Category Archives: gender

An Aging, Weary Black Woman’s Directives

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©️ by Leslye Joy Allen

1. Do not waste what is left of your life on sexists, misogynists, practitioners of misogynoir, racists, homomisics, transmisics, xenomisics, and on people too lazy to look inside a dictionary to discover what these words, with their prefixes and suffixes, mean.

2. Never render CPR nor succor to those who are not kind, who cannot be kind, and who think it is a waste of their time to be kind.

3. Follow Malcolm X’s request to never call any man “brother” until he demonstrates that he is one.

4. When confronted by sworn enemies, do not, as my late Mama would say, “bother to piss down their throats even if their guts are on fire.”

5. If some illiterate soul wants to learn how to read, point them to the nearest literacy class. If some soul doesn’t read much, but wants to read more, give them books. The ones who refuse to read, leave them alone.

6. Per the instructions of my second grade teacher Sister Mary Gemma, always remember that, “you only have two cheeks. Therefore, you only turn the other cheek once.”

7. Rest on purpose. My late Daddy used to say, “Let the men do some of the work because they owe you the same things they already believe you owe them, on demand.”

8. Stop fighting every battle. My late cousin Billie used to say, “You can’t fight in every skirmish if you plan to win the war.”

9. Stop adding caveats like, “I don’t want anybody to take this the wrong way, but…” or “I don’t want anybody to get upset, but…”to your opinions. These kinds of caveats and prefaces, as Dr. Jacqueline Howard Matthews would say, is an apology for your opinion before you even render your opinion.

10. As Black women en masse we have no permanent friends, only permanent interests.

©️ Leslye Joy Allen

#MakeAmericaLiterateAgain

Blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a reference to this hyperlink: https:/leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers.  All Rights Reserved.

Sister Survival

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©️by Leslye Joy Allen

In the aftermath of Kamala Harris’ defeat in the US 2024 presidential election on November 5th, no one took her loss as hard as Black women. Our work for her and our votes for her created that long blue line at 92 percent—the single largest and most consistent voting bloc in the United States.

My sister friends did what sisters always do. We called each other to vent at 10 PM or 3 AM. We called to see how we all were doing. We worried about Kamala. The sentence that came up the most in these conversations was: I’m done.

Baltimore’s Mayor Brandon M. Scott stated that Black women shouldn’t have to shoulder the bulk of everything with little to no help from others. And we won’t.

Sisters are worn out from over work, over strategizing, navigating inter- and intra-racial sexism, misogynoir, racism, the constant double standards, the defensiveness that rears its head whenever we dare to acknowledge double standards, the expectation that we must show up to work in everyone’s behalf, but that we must not make a mistake, and we must always be accessible.

A few days after the election and shortly after I reviewed a NAACP report that concluded that one-in-four Black men under the age of 50 voted for Trump, the poem below popped in my head. It’s reposted here at the request of a friend. I wrote it in 4 minutes to the delight of every one of my former English professors. Every sister that read it, got it. And their responses were all along the same lines:

“Girl, I’m done killing myself for people that never support us.”

“So many men and so many other people only pay attention to Black women when we are fighting for them instead of fighting for ourselves.”

We sisters are not the same people we were the day before the election; and whatever is left of us that still resembles us is on hiatus.

Blogs written by Leslye Joy Allen are protected by U. S. Copyright Law and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Any partial or total reference to any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen, or any total or partial excerpt of any blog authored by Leslye Joy Allen must contain a reference to this hyperlink: https:/leslyejoyallen.com with Leslye Joy Allen clearly stated as the author. Postings or blogs placed here by other writers should clearly reference those writers.  All Rights Reserved.

©️ Leslye Joy Allen