the same structural analysis to leadership, power and systems every week.
00:37:43.233 --> 00:37:50.735
And if your organization is ready to interrogate its systems rather than decorate them, that is one of the work that I do.
00:37:50.735 --> 00:37:51.954
Let's chat.
00:37:52.416 --> 00:37:55.702
I'm Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom.
00:37:55.702 --> 00:37:57.646
Thank you so much for being here.
00:00:03.306 --> 00:00:11.522
When the harm of racism meets the harm of patriarchy meets the harm of anti blackness, the result is not the sum of three harms.
00:00:11.522 --> 00:00:25.373
It is something different, something multiplied, something that has produced a structural position so specific that the dominant analysis of either race or gender systematically fails to see it.
00:00:25.780 --> 00:00:34.222
Black women remain the most under-appreciated, undercared for, and underprotected group of women in the world.
00:00:34.284 --> 00:00:39.015
Malcolm X said something close to this in 1962 about the United States.
00:00:39.015 --> 00:00:41.017
The line has not been retired.
00:00:41.017 --> 00:00:43.398
It has only been globalized.
00:00:43.398 --> 00:00:47.878
And yet, black women continue to show up for everyone else.
00:00:48.418 --> 00:00:53.280
Most black women are predictable in that they will always stand up for what is right.
00:00:53.280 --> 00:00:56.161
They will show up politically to vote for justice.
00:00:56.161 --> 00:00:59.881
They will hold up a world that continues to not see them.
00:01:00.241 --> 00:01:05.412
Black women know that when things get bad, it gets worse for them.
00:01:05.472 --> 00:01:10.236
I believe the comedian Trevor Noah said this in his departing speech years ago.
00:01:10.236 --> 00:01:18.838
In the United States in 2025, black women earned 66 cents for every dollar paid to white men.
00:01:18.859 --> 00:01:22.340
White women earned 81 cents.
00:01:22.340 --> 00:01:26.061
Black men earned roughly 73 cents.
00:01:26.260 --> 00:01:30.022
The gap between black women and white women is not the gender gap.
00:01:30.022 --> 00:01:33.873
The gap between black women and black men is not the race gap.
00:01:34.215 --> 00:01:40.367
Black women fall through both analysis and the place where they fall is the subject of this episode.
00:01:40.710 --> 00:01:47.825
More than 300,000 black women in the United States have lost their jobs since the beginning of 2025.
00:01:48.045 --> 00:01:58.652
The glass ceiling that has been named for white women, the concrete ceiling that has been named for women of color in corporate research, does not describe what black women face.
00:01:58.652 --> 00:02:01.593
What black women face is a wall.
00:02:01.739 --> 00:02:16.292
They can rarely exhale in a world that does not see them as soft, a world that extracts from them just as quickly and as mercilessly as it calls them aggressive for stating what in the white woman would be called passionate.
00:02:16.292 --> 00:02:19.526
In Africa, the story is structural in a different shape.
00:02:19.526 --> 00:02:23.868
Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship in the world.
00:02:23.868 --> 00:02:29.653
African women make up 58% of the continent's self-employed population.
00:02:29.653 --> 00:02:34.698
They run roughly 70% of informal cross-border trade.
00:02:34.698 --> 00:02:40.162
They contribute 13% of the continent's gross domestic products.
00:02:40.235 --> 00:02:43.538
When a woman is educated, the return compounds.
00:02:43.538 --> 00:02:52.526
She elevates her household, the health of her children, the schooling of her daughters, the income of her entire lineage.
00:02:52.709 --> 00:03:08.408
And yet, in twenty twenty four, female-led startup on the continent received two percent of all African startup funding, forty eight million dollars to women, two point two billion to men.
00:03:09.074 --> 00:03:13.798
gender gap is 30%, six points wider than the global average.
00:03:13.798 --> 00:03:21.861
The work is being done by the women, the recognition, the financing, and the protection, are almost non-existence.
00:03:21.861 --> 00:03:29.282
in the United Kingdom black African women earn nine point three percent less than white British workers.
00:03:29.282 --> 00:03:35.909
And black women die in pregnancy and the postpartum period at nearly three times the rate of white women.
00:03:35.909 --> 00:03:41.752
In London, the ethnicity pay gap reaches 23.8%, the highest in the country.
00:03:41.835 --> 00:03:55.439
Diane Abbott, the first black woman elected to the British Parliament in 1987, and still the longest serving black member of that body, 45% of all the abusive tweets.
00:03:55.439 --> 00:04:03.795
Directed at women MPs in the run-up to the 2017 election, according to Amnesty International's research.
00:04:03.991 --> 00:04:15.021
In 2024, a Conservative Party donor was reported to have said Abbot should be shot, and that looking at her made him want to hate all black women.
00:04:15.043 --> 00:04:17.665
This is one black woman in one country.
00:04:17.665 --> 00:04:19.918
The pattern is everywhere.
00:04:20.028 --> 00:04:23.432
I'm Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom.
00:04:23.673 --> 00:04:30.942
This episode is part of a series on the system I call white terrorism rather than white supremacy.
00:04:31.062 --> 00:04:32.564
And it stands on its own.
00:04:32.564 --> 00:04:37.911
So if this is the first one you are hearing, you will not be lost So let's jump in.
