Trigger Warning: This letter contains references to sexual, physical and emotional abuse.

Dear Black Girls and Black Women,

I love you. This week, these last few months have been so hard for everyone but in this space I want to talk to you about how much I love you.

The word tolerant means “showing willingness to allow the existence of opinions or behaviour that one does not necessarily agree with.” Tolerance is the performance of humanity, the pretence that the majority are willing to give permission to a minority to exist, even though they might not necessarily agree with their existence. So, when Home Secretary Priti Patel says that Britain is a “tolerant country” it’s clear that she is merely performing benevolence and virtue. And doing it badly, might I add.

My heroes Lana and Lilly Wachowski directed the big screen adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas. Hugo Weaving plays multiple characters in the film, one of whom is racist, colonialist Haskell Moore. In the film’s final act Haskell gives the following warning to his daughter Tilda who is running off with her love, abolitionist Adam Ewing played by Doona Bae and Jim Sturgess respectively: “There is a natural order to this world and those who try to upend it do not fare well. This movement will never survive; if you join them, you and your entire family will be shunned. At best, you will exist a pariah to be spat at and beaten. At worst, to be lynched and crucified…”

Last year, gal-dem invited me to speak at their event celebrating the release of Michelle Obama’s memoirs Becoming. I was charged with reading the book and then writing my speech having imagined what Michelle Obama would do if women ruled the world. Find my speech in full below. I hope you enjoy.

Recently, news broke that Clemmie Hooper, a midwife and mummy-blogger with just shy of 700,000 Instagram followers used a burner social media account to attack her rivals. I had no idea about any of this because the world of mummy blogging is as foreign to me as supporting the Conservatives but I digress. This ain’t about my burgeoning spinster-hood. All this was brought to my attention yesterday when Kelechi Okafor laid out the details in succinct but scathing thread. While all of this is truly perplexing, the most disturbing aspect of Hooper’s revelations is her targeting of fellow mummy blogger Candice Brathwaite with naked misogynoir. Hooper’s burner account posted several times about Braithwaite, a black mummy blogger with over 47,000 instagram followers, attempting to leak stories about Brathwaite’s past, accusing her of being a “aggressive” (white women’s go-to description for confident and outspoken black women), “social climbing” and “using her race as a weapon”. The irony of that last point is not lost on me.

I am not a royalist. I am of the mindset that Britain should abolish the monarchy especially since it’s long been established that royal families were not, as originally believed, ordained by God Himself but are in fact just normal people who cheat and rob and shit like the rest of us. This said, I don’t know what else this cold little rock produces that injects an estimated £1.8bn annually into the British economy the way the royal family do.

I haven’t seen all the plays this year but seven methods of killing kylie jenner is the play of the year. Jasmine Lee-Jones, the twenty year old playwright responsible for the masterpiece on at the Royal Court until Saturday 27th July, made me question if my words would even be worthy to describe what I experienced last night; that’s how talented she is. It’s no secret that I’ve been a little down lately- I’ve not been feeling myself, a walking wound that won’t scab over but sitting in that theatre, surrounded by black women all gathered to watch black women perform in a play written by a black woman I felt closer to healing than I have in a long time.

I came out to my mum in an Ikea carpark, she said “thought so” then we went shopping. There was none of the poetry or conflict of Lena Waithe’s Primetime Emmy Award Winning Thanksgiving episode of Master of None. Waithe was the first African American woman to win the honour for her writing on a second season episode of the Aziz Ansari Netflix series that remains as affecting today as when it was first released. I know this cos I just watched it again and I laughed out loud and cried just as I did when I first watched it.

“…don’t worry about the fact that I’m black, I won’t make you feel uncomfortable... I am completely non-threatening, I am brown but safe.”

-Afua Hirsch, (Brit)ish: On Race, