The Link Between the Baby Formula Shortage, Roe v. Wade and Buffalo Shooting
Spoiler alert: It’s Black women
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Black women, are you ok?
I know that I’m a Canadian, but I’m a Black woman before my citizenship and I stand in solidarity.
Baby formula shortage, Roe v Wade potentially being overturned and a White supremacist attack in Buffalo. (Oh yes — we’re still in a pandemic, where apparently one million Americans have died). What a time to be alive in the US of A.
It is not lost on me that the common thread between these phenomena are Black women. Black American women.
Black women (wet nurses and mammies) were the “baby formula” of slave holding families.
Lack of access to safe abortion hurts women of colour and Black women the most.
Mostly Black women died in the grocery store terrorist attack in Buffalo. Black women are typically the ones who do the grocery shopping for their families.
Some of them were breast cancer survivors… imagine having beaten breast cancer, only to be felled by the bullet of White supremacy?
Dr. Fauci has just said that Black Americans will be particularly hit hard by the next COVID wave. People are often wont to blame our size, shape and diets on our health outcomes, but we know from Dr. Sabrina Strings that the reason why Black people disproportionately are affected by COVID is not obesity, but slavery.
I’m a fat, Black, single woman who lives at the intersection of those aforementioned marginalized identities and who already experiences daily, low-grade, chronic stress on account of those identities and their intersections.
Professionally, I spend my time trying to get people to acknowledge their privilege, recognize their social location and realize that, yes, racism and White nationalism is a thing — even in Canada.
I don’t even live in the United States, but I simply no longer have the emotional capacity to… respond? digest? witness? react? to events involving racial trauma and White supremacy. This goes a little beyond compassion fatigue.
I don’t feel defeated but I am depleted. We are tired.
How are you doing?
Writing this probably won’t change anything because people, in their latent insecurity, clutch at their feigned sense of superiority and are determined to hold tightly to their social positions.
But I want to give credence to folks who may feel the same way as I do. The burden of racism weighs heavier today than on most days, and I guess I want people to see that…to recognize that.