00:04:37.911 --> 00:04:42.826
I wanna talk about the impact of compounding harm on black women.
00:04:42.826 --> 00:04:49.408
My claim that compounding is multiplicative is structural, not arithmetic.
00:04:49.408 --> 00:04:56.312
The misogyny applied to black women is not the misogyny applied to white women applied to a black body.
00:04:56.312 --> 00:04:58.233
It is its own technology.
00:04:58.233 --> 00:05:05.338
The racism applied to black women is not the racism applied to black men applied to a female body.
00:05:05.338 --> 00:05:07.319
It is its own technology.
00:05:07.319 --> 00:05:11.976
The compound is what this technology uses when they meet.
00:05:11.976 --> 00:05:14.939
Misogynoir is the cleanest example.
00:05:14.939 --> 00:05:29.471
Moya Bailey coined the term in 2010 to name the specific contempt for black women that operates as neither generic misogyny nor generic anti-blackness, but on its own a cultural production.
00:05:29.471 --> 00:05:36.158
The angry black woman trope is misogynoir There is no parallel angry white woman trope of the same cultural weight.
00:05:36.158 --> 00:05:40.601
And no parallel angry black man trope in the same register.
00:05:40.601 --> 00:05:45.867
The mammy archetype is misogynoir The Jezebel archetype is misogynoir.
00:05:45.867 --> 00:06:03.410
The sapphire, the welfare queen, the strong black woman trap that demands and then punishes its as - unfeminine are all misogynoir Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thoughts in 1990 called this controlling images.
00:06:03.410 --> 00:06:07.132
They are an apparatus that does structural work.
00:06:07.132 --> 00:06:10.235
They tell employers the kind of worker a black woman is.
00:06:10.235 --> 00:06:13.276
They tell juries the kind of defendant she is.
00:06:13.276 --> 00:06:16.678
They tell doctors what type of patient she is.
00:06:16.678 --> 00:06:22.702
They tell schools what kind of a student a black girl is before she enters the classroom.
00:06:22.718 --> 00:06:27.634
The controlling image is the technology by which the compound is administered.
00:06:27.634 --> 00:06:36.928
I also want connect this to the arguments the rest of the series has been building because the compound is not a separate phenomenon from the system I have been naming.
00:06:36.928 --> 00:06:39.824
is instead that system concentrated.
00:06:39.824 --> 00:06:53.204
in the first episode I argued that what we call white supremacy is accurately called white terrorism and that it required patriarchy to function because you cannot run a system of domination without a hierarchy to run it through.
00:06:53.204 --> 00:07:03.663
In the last episode, so in episode four, I argued that racism is the operating system that white terrorism builds and that anti-blackness is its foundational case.
00:07:03.663 --> 00:07:13.007
The compound is what happens at the point where racism, patriarchy, and anti-blackness converge on a single body.
00:07:13.007 --> 00:07:32.177
That point is where white terrorism does its most concentrated work and it hides it most completely because the woman standing at that point is the exact person the racial analysis is trained to read as a man, and the gender analysis is trained to read as white.
00:07:32.177 --> 00:07:35.257
She disappears in the gap between the two.
00:07:35.257 --> 00:07:38.680
The compound is the gap occupied.
00:07:38.680 --> 00:07:40.882
The numbers tell the same structural story.
00:07:40.882 --> 00:07:54.827
The Institute for Women's Policy Research has projected, based on the current rate of progression, that pay equity for black women in the United States will not arrive until the year 2227.
00:07:54.827 --> 00:08:01.194
In English, 201 years from now, six generations.
00:08:01.283 --> 00:08:04.569
current rate of progress is not a rate of progress for black women.
00:08:04.569 --> 00:08:07.692
black women are not on a trajectory towards equity.
00:08:07.692 --> 00:08:11.237
They are on a trajectory that flattens before it gets there.
00:08:11.237 --> 00:08:12.699
So I want to talk about the lineage.
00:08:12.699 --> 00:08:15.182
The argument I am making is not new.
00:08:15.343 --> 00:08:24.742
It is an expression of a tradition that has been building for at least five decades with roots in black women's writing and organizing going back much further.
00:08:24.742 --> 00:08:31.595
the compound has been taught about, named, and analyzed across continents by women for a long time.
00:08:37.754 --> 00:08:41.825
the April nineteen seventy-seven Combahee River Collective statement is the earliest rigorous articulation of what we now call intersectional analysis.
00:08:41.825 --> 00:08:52.317
The Combahee River Collective was a group of black lesbian feminists in Boston, including Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and - Demita Frazier.
00:08:52.317 --> 00:09:03.740
Their statement named the interlocking systems of oppression and argued that the sentences of those oppressions create the conditions of black women's lives.
00:09:03.740 --> 00:09:07.796
That argument is the structural claim of this episode.
00:09:07.796 --> 00:09:10.996
Bell Hooks published Ain't I a Woman?
00:09:10.996 --> 00:09:21.892
Black Women and Feminism in 1981, taking her title from Sojourner's Truth 1851 speech at the women's convention in Akron, Ohio.
00:09:21.892 --> 00:09:29.474
and making the argument that black women have been erased from both white feminism and black liberation.
