The Strong Black Woman

How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women

Marita Golden

• Publisher: Mango
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642506846
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Biografías de ciencias sociales

How African American Women Repair and Recover from Trauma and Racism

Meet Black women who have learned though hard lessons the importance of self-care and how to break through the cultural and sometimes family resistance to seeking therapy and professional mental health care.

"Black don't crack". The Strong Black Woman Syndrome is a racist and sexist archetypecreated to marginalize Black women. It is a toxic ideology that is a major factor contributing to the dismal health metrics for Black women, showing that four out of five are overweight and are more likely to suffer a stroke or heart attack than White women. The syndrome calls on Black women to be the problem-solvers and chief caretakers for everyone in their lives. "Black don't crack" is a familiar adage. We never buckle, never feel vulnerable, and never bother others with our pain.

Black women face a hidden mental health crisis of anxiety and depression. To be a Black woman in America is to know that you cannot protect your children or guarantee their safety, that your value is consistently questioned, and that even being "twice as good" is often not good enough. Consequently, Black women disproportionately experience anxiety and depression. Studies now conclusively connect racism and mental health?and physical health.

Time to take care of your emotional health. Not because you are "crazy" but because you deserve to be emotionally healthy for yourself and those you love. More and more young African American women are re-examining the Strong Black Woman syndrome and engaging in self-care practices that positively change their lives.

In The Strong Black Woman, hear the stories of African American women who:

• Asked for help when they needed it
• Built lives that offer healing every day
• Learned to accept that healing?and deserve it

If you have read The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health, The Racial Healing Handbook, or Black Fatigue, The Strong Black Woman should be your next read.

We Wear the Mask

The MRI revealed two strokes that I knew nothing about. Two symptomless “silent” strokes that had occurred, according to my doctor, sometime in the past. The MRI revealed the strokes but could not offer clues to when, on two occasions, while I was unaware of it, my brain had been under attack. When the blood supply to my brain was cut off. When, as a result, the essential oxygen and nutrients my brain required to function were denied. When my brain cells were destroyed. When two sections of my brain essentially died.

I sat in the examining room of my doctor, whom my husband and I had been seeing for over twenty years. Dr. Michael Cannaday combines joviality with compassion, and as he sat thumbing through the voluminous records, test results, and paperwork of my file, I saw the concern on his face. We had discussed the implications of the results of the MRI, the possibility of another stroke, or a heart attack, and he told me to add a baby aspirin to prevent blood clots that could cause a stroke to my daily regimen of a multivitamin and the cholesterol and high blood pressure medication I took. I was to immediately make an appointment with my cardiologist to have my heart monitored. And I was to make an appointment to return to his office for an echocardiogram which would scan my heartbeat and identify heart disease. I was given a referral for a carotid duplex scan to identify blockages in my arteries.

I sat in the room, after Dr. Cannaday left to go to his next patient, reeling with emotions. I had done everything right, or thought I had, and it seemed to me that my body was punishing me for it. My husband had suffered two small strokes with heart attacks in the last two years. In both cases, the stroke symptoms (blurred vision, numbness in his arm, slurred speech) struck in a flash, and were gone within sixty seconds the first time and subsided within five minutes the second time. But he knew he’d had a stroke.

In both cases he was hospitalized, given a battery of tests and sent home with modifications to his medications, after three days under the excellent care of a United Nations of doctors and specialists at Washington Hospital Center. My husband was a twenty-four-year survivor of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that originates in the lymphatic system, which supports the disease fighting network in the body. After months of hospitalizations and rigorous chemotherapy and radiation that saved his life, the until-then-dormant diabetes gene that runs in his family activated, and he now lives with Type 2 diabetes.

I was not diabetic, weighed the same as I had in college, exercised regularly, almost religiously, ate healthy, rarely got a cold, had no seasonal allergies. I meditated daily, journaled, and often engaged in days of silence to rejuvenate my spirit. And I had a rich, varied, and deeply satisfying network of friends. Nobody believed I was turning seventy soon. My greatest vulnerability, I thought until that moment in Dr. Cannaday’s office, was an A-Type personality. That is what I told myself. But several years earlier, a malignant (cancerous) tumor was found in my rectum during my regular colonoscopy. It was removed, and I did not have to undergo chemotherapy. I followed a regimen, initially of body scans and checkups every six months, that had revealed no further growth and had now evolved into a single annual checkup. I eagerly sailed into those annual visits with my cancer doctor like a hyped-up overachieving student, ready to show off lab tests that would earn me a clean bill of health. So far, they always had. I didn’t think of myself as a cancer survivor. A cancerous tumor was found in my rectum, but I wasn’t a cancer survivor. Not me. But I was. I am. Thinking of myself as a cancer survivor would have dulled the armor I wore that I worked so hard to keep unscarred and untarnished. And yes, I was on high blood pressure medicine, but I had that under control.

