“Black Femininity Training” Will Not Free Us

I’m slouched in bed, scrolling through my Twitter feed after a long day of work and classes when my designated scrolling thumb stops in its tracks— “what in the blue f*ck is a “femininity coach”?????”, tweeted by @_benjvmins_. My initial reaction is disbelief–– I rush to the Twitter search bar in search of answers and find tweets discussing the rise of “black femininity training” on TikTok; Black women creators are making videos that teach Black women how to be “highly feminine”, or embark on their “divinely feminine journeys,” suggesting viewers dress modestly, nurture their men, and implement other “traditionally” feminine practices into their lives.

My first instinct is to laugh––that almost-crying type of laughter when you hear something so absurd that it’s downright hilarious. But, really, the driving force behind my laughter is my anger. After a long and exhausting day of trying to live as a Black woman, I and many others online just can’t seem to catch a break from people within our own community telling us how to be women––as if our perfection of womanhood will save our race. If I know anything, I know that Black femininity training is most definitely not our ticket to freedom.

It turns out, there’s a whole side of TikTok (and Youtube) dedicated to Black femininity coaches. In a video titled “How To Start Your Feminine Journey,” one creator with 14.4K followers recommends women “volunteer” to “activate [their] nurturing qualities”; in another titled “3 Risks Every Woman MUST TAKE NOW to Own Her Femininity & Attract High Value Men FAST!,” a creator with 34.1K followers tells female viewers to step out of their “comfort zone” to escape their “masculine energy,” effectively elevating their desirability. What startled me most about these videos is that the creators were themselves Black women telling other Black women, who from the comments seem generally young and impressionable, how to act. Stuck in my own bubble, I had honestly forgotten some Black women still had such strong faith in “traditional femininity” and its apparently magical ability to frame us as respectable human women, amazingly banishing the stereotype of Black women’s hypermasculinity into the abyss. With the wave of a wand, Poof! No one will ever question our womanhood again! Unfortunately, not quite.

Black femininity training will not free us. Listen, I have nothing against dressing modestly, being nurturing towards your partner, and other things of that sort, but, when directed towards Black women, these tips are so very loaded with a terribly violent racial history. For centuries, powerful institutions have told Black women that they are not feminine enough, and, in response, many Black women have done everything in their power to fashion themselves as the “perfect woman”––a.k.a the polite and submissive housewife and mother. This is completely understandable, seeing as these women only want to survive, and even thrive, in societies that want the very opposite for them. However, again and again, these attempts have proved themselves void in uplifting Black women’s public image. If we ever want to understand why the chase for “traditional womanhood” goes in endless and unproductive circles, we need to assess who the concept of traditional womanhood was even made for.

This understanding of “true” womanhood and all of its associated characteristics have historically existed as a V.I.P, whites-only space. In the United States, slavers and colonialists began to describe white women as “delicate” to justify enslaved Black women’s hard and “manly” forced labor; they only thought to describe white women as “modest” when they needed to mark a difference between them and Black women, who became sexually promiscuous Jezebels in the colonial imagination. In this sense, “traditional”–or white–womanhood was a literal tool for white supremacist agendas, deepening the crafted racial binary between black and white. As this conception of white womanhood continued throughout time, historians named this feminine upkeep the “Cult of True Womanhood,” which encompasses the four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.

These TikTok creators’ conceptions of “femininity” most definitely proclaim these virtues, working perfectly within the logic of white supremacist, anti-Black gender schemes. Some may argue that this Black pursuit of True Womanhood will un-racialize the Cult, granting us a sort of liberation byway of inclusion. But, I’m here to tell you that the Cult can’t be un-whitened.

True Womanhood was designed for strictly anti-Black purposes. It inherently excludes Black women who stray far from the four virtues––Queer Black women, openly sexual Black women, and, more generally, Black women who create their own, non-white-standard, versions of womanhood that transcend self-repression. True Womanhood is heteronormative, transphobic, and anti-everything-black. Even Black women who practice the four virtues find the Cult inaccessible, which Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech makes clear. I mean, something along the lines of “Black femininity training” is what the colonizers prayed for as they imagined the future of their newly racialized world–– they prayed for people to buy into this idea of womanhood in hopes that it would draw a stark difference between white women and the “Black female other.” I don’t want to be the answer to their prayers. I want to be everything they feared, crafting my own self-definition of womanhood that frees me from racist norms of gender.

It’s time to leave behind the broken promise of True Womanhood. Y’all, there is so much more out there for us. We have the creative power to move beyond white supremacist constructs that only want to police and denigrate Black women. It’s time we embrace the beauty in Black iterations of womanhood, and gender in general; embrace the amazing unruliness and nonconformity of these forms of gender–– or rise above gender in its entirety and define yourself by other means. Whatever you choose to do, abandon your place as a cog in the machine of white supremacy and ruthlessly accept every Black bit of yourself.