00:09:29.474 --> 00:09:49.509
Hortense Spillers in her 1987 essay, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe, Extended the analysis to the specific way slavery and its afterlives produced black womanhood as a category outside the protection of gender as the culture defined it.
00:09:49.791 --> 00:10:03.284
Hall, Bell Scott, and Smith edited All the Women Are Whites, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave in 1982, with the title carrying the entire argument.
00:10:03.306 --> 00:10:13.514
Lord wrote, There is no hierarchy in oppression in 1983, naming the interlocking nature of the work and refusing the luxury of fighting only on one front.
00:10:13.535 --> 00:10:35.344
Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 coined the term intersectionality in an article in the University of Chicago's Legal Forum that demonstrated through US anti-discrimination law how black women were systematically erased by courts that asked them to choose between being discriminated against as a woman or as black people.
00:10:35.400 --> 00:10:39.535
Her 1991 piece in the Stanford Law Review extended the analysis.
00:10:39.535 --> 00:10:48.445
Patricia Hill Collins published Black Feminist Thoughts in 1990, naming the matrix of domination, the controlling images, and the outsider within.
00:10:48.445 --> 00:10:51.029
African black feminism has its own genealogy.
00:10:51.029 --> 00:11:10.052
Oyeronke Oyewomi's The Invention of Women in 1997 argued that Western gender as a body-based binary was imposed on Yoruba society by colonialism, and that the gender hierarchy operating in African societies now is part of a colonial inheritance.
00:11:10.052 --> 00:11:23.520
Ifi Amadiume's male daughters, female husbands, in 1987 documented evil social roles, including women who married women and women who held positions, the colonial binary erased.
00:11:23.520 --> 00:11:31.187
Amina Mama has spent decades documenting how the postcolonial African state administers its specific gender violence.
00:11:31.187 --> 00:11:46.611
Sueli Carniero coined an enegrecer o feminismo, to blacken feminism, arguing that the Brazilian women's movement had centered white women and erased black Brazilian women.
00:11:46.611 --> 00:11:51.818
And Leila Gonzalez made related arguments through the 1980s.
00:11:51.818 --> 00:11:56.221
Moya Bailey coined misogynoir in 2010 - This is the lineage.
00:11:56.221 --> 00:12:02.331
The compound has been named for at least fifty years on at least three continents.
00:12:02.331 --> 00:12:09.222
The argument here is the present tense iteration of a tradition the present tense has not caught up to.
00:12:09.222 --> 00:12:11.048
So what does the compound do?
00:12:11.048 --> 00:12:14.677
The compound is not just a statistical position.
00:12:14.677 --> 00:12:19.102
It is a set of mechanisms that operate every single day.
00:12:19.102 --> 00:12:24.086
The controlling images that Collins documented in 1990 remain operative.
00:12:24.086 --> 00:12:32.153
The Mammy is now the corporate black woman expected to absorb her white colleagues' anxieties and never raise her voice.
00:12:32.153 --> 00:12:40.159
The Jezebel is the cultural insistence that black women's sexuality is excessive and not entitled to consent.
00:12:40.159 --> 00:12:48.755
The sapphire is the angry black woman trope that converts any expression of disagreements into evidence of unprofessional aggression.
00:12:48.755 --> 00:12:54.566
The welfare queen was always a tool for dismantling the social safety net by racializing it.
00:12:54.566 --> 00:12:58.931
The strong black woman trope pretends to be a compliment.
00:12:58.931 --> 00:13:08.236
It tells black women that they can carry anything, which has the practical effect of telling everyone else that they do not have to help her carry it.
00:13:08.236 --> 00:13:21.008
Cheryl Wood Giscombe's research on what she calls the Superwoman schema, has linked the internalization of the script to delayed help seeking, untreated stress.
00:13:21.008 --> 00:13:23.879
And worse health outcomes.
00:13:24.032 --> 00:13:26.384
The compliment is the cage.
00:13:26.384 --> 00:13:31.929
The dual erasure that the 1982 anthology named is still operating.
00:13:31.929 --> 00:13:37.154
When black women raise gender based violence, they are told they are dividing the black community.
00:13:37.154 --> 00:13:42.620
When they raise racial discrimination, they are told that they are dividing the women's movement.
00:13:42.620 --> 00:13:50.568
Whichever movement they turn to expect them to drop the other half of their existence at the price of admission.
00:13:50.568 --> 00:13:54.250
I want to talk about some of the mechanisms of how it shakes out.
00:13:54.250 --> 00:13:57.832
First, the labor extraction without recognition mechanism.
00:13:57.832 --> 00:14:10.133
Black women across the diaspora do disproportionate amounts of political organizing, community caregiving, family stabilization, and emotional labor across racial and gender lines.
00:14:10.552 --> 00:14:17.360
African women contribute 13% to the continent's GDP and receive 2% of formal investments.
00:14:17.360 --> 00:14:21.708
Black American women vote at higher rates than any other US demographic group.
00:14:21.708 --> 00:14:34.030
Black South African women hold up household economies in the post apartheid period in ways national statistics on - undercounts The work flows one direction and the reward flows another.
00:14:34.030 --> 00:14:37.472
Another mechanism is the political mobilization paradox.
00:14:37.472 --> 00:14:46.697
Black women, particularly Black American women, are reliably the most engaged voting demographic in US progressive politics.
