Eye to Eye: Black Women and Envy

Make yourself comfortable, because we’re about to get into it.

Envy comes with a particular sting in its tail when it comes from Black women.

This topic has been on my heart for quite some time, as envious attacks have somewhat accelerated and intensified since my career started to ascend and I became more visible.

It’s not to say I haven’t experienced envy from other folk, regardless of their hue or gender before - I have, because a lot of people don’t like to see liberated and or accomplished Black women. They really don’t.

It’s a source of contention and agitation for many - a liberated and accomplished Black woman challenges everything we’ve ever been socialised to believe about Black women and their ‘place’ in the world.

Envy often looks and feels like a strong dislike for the other person, but it’s more like a mirror - the dislike is not about the other person at all, but feelings of inferiority and the perceived disparity between the other person and you.

I learned from a young age to conflate envy with love, as my first experience of envy, was from a caregiver, so I don’t always recognise it - until boom - it’s undeniable. But when it comes from Black women, to me, it feels rabid.

“As Black women, we have shared so many similar experiences. Why doesn’t this commonality bring us closer together instead of setting us at each others throats with weapons well-honed by familiarity” Audre Lorde

But where is all this envy coming from and why is it so potent? Audre Lorde, like a prophet, has some critical answers.

Channeling Ms Lorde whilst book signing.

A couple of years ago, I pitched an idea for my next book, which is about Black women, to a US literary agent - also a Black woman. We had a great conversation and she offered me some really helpful pointers to strengthen my idea and recommended I read Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, specifically the chapter Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger, before returning to writing and sharing a full proposal with her.

Well, that proposal is still not sent, because I couldn’t finish the damn book.

The amount of times I’ve picked it up and put it down again, or carried it on holiday only to leave it in my suitcase.

But this exact same chapter is following me round like a thorn in my side and was recommended to me again by a sister friend recently, after I shared about a very painful betrayal I was working through. So in my attempts to process all that was coming up for me, I begrudgingly returned to it.

Turning each page felt like a blade to my heart. The searing accuracy of where it all stems from was hard to digest and contest.

In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde writes: “My Black woman’s anger is a molten pond at the core of me, my most fiercely guarded secret….a boiling hot spring likely to erupt at any point”

Underneath all of this bubbling anger, she argues is hatred.

A ferocious want to harm, denigrate or even destroy. A devastating consequence of the legacy of hatred projected onto us from centuries worth of systems and human societies that had no regard for Black women’s humanity. And that hatred gets blown in our direction from the moment we enter this mad world. We cannot help but internalise it and if we’re not aware of it - that same hatred we’ve experienced personally and through our lineage, gets blasted in the most devastating of ways - through one another.

It’s deeply painful.

And if we go on to internalise the hatred we experience as ‘something inherently wrong with us’ we’re in trouble. For the young child trying to make sense of the world and the hatred that underpins something as illogical as white supremacy and patriarchy - surely thinking there is a defect in you - might be the most logical explanation as to why grown adults, from strangers to caregivers, would regularly be moved to launch racial epithets at children - such was my experience. As a teen, an inherent defect in you might seem like the only logical explanation as to why I - the only Black female staff member was accused of stealing money from a till, at a part-time job, on my day off. Or perhaps now as an adult, why the Black maternal morbidity rate persists and why I don’t know a single Black woman who hasn’t experienced abuse.

There is no truer explanation other than a legacy of hatred that we have somehow survived - to the extent we’ve worn the armour of strong and stoic so well, the hatred is almost normalised. Love and care is treated as suspicious and softness and tenderness is hard to access. But what is common is not necessarily normal.

I see now - that when we internalise this hatred and remain unaware of its systemic origin and don’t work on our own shit - what distortions do we see reflected back at us and therefore in the faces of other Black women?

How does that manifest in our interpersonal exchanges?

“The anger with which I meet another Black woman’s slightest deviation from my immediate need or desire, or concept of a proper response is a deep and hurtful anger, chosen only in the sense of a choice of desperation - reckless through despair” Audre Lorde

From the most outrageous of entitled expectations from the home to the workplace, disproportionate rage outbursts, regular occurrences of everyday disrespects, the looks of disgust and contempt, to this deep seated envy - what I call the Black Woman’s Poison Chalice. Envy is a strong feeling of resentment rooted in unhappiness, that gets triggered by other peoples’ perceived successes or a strong dislike for others deemed as virtuous or seemingly ‘good’. Its roots of resentment come from the desire to have what you see another person has, that you think should be yours. It’s intimately tied to insecurity and scarcity. And somewhere underneath all of this, the anger, the hatred and the envy, is deep seated unaddressed pain.

Lorde goes on - “Other Black women are not the root cause nor the source of that pool of anger…Then why does that anger unleash itself most tellingly against another Black woman at the least excuse?”

“Echoes of it return as cruelty and anger in our dealings with each other. For each of us bears the face that hatred seeks, and we have learned to be at home with the cruelty because we have survived so much of it within our own lives.”

Lorde’s words are a tough pill to swallow. But my goodness does it provide some explanation to the gravitas of the matter and why these envious attacks from Black women and the bubbling cauldron of ingested and distorted hatred that lies beneath, is so damn heartbreaking.

But for me, it also provided some comfort - because it reminded me that firstly I am not alone and that if something feels disproportionate it is always historical.

Now - I’d rather not have to deal with envy at all. But envy is part of the human condition - we are not without both perpetuating it or experiencing it ourselves - but rather than launch into justifying an attack on others, if feelings of envy surface, they are a useful and somewhat inconvenient invitation to have the courage to address the root of our pain, to get real intimate with the source(s) of our anger, take responsibility for our hurt and look at what it is within ourselves that needs our urgent tender loving care.

Because what I know for sure is this, sisterhood cannot survive where envy thrives.

Much love

Nova

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Nova Reid is a writer, mental health advocate, TED Speaker and Producer. She is author of The Good Ally and host and executive producer of Hidden Histories with Nova Reid. You can find out more about her work on www.novareid.com

Header image: Becky Bailey Photography