Member Since: 8/18/2013
Posts: 40,566
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ELLE Mag: #BlackGirlMagic is problematic
Quote:
Black girl magic suggests we are, again, something other than human. That might sound nitpicky, but it's not nitpicky when we are still being treated as subhuman. And there's a very long history of black women being treated as subhuman by the medical establishment, in spite of the debt Western medicine owes to them. It doesn't begin or end with Henrietta Lacks and the cancer cells taken from her cervix without her or her family's knowledge or permission. It doesn't begin or end with black women receiving less anesthesia, if at all, in surgeries because of the widely held belief that black women felt no pain. It doesn't begin or end with black women receiving improper and dangerous prenatal care or compulsory sterilisations.
But it is portrayed as just that: a tension. None of Rhimes's main characters (even white Meredith Grey) are wholly healthy women (they're subsisting on a diet of popcorn and red wine or using sex as a weapon). They're not perfect, and they're not magical. What they are is incredibly, lethally, terrific at what they do. That's not magical. That's what women do. In order to survive, we don't fly, we don't acquire superhuman characteristics. We woman up. And perhaps black women tend to do it better than most but that's because we have to, not because we're magical. (Most of us fail miserably, by the way; when one of us doesn't, we call them magical.)
These days, when racist practices occur in medicine, they're more often reported on. But I find it not coincidental that as certain language started disappearing and certain practices started going underground, another language and practice started showing up: the idea of the magical black woman—#BlackGirlMagic.
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Read more: http://trib.al/dAgkbOw
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