00:14:46.697 --> 00:14:51.740
In 2020, roughly 9 in 10 Black women voted for Joe Biden.
00:14:51.740 --> 00:14:56.163
In 2024, roughly 9 in 10 black women voted for Kamala Harris.
00:14:56.163 --> 00:15:04.662
A black woman who's lost some analysis attributed in part to misogynoir The very compound this episode describes.
00:15:04.662 --> 00:15:13.054
Black women have been called upon repeatedly to save American democracy in moments of national crisis.
00:15:13.135 --> 00:15:14.251
They have shown up.
00:15:14.251 --> 00:15:17.577
The democracy they show up for has not shown up for them.
00:15:17.577 --> 00:15:20.320
The maternal mortality rates do not improve.
00:15:20.320 --> 00:15:22.461
the pay gap do not close.
00:15:22.461 --> 00:15:31.490
The police violence against black women, including Breonna Taylor, killed in her own home in March 2020, does not produce structural reform.
00:15:31.490 --> 00:15:34.413
the mobilization of black women is reliable.
00:15:34.413 --> 00:15:37.130
The protection of black women is not.
00:15:37.130 --> 00:15:40.251
I also want to talk about the inheritance of compound trauma.
00:15:40.251 --> 00:16:00.413
The pattern of harms are reproduced across generations through structural mechanisms, through segregated neighborhoods, underfunded schools, inherited debt, And cultural mechanisms, the controlling image, the strong Black woman script, the silence around sexual violence inside the Black communities.
00:16:00.413 --> 00:16:03.934
The compound is not just what is happening to black women today.
00:16:03.955 --> 00:16:19.101
It is what was done to their grandmothers and to their great grandmothers and the women on the ship and the women in the cane field, the women in the township, the women in the favelas, the women whose granddaughters are listening to this.
00:16:19.222 --> 00:16:21.529
The line is continuous.
00:16:21.529 --> 00:16:27.552
Next, I want to talk about the adultification and the structural assault on black girlhood.
00:16:27.634 --> 00:16:31.676
The compound begins before black women are women.
00:16:31.676 --> 00:16:40.972
The structural assault begins before consent, before agency, before the language a girl has to name what is happening to her exists.
00:16:40.972 --> 00:16:45.131
In 2017, the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality
00:16:45.144 --> 00:16:49.998
The Erasure of Black Girls' Childhood.
00:16:49.998 --> 00:17:02.494
the researchers, Rebecca Epstein, Jamila Blake, and Thalia Gonzalez surveyed adults in the United States about their perceptions of black girls and white girls of the same age.
00:17:02.494 --> 00:17:09.432
Adults perceived black girls as less innocent than white girls, beginning at the age of five.
00:17:09.432 --> 00:17:21.176
Adults believed black girls needed less nurturing, less protection, and less comforting than white girls, beginning at the age of five.
00:17:21.657 --> 00:17:26.961
Adults believed black girls were more knowledgeable about adult topics.
00:17:26.961 --> 00:17:32.636
including sex than white girls beginning at age five.
00:17:32.636 --> 00:17:35.304
The phenomenon is called adultification.
00:17:35.304 --> 00:17:42.458
A twenty nineteen follow up study confirmed that black women had experienced exactly this treatment in their own childhoods.
00:17:42.458 --> 00:17:48.071
So five mechanisms make up the structural assault on adultification.
00:17:48.413 --> 00:17:51.134
Number one, the perceptual mechanism.
00:17:51.134 --> 00:17:53.385
Black girls are seen as older than they are.
00:17:53.385 --> 00:17:57.488
A black 10-year-old is perceived as 13 or 14.
00:17:57.509 --> 00:18:01.592
A black 13-year-old is perceived as a young adult.
00:18:01.592 --> 00:18:05.705
The perception is the precondition for all the other mechanisms.
00:18:05.705 --> 00:18:08.657
Number two, the protective withdrawal mechanisms.
00:18:08.657 --> 00:18:15.323
Because black girls are seen as more adults, they are nurtured less, protected less, comforted less.
00:18:15.323 --> 00:18:19.526
When a black girl reports harm, she is believed less readily.
00:18:19.526 --> 00:18:23.460
When she needs emotional care, she is given less of it.
00:18:23.460 --> 00:18:26.002
Number three, the sexualization mechanism.
00:18:26.002 --> 00:18:30.695
Black girls' bodies are read as adults before they are.
00:18:30.799 --> 00:18:38.906
girl whose body develops at the same rate as a white girl is seen as more sexually mature and more sexually available.
00:18:38.906 --> 00:18:52.490
It is what produces the situation where a black girl is targeted for sexual harassment by adult men in her community, and the community calls her fast rather than calling the men predators.
00:18:52.517 --> 00:18:55.269
four, the criminalization mechanism.
00:18:55.269 --> 00:19:04.817
In US schools, according to federal civil rights data, black girls are suspended at more than five times the rate of white girls.
00:19:04.817 --> 00:19:11.483
The largest racial disparity for any group of any gender in the school discipline system.
00:19:11.483 --> 00:19:17.984
And they are referred to the juvenile justice system at nearly three times the rate of white girls.
