I was in an on-again-off-again relationship for five years that depleted me. As of late, I have been asking myself why aren’t we talking about how often black women are gaslighted? The vicious cycle was as follows: he would reach out to me, mastering the perfect concoction of grandiose romantic gesture and genuine growth needed to regain my trust. I’d take him back. We’d be blissfully in love for a few weeks, and then he would start to pull away and avoid me. I’d torture myself, racking my brain about what I did wrong, and shyly attempt to talk about it.
My pent up frustration via dissatisfaction would eventually lead to a fight, during which he’d drop nuclear truth bombs related to his mental health. One time he shared in a fit of depression, he beat up his car. Another time he told me if he could do that to his car, imagine what he could do to me?
What he said didn’t scare me. It felt like home to me. I thought this was normal not just because this dynamic was nothing new, but also because this is what I had been taught all my life. I grew up seeing black women subscribe to being a “ride or die” or “the loyal black woman”, so readily accepting men’s inclination to use and abuse them as a symptom of their emotional traumas. Taking that trauma on and being responsible for “fixing” it was a part of being a black woman in a romantic relationship. Sure, I was encouraged to be independent and to advocate for myself, but not how to maintain those characteristics in a romantic relationship. I quickly realized what it means to be a black woman in love.
Maintaining this standard, this “status quo”, requires and allows men to gaslight black women. To ensure we play our part, they need to make sure we disconnect from our needs, desires and feelings. My ex continued to invalidate my feelings, and made sure our relationship orbited around his existence. It was subtle and nuanced; he used coded language to manipulate me and it worked every time. Our relationship looked like most of the black romantic relationships I had seen growing up, so I thought it was all normal. This was what love looked like.
According to a report published by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “The Status of Black Women in the United States”, black women “experience significantly higher rates of psychological abuse — including humiliation, insults, name-calling and coercive control” than nonblack women. We are expected to carry the weight of all men in all spaces; we manage and compensate for our male counterparts’ emotional and mental shortcomings. If we fail to fix men’s issues, our value depreciates and we are rejected. Strength and providing healing is the impossible and unfair standard black women have to live up to in love.
When I spoke with other Black women about this, they shared similar stories.
“It was so easy to paint me as the crazy, mean girlfriend,” Jazmynn Croskey tells me of her experience being gaslighted. Pejorative stereotypes about black women are so easily accessible; we’re angry, loud, sassy, rude, strong. The latter is used as a compliment and it is , but it leaves little room for us to be anything else. Sure, we’ve made progress dispelling the ignorance, but these ideas are so embedded in culture, they made a home in people’s subconscious. Black women have to prove themselves, in both our professional and personal lives.
Black women are the victim of a societal disillusion, one that profits from positioning us so low that using, abusing and taking advantage of us is easy. “Feelings and emotions don’t have a racial barrier on them,” Jazmynn continues, “Everyone feels emotion and I feel like women of colour get the short end of the stick when it comes to this.”
Most black women I know have experienced some form of gaslighting, but we’ve only recently started talking about it, and how prevalent it is in our community. No one in my Kenyan American household taught me about this kind of abuse. Throw in being constantly exposed to the media’s portrayal of black women in love, often taking on a “ride or die” role and sacrificing in the name of “struggle” love, and you have a lot of millennial black women unaware of the effects of this deeply flawed messaging. It’s so difficult for any victim of gaslighting to realize what’s happening to them. It’s even more difficult for black women because that’s what we’ve been taught to accept it.
Thankfully, more and more black women are speaking up about their experiences being gaslight, and how it’s not okay nor is it the love we have to accept. When we have conversations about this experience we rarely call it emotional abuse. Even when we get out of these toxic relationships, we rarely assign a name to what it was, what we went through. If we don’t recognize that these experiences are abusive, we’ll continue to find ourselves in similar situations.
To acknowledge this abuse, we need access to the language used to encapsulate this experience. Amber Rose, back in 2018, posted about experiencing “narcissistic, mental and emotional abuse”. These terms were so foreign to me, but they completely embodied my struggle in love. Recognizing and putting a name to my pain was a crucial step in my moving on and making healthier romantic choices. Black women need what I wish I had known prior to my last relationship: we’re gaslighted, a lot, because of what it is to be a black woman in North America. But the more we talk about it and build language surrounding our experiences, the closer we get to healing.
GUEST CONTRIBUTOR: Kui Mwai