As I sat in Dr. Cannaday’s office alone, attempting to absorb the news that I had experienced two strokes, the image of myself that I had crafted over the years as in charge of my body, as nearly invincible, as the poster child for Black female health, vanished. I was dizzy with confusion, and sat attempting to beat back a creeping despair. I had had two strokes.

I was a writer who had spent the last five years researching and writing first a novel, then a major piece of journalism, and finally editing an anthology about the disproportionate impact of Alzheimer’s disease on African Americans. I was now too familiar with the “twice as likely syndrome” that resulted in Blacks being twice as likely to develop a majority of the most lethal health conditions, from diabetes to obesity to stroke to heart attack; we lead the way and are often, according to statistics, “twice as likely” to be living with and dying from these disorders. And all of that is one reason we have more Alzheimer’s and other dementias. So intellectually I knew my risk. Now I owned it.

Who was I? What else was my body doing? Apparently Black did crack.

I gathered my coat, my purse, and the book I had brought in case of a wait, and walked to the receptionist. The excellent health coverage my husband and I had, thanks to his years teaching in the Washington, DC, public school system, combined with Medicare, meant that I had no co-pay and no reason to do more than simply wave goodbye to Ms. Thomas, the doctor’s receptionist and assistant. Instead, as I put on my coat, I told her in a small, trembling, still-shocked voice what the MRI had revealed. “They were tiny strokes. So small I had no awareness of them.” I smiled weakly, struggling somehow to make lemonade out of the lemons I had been handed. Looking over the top of her glasses as she leaned in close to me, Ms. Thomas shook her head and said, “Small or big, a stroke is a stroke.”

The road to the MRI started a few days after Christmas. Standing up from my computer, I felt the sudden onslaught of a dizziness that briefly made it seem that the room was spinning. I felt unstable, and a bit woozy. But I did not think much about it, since the worst of the sensations passed quickly. For the next two days, I felt a minor off-centeredness, reminiscent of sensations I’d had with an ear infection a year earlier. I called my ear, nose, and throat doctor for an appointment later in the week. None of my normal activities were affected, but the dizziness persisted. Then my blood pressure shot up and I went to an emergency health center in my neighborhood. During the ten hours I spent in the emergency center, I had an electrocardiogram that revealed no issues. During the long emergency room hours of waiting and switching channels on the overhead television filled with infomercials, my blood pressure went down. Yet, because of the dizziness, I was sent to a local hospital for tests that the health center could not provide. By 2:00 a.m., at the hospital, I was presenting no symptoms and was sent home.

A week later, Dr. Cannaday ordered an MRI in response to the persistent dizziness. The MRI revealed evidence of two minor strokes that had occurred sometime in the past. In addition, I underwent a two-hour hearing test that revealed no problems, and wore a heart monitor that confirmed that my heart was strong. And none of my doctors could tell me what the dizziness meant or signaled. Not Dr. Cannaday. Not the cardiologist. Not my ENT specialist. They all admitted they simply did not know what had happened to me during those three days. None of them suspected a stroke. I was concerned, but relieved to know more about my body and health than I had known before.

After discussing the dizziness I had experienced and the MRI results with Dr. Cannaday, I thought my body was punishing me. In reality, my body was warning me. If not for that bout of dizziness and high blood pressure, I might not have known that I had had two strokes. And, although I had not wanted to claim the identity of a cancer survivor, I already had an appointment for the fall for my annual post-cancer exam. I was a Strong Black Woman, but clearly not that strong.

My living and aging and thoughts about death are shadowed by the lives and deaths of my parents, neither of whom lived to be old. Neither of them lived much longer than the 1970s’ established life expectancy for Black men and women. My mother died at sixty-three, and my father at sixty-two. They both died when, to my young adult eyes, they appeared to be healthy. A decade before her death in 1971, my mother had survived and quickly recovered from a cerebral hemorrhage, a massive stroke that in...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• We Wear the Mask
• Both Sides Now
• Through the Fire
• The Reimagined History of My Heart: of Harriet, of Rosa, of Fannie Lou, of Patrisse
• The Story of My Body
• Me Too
• Fear Loathing Love: Our Bodies Inside Out
• Falling: Days of Dying, Rage and Redemption
• Another Mourning in America
• Say My Name
• Healing Stories
• Coda: New Age Strong Black Women
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author