00:19:17.984 --> 00:19:30.508
the school administrator who suspends a black eight year old girl for an outburst that would have produced a hug for a white eight year old girl is acting on the adultification belief.
00:19:30.508 --> 00:19:33.801
And number five, the absence mechanism.
00:19:33.801 --> 00:19:44.448
Black girls are systematically absent from the research, the policy, the advocacy, and the cultural representation that is supposed to protect girls.
00:19:44.448 --> 00:19:55.173
The category black girl has had to be built in advocacy and in research against both gendered and racialized defaults.
00:19:55.173 --> 00:20:15.906
The Say Her Name campaign that was launched in 2014 by Kimberley Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum has had to do the work of making black women and girls killed by police visible because the broader Black Lives Matter discourse has centered black men's deaths.
00:20:15.906 --> 00:20:19.247
This mechanism operates across every case.
00:20:19.247 --> 00:20:22.516
The compound begins before black women are women.
00:20:22.516 --> 00:20:25.386
So, how does the compound look like in 2026?
00:20:25.386 --> 00:20:27.367
Let's look at five live sites.
00:20:27.367 --> 00:20:39.894
In the United States, black women earn, as I said, 66% per dollar paid to white men, and more than 300,000 black women have lost their jobs since the beginning of 2025.
00:20:39.894 --> 00:20:53.719
The federal workforce reduction of the second Trump administration disproportionately removed black women from the positions in the federal civil service where they were nearly twice as concentrated as in the labor force as a whole.
00:20:53.719 --> 00:21:02.200
And which has functioned for decades as one of the few sectors where black women could secure stable middle class employment with structural protection.
00:21:02.200 --> 00:21:06.566
The private sector treatment from racial equity hiring compounded the federal losses.
00:21:06.566 --> 00:21:22.848
The 400 year economic compound that began with the unpaid labor of enslaved black women and continued in different legal forms through every subsequent generation is what produced this year's numbers.
00:21:22.848 --> 00:21:49.787
In Brazil, on the evening of March 14, 2018, Rio de Janeiro's City Council woman, Marielle Franco, was shot and killed in her car along with her driver, Anderson Gomes Franco was 38, A black bisexual woman from the Marefavela complex who had built her entire political career documenting police violence in Rios Favelas and the militias that controlled large portion of the city.
00:21:49.787 --> 00:21:59.800
The investigation took six years to convict the two former police officers who pulled the trigger and two more years to convict the man who ordered her killing.
00:21:59.800 --> 00:22:10.634
on February 25, 2026, Brazil Supreme Court unanimously convicted former Congressman Chiquinho Brazao I probably said that correctly.
00:22:10.634 --> 00:22:17.711
incorrectly and his brother Domingo Brazao sentencing each to seventy-six years and three months.
00:22:17.711 --> 00:22:28.560
Justice Carmen Lucia, the only woman on the panel, asked publicly at the close of the trial, How many more Marrielles Brazil would allow to be murdered?
00:22:28.560 --> 00:22:30.382
The militias still operate.
00:22:30.382 --> 00:22:33.855
The land grabs Franco was opposing still happen.
00:22:33.855 --> 00:22:38.941
Black women in Brazilian politics still face political violence at scale.
00:22:38.941 --> 00:22:49.862
according to research compiled after the 2020 municipal elections, approximately eight in ten black women candidates experienced online violence.
00:22:49.862 --> 00:22:59.032
Six in ten experience moral and psychological violence, and five in ten experience institutional violence.
00:22:59.032 --> 00:23:04.747
The verdict matters, but the structure that produced the killings has not been dismantled.
00:23:04.747 --> 00:23:20.326
in South Africa, on November 20, 2025, at the G20 Social Summit in Johannesburg, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the government will classify gender-based violence and femicide as a national disaster.
00:23:20.326 --> 00:23:27.051
And the formal classification under the Disaster Management Act took effect the following day.
00:23:27.092 --> 00:23:32.191
The same day, a nationwide women's shutdown brought the country to a standstill.
00:23:32.191 --> 00:23:39.740
South African police data documents an average of 15 women murdered every single day.
00:23:40.000 --> 00:23:43.346
The femicide rate is among the highest in the world.
00:23:43.346 --> 00:23:47.626
The women that are killed disproportionately are black African women.
00:23:47.626 --> 00:24:04.791
Uyinene Mrwetyana a 19-year-old University of Cape Town student, was raped and murdered at a post office in August 2019, and her killings produced six years of policy commitments that did not produce structural change.
00:24:04.791 --> 00:24:07.594
The declaration is not a solution.
00:24:07.594 --> 00:24:10.734
It does not invoke emergency powers.
00:24:10.855 --> 00:24:19.510
It is an admission after thirty years of refusing to make it, that the structure is producing a body count the states can no longer ignore.
00:24:19.510 --> 00:24:32.195
The compound is the apartheid residue, the post apartheid economy with more than thirty percent unemployment, the cultural impunity around violence against women and the failure of the state's response.
00:24:32.195 --> 00:24:47.482
Across the rest of Africa, the compound operates without the racial discourse architecture that organizes it in the diaspora and that shaped the South African case because the political and economic actors around African women in most countries are also black.
00:24:47.482 --> 00:24:51.726
African women run more than half the continent's small businesses.
