Black Woman Should Always Matter, But Never Do

The distance between Adriana Smith in 2025 and my Olivia story is a whole universe

I fully intended to give y’all a sense of the Olivia story on Juneteenth 2025, my main allegorical character and muse in Spinning Sage’s Gold. I wanted to share both the joy and the dull aches of depression of attempting to write about a hypothetical descendant (whether by blood or by spirit or by adoption, or all of the above) who is, well, free. Like freer-than-Janelle-Monáe-Robinson-free, never knowing the everyday that is the abuse Black women face in the US and all over the globe. Learning about it, but not experiencing it.

But I will save that beautiful, sweet, and longing-for-that-future Substack for later on in this run. Today is about the grotesqueness of the US and the West and the world toward Black women, all (dis)embodied in Adriana Smith, a long-dead 31-year-old nurse from Georgia who “pro-life” authorities turned into an incubator for a nine-week-old fetus for four months. Only to then cut Smith open last week to “birth” a child that weighed less than a pound, one whose chance of survival without complications is horribly low. To call this fucking disgusting and inhumane — there are not enough words in English to describe how many Black folk and Black women folk feel right now. Just imagine a gigantic neutron star reaching out to incinerate, flatten, spaghettify, and irradiate the muthafuckas who did this to Smith, between the Georgia state legislature and the doctors and nurses involved. That would only begin to get at the emotions I, at least, have today.

There is a long, disgusting history of Black folk as guinea pigs for Western “progress” and for unholy white amusement. To call James Marion Sims a gynecologist would be the equivalent of calling the sadist Nazi fuck Josef Mengele a compassionate doctor. Both experimented on people against their will and mangled them in the process. In Sims’ case, it was enslaved Black women who helped him make breakthroughs in understanding women’s reproductive organs and the tools needs for proper care, all while breaking their bodies like he was running a Chicago slaughterhouse. Yet from 1934 to 2018, a bronze statue of this torturer (and, if one thinks about the cumulative effects of repeated surgeries on enslaved Black women, a slow-motion-murderer) stood outside Central Park. I have watched only one episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, and it was enough to know that white women like Margaret Atwood have all but ignored that the West has always been a handmaid’s tale for Black women.

To be sure, there’s also the torture Black men and boys have endured. The ears and balls and flayed skin and muscles torn off of swinging bodies by bloodthirsty white mobs, some of whom actually ate of this flesh or kept pieces as souvenirs. The forty-year-long Tuskegee Experiment, where Black men with syphilis went blind and lost their minds to the disease, as doctors gave them placebos instead of penicillin for treatment. It only ended in 1972, the year I turned three. No one in an anti-Black world gets away without suffering some trauma, physical, psychological, and spiritual.

But, as I wrote in a piece I did for Al Jazeera in 2022 about misogynoir toward Black women in sports

This is a world of anti-Blackness, one where the contributions of African people and of the African diaspora are erased, stolen, or undervalued. This is doubly so for Black women across the globe and it is quite apparent in the way Black women athletes are treated. Their achievements cannot be celebrated without a hypercriticism of their athletic flaws, or without an extensive critique of their looks or their alleged lack of femininity.

I wrote that a year before the Caitlin Clark craze began, with Angel Reese as the antagonist. And like clockwork, white people in Indiana, in the US, and all over the world have turned her into the “Great White (Women’s) Hope,” while jeering Reese every chance they get.

In the WNBA, where nearly two-thirds of the players are Black women and 40 percent are queer, the Indiana Fever and Clark fanbases are a shame and a pitiful display of anti-Blackness, anti-queerness, and misogyny, and all at the same time.

So why, pray tell, did I create a character like Olivia, one who is free of this seventh circle of Hell for Black women worldwide in both time and in systems, and yet one who is full aware of our present? Because if had a daughter or granddaughter, I would want to raise her to be aware and to be free. Even in the post-Western world I envision in Spinning Sage’s Gold, there are a small group of folks who will believe the West’s sick patriarchal bullshit. For such is the nature of all human creations and systems — not all will want a transition toward a better world.

I did not get to Olivia easily. When the first thing you remember your father saying is “You’s a Black bit’!” to your mother at four years old, being able to spot your own misogyny and misogynoir is work. I once thought that men were physically superior to women, accidentally and then deliberately slapped a classmate on her butt a week before my high school graduation (all because she accused me of being fresh instead of just being clumsy), and have been tempted to use the b-word over minor offenses in my younger days. But Malcolm X was correct. Black women (and with them, Indigenous women, I’d add) are “The most disrespected…The most unprotected…[and] The most neglected,” in the US and worldwide.

I couldn’t ignore the day I witnessed my stepfather slap and kick my mother into unconsciousness in 1982. I couldn’t stop him with his black belt in Karate, but I could wage guerrilla warfare on his ass and put my body on the line for the next seven years. I couldn’t help but connect the dots between abuse in families like mine and the history of slavery and slaughter the West has wrought for a half-millennium. I can’t help but try to reclaim Adriana Smith’s worth now.