00:24:51.726 --> 00:24:55.990
They produce more than half its food and carry almost all of its caregiving.
00:24:55.990 --> 00:25:01.304
Child marriage remains at 31% across Sub-Saharan Africa as of 2024.
00:25:01.304 --> 00:25:04.435
Down from 38% a decade earlier.
00:25:04.435 --> 00:25:06.517
Niger seats at 81%.
00:25:07.448 --> 00:25:20.248
At 78%, Mali at 69%, Nigeria at 64%, with 22 million child brides, the highest absolute number on the continent.
00:25:20.608 --> 00:25:22.611
We should be ashamed.
00:25:23.073 --> 00:25:34.874
Female genital cutting continues to affect an estimated 200 million women and girls globally, the overwhelming majority of them in African countries.
00:25:34.874 --> 00:25:47.484
The compound here is the post-colonial state compound of patriarchy, economic exclusion, and a development model that extracts women's labor and returns minimal protection.
00:25:47.484 --> 00:25:51.086
For black, queer, and trans women, the compound has an additional layer.
00:25:51.086 --> 00:26:07.304
The Trans Murder Monitoring report published by Transgender Europe in November 2025 Documented 281 trans and gender diverse people murdered worldwide between October 2024 and September 2025.
00:26:07.345 --> 00:26:11.365
88% of the victims were black or brown.
00:26:11.365 --> 00:26:14.989
90% were trans women or trans feminine people.
00:26:14.989 --> 00:26:19.592
Brazil led the global count for the 18th consecutive year.
00:26:19.592 --> 00:26:30.028
14% of the murdered were activists or movement leaders, up from 9% in 2024 and 6% in 2023.
00:26:30.028 --> 00:26:36.582
The researchers explicitly noted that the apparent decrease from the previous year.
00:26:36.582 --> 00:26:44.010
Likely reflect reduced media coverage and underreporting rather than actual reduction in violence.
00:26:44.010 --> 00:26:52.698
I want to name something that this episode is obligated to name, which is the role of cisgender black women in the violence against black trans people.
00:26:52.698 --> 00:27:07.670
Across the diaspora, cisgendered black women have participated in the cultural production that marks black trans women as deceptive, as predatory, as not real women, as appropriating Black womanhood.
00:27:07.670 --> 00:27:11.494
The participation is not universal, it is also not rare.
00:27:11.676 --> 00:27:19.541
The compound black women carry does not exempt them from the analysis when they participate in producing other people's compounds.
00:27:19.541 --> 00:27:27.189
The black women's movement that does not include black trans women is not the black women's movement this episode is talking about.
00:27:27.189 --> 00:27:30.873
As usual, I anticipate some critiques, so let's get into them.
00:27:30.873 --> 00:27:33.102
The first, the oppression Olympics.
00:27:33.102 --> 00:27:45.031
the framing that black women are the most oppressed group in the world can be heard by someone, including some black feminist, as a competitive claim about suffering that forecloses solidarity.
00:27:45.031 --> 00:27:46.236
That is not my goal.
00:27:46.236 --> 00:27:52.000
Audrey Lorde for example, explicitly rejected the hierarchy of oppression in 1983.
00:27:52.074 --> 00:27:57.848
The argument this episode is making is about positionality, not about the ranking of pain.
00:27:57.848 --> 00:28:09.409
Black women sit at an intersection of racism, patriarchy, and anti-blackness that the dominant analyses of either race or gender systematically fail to see.
00:28:09.409 --> 00:28:16.473
And the failure produces compound harms that the dominant analysis cannot address.
00:28:19.688 --> 00:28:19.846
The second, the class and celebrity exception.
00:28:19.846 --> 00:28:22.248
Sure, Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire.
00:28:22.248 --> 00:28:24.170
Michelle Obama was first lady.
00:28:24.170 --> 00:28:30.698
Beyonce is the most awarded artist in Grammy history, and Kamala Harris was vice president.
00:28:30.698 --> 00:28:37.226
The structure can absorb individual exceptions without changing what it does to most black women most of the time.
00:28:37.226 --> 00:28:41.521
Class is a real axis of differentiation inside the compound.
00:28:41.521 --> 00:28:50.851
A billionaire black woman still experiences misogynoir but she experiences it inside a class position that buffers many of the structural harms.
00:28:50.851 --> 00:28:53.553
I am not going to pretend that this buffering is not real.
00:28:53.553 --> 00:29:00.010
and yet it does not mean the exceptions dilute the structural claim about the rule.
00:29:00.010 --> 00:29:09.205
the third the "but black men" critique naming black women's specific experience of compounded harm is sometimes received as divisive.
00:29:09.205 --> 00:29:11.268
The data on black men is real.
00:29:11.268 --> 00:29:22.373
Black American men are killed by police at nearly three times the rate of white men, And they are incarcerated at a rate far outside of proportion of their share of the population.
00:29:22.373 --> 00:29:28.005
The compound black women carry is structurally distinct from what black men carry.
00:29:28.005 --> 00:29:30.026
The two are not in competition.
00:29:30.026 --> 00:29:34.993
naming the compound makes black men's specific harms more visible, not less.
00:29:35.075 --> 00:29:41.336
Solidarity across gender within the black community require being able to name what each is carrying.
00:29:41.336 --> 00:29:43.939
The fourth is the intra-black critique.
00:29:43.939 --> 00:29:57.711
Cis Black women have participated in violence against black trans women, in colorism against darker skinned black women, in violence against black queer people, in the policing of black girls' bodies through respectability discourse.
00:29:57.711 --> 00:29:59.321
not a moral exemption.
00:29:59.321 --> 00:30:05.115
Black women are not exempt from being analyzed when they participate in producing harm.
00:30:05.115 --> 00:30:06.840
To other black women.
00:30:06.840 --> 00:30:08.910
There are no innocent parties at scale.
00:30:08.910 --> 00:30:11.060
The fifth is the agency critique.
00:30:11.060 --> 00:30:14.482
Black women are not just victims of compound oppression.
00:30:14.482 --> 00:30:20.125
They are intellectuals, organizers, leaders, mothers, builders.
00:30:20.125 --> 00:30:23.027
The Combahee River Collective was black women.
00:30:23.027 --> 00:30:25.048
Crenshaw is a black woman.
00:30:25.048 --> 00:30:26.989
Collins is a black woman.
00:30:26.989 --> 00:30:29.770
Oyewummi is a black woman.
00:30:29.770 --> 00:30:32.693
Marielle Franco was a black woman.
00:30:32.693 --> 00:30:35.660
Sueli Caniero is a black woman.
00:30:35.660 --> 00:30:39.457
The agency is not in tension with the structural diagnosis.
00:30:39.457 --> 00:30:44.276
The agency is what produced this structural diagnosis.
00:30:44.276 --> 00:30:50.391
So now I want to run this through my three clarities framework identity, context, and power.
00:30:50.391 --> 00:30:55.076
I have articulated every episode of this series.
00:30:55.076 --> 00:30:59.740
From inside the system I am naming, and this one is no different.
00:30:59.740 --> 00:31:01.056
I am a black woman.
00:31:01.056 --> 00:31:13.602
I have faced misogynoir including its violent forms, and my Nigerian upbringing, my education, my privilege, and my profession has not exempted me.
00:31:13.602 --> 00:31:15.324
but this section is not about me.
00:31:15.324 --> 00:31:23.169
I want to turn the diagnostic framework I use in all of my work, the three clarities, directly towards Black women.
00:31:23.430 --> 00:31:26.752
Because the system is not going to hand us any clarity.
00:31:26.752 --> 00:31:30.936
And clarity is the one thing the system most needs us not to have.
00:31:30.936 --> 00:31:32.647
So identity clarity.
00:31:32.647 --> 00:31:33.788
Who are you?
00:31:34.009 --> 00:31:37.393
When you strip away everything the system has told you that you are.
00:31:37.393 --> 00:31:41.576
You're not the mammy who exists to absorb everyone else's needs.
00:31:41.576 --> 00:31:46.257
You're not the Jezebel whose body is presumed available.
00:31:46.337 --> 00:31:51.618
You are not the sapphire whose every boundary is read as aggression.
00:31:51.660 --> 00:31:57.682
You are not the strong black woman who is permitted to carry everything and allowed to ask for nothing.
00:31:57.682 --> 00:31:59.665
You are not the angry black woman.
00:31:59.665 --> 00:32:01.708
You are not the welfare queen.
00:32:01.708 --> 00:32:08.214
You are not any of those controlling images, the systems built to manage you.
00:32:08.636 --> 00:32:11.760
Those images are not descriptions of you.
00:32:11.760 --> 00:32:14.535
They are instruments for administering you.
00:32:14.535 --> 00:32:19.976
Strip them away, all of them, and look at what is actually there.
00:32:19.977 --> 00:32:23.067
What is actually there is a person with capability.
00:32:23.067 --> 00:32:26.449
The system has spent centuries trying to make invisible.
00:32:26.449 --> 00:32:33.432
Standing at the end of a line of women who were never supposed to survive, and you survived anyway.
00:32:33.432 --> 00:32:39.846
This is an identity that many of us share, not what the system assigned to us.
00:32:39.846 --> 00:32:49.723
What you actually are and where you actually come from is from a history of giants.
00:32:49.723 --> 00:32:53.483
The system needs you to believe you are what it says you are.
00:32:53.727 --> 00:32:57.656
The first act of clarity is to refuse.
00:32:58.160 --> 00:33:02.229
Context clarity See the system for what it actually is.
00:33:02.229 --> 00:33:05.500
The maternal mortality rate is not your bad luck.
00:33:05.500 --> 00:33:08.583
The pay gap is not your failure to negotiate.
00:33:08.583 --> 00:33:13.737
The promotion that did not come is not because you did not show up every day at the office.
00:33:13.957 --> 00:33:19.500
The idea dismissed in the meeting and praised when a white colleague repeats it 10 minutes later.
00:33:19.799 --> 00:33:28.001
The moment you were mistaken for the assistance or the help in the room that you're leading, the harm you reported and were not believed about.
00:33:28.001 --> 00:33:29.932
None of it is personal.
00:33:29.952 --> 00:33:31.523
All of it is structural.
00:33:31.523 --> 00:33:35.345
The system is invested in reducing black women to dust.
00:33:35.345 --> 00:33:38.546
I am not using this language for effect.
00:33:38.645 --> 00:33:48.788
I am describing what the data in this episode shows the system does reliably across every geography in every generation.
00:33:49.128 --> 00:33:52.259
When you see that clearly, two things happen.
00:33:52.521 --> 00:33:58.464
You stopped spending your energy trying to fix yourself or a system that was never built to recognize you.
00:33:58.464 --> 00:34:09.391
And you stop waiting for the system to suddenly see you because a system constructed to not see you does not wake up one morning and go, hello, I see you.
00:34:09.512 --> 00:34:11.393
Clarity is protection.
00:34:11.393 --> 00:34:18.737
It is what makes you harder to manipulate, harder to gaslight, harder to mobilize against your own interest.
00:34:18.759 --> 00:34:21.219
See the system, name it.
00:34:21.302 --> 00:34:26.380
Do not let it convince you that what it does to you is something you did to yourself.
00:34:26.380 --> 00:34:27.862
Power clarity.
00:34:27.922 --> 00:34:32.005
Know what you can actually move and what you cannot.
00:34:32.126 --> 00:34:35.128
You cannot move the system on its own timeline.
00:34:35.210 --> 00:34:37.512
It will not be dismantled this year.
00:34:37.552 --> 00:34:40.135
It may not be dismantled in your lifetime.
00:34:40.135 --> 00:34:46.023
This is the hard truth, and I will not soften it because softening it is its own kind of lie.
00:34:46.023 --> 00:34:49.135
But what follows from it is not despair.
00:34:49.135 --> 00:34:55.539
If the system is not going to change in time to save you, then waiting for rates is not a strategy.
00:34:55.539 --> 00:34:57.681
Building is a strategy.
00:34:57.681 --> 00:34:59.460
Black women already know this.
00:34:59.460 --> 00:35:03.603
African women have the highest rate of entrepreneurship in the world.
00:35:03.603 --> 00:35:11.887
Not because the formal economy welcomed them, but precisely because it did not, and they built anyway.
00:35:11.989 --> 00:35:13.030
That is the model.
00:35:13.030 --> 00:35:14.990
Build your own damn table.
00:35:14.990 --> 00:35:26.619
build your own businesses, your own institutions, your own networks, your own wealth, your own communities of women who see each other clearly and hold each other up.
00:35:26.619 --> 00:35:29.050
Support black women where you can.
00:35:29.050 --> 00:35:31.282
Buy from black women where possible.
00:35:31.282 --> 00:35:33.340
Move forward even when you fight.
00:35:33.340 --> 00:35:36.572
Because the fighting and the building are not in competition.
00:35:36.572 --> 00:35:37.847
They are the same work.
00:35:37.847 --> 00:35:42.389
And do the work, knowing you may not reap the benefits of it.
00:35:42.389 --> 00:35:48.393
The way the women before you fought for a future they did not leave to enter.
00:35:48.434 --> 00:35:51.797
They built the tables you and I are sitting up now.
00:35:51.797 --> 00:35:53.929
You and I will build the table.
00:35:53.929 --> 00:35:58.382
Our daughters and the women not yet born will sit at.
00:35:58.663 --> 00:36:00.885
The work outlives the worker.
00:36:00.885 --> 00:36:02.617
That is not the tragedy.
00:36:02.617 --> 00:36:08.344
That is how every table any black woman has ever sat at got built.
00:36:08.344 --> 00:36:17.568
So in closing, I wanna reiterate the compounded harm that black women experience is multiplicative, not additive.
00:36:17.568 --> 00:36:31.282
It is administered through controlling images, through the dual erasure in discourse around gender and discourse around race, through extraction without recognition, through the mobilization paradox.
00:36:31.282 --> 00:36:34.655
And through trauma inherited across generations.
00:36:34.655 --> 00:36:42.677
It begins in the adultification of black girls and it operates in 2026 across every geography this chapter has examined and more.
00:36:42.677 --> 00:36:55.945
The lineage that named it goes back fifty years in three continents, built by the women whose tools I employ in this episode, whose tools I employ in my work.
00:36:55.945 --> 00:37:14.041
And it is one part of the larger system this series has been naming white terrorism, doing its most concentrated work at the point where racism and patriarchy and anti blackness meet on a single body.
00:37:14.041 --> 00:37:15.981
So see the system.
00:37:16.402 --> 00:37:21.574
Refuse what it says that you are and build anyway.
00:37:21.621 --> 00:37:23.045
this was episode five.
00:37:23.045 --> 00:37:29.989
if this episode named something you've been carrying, share it with a woman who needs to hear it or who needs the language.
00:37:30.291 --> 00:37:34.135
As usual, subscribe to Overnight Wisdom wherever you get your podcast.
00:37:34.135 --> 00:37:43.233
join the weekly clarity newsletter at chisomudeze.com where I bring the same structural analysis to leadership, power and systems every week.
00:37:43.233 --> 00:37:50.735
And if your organization is ready to interrogate its systems rather than decorate them, that is one of the work that I do.
00:37:50.735 --> 00:37:51.954
Let's chat.
00:37:52.416 --> 00:37:55.702
I'm Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom.
00:37:55.702 --> 00:37:57.646
Thank you so much for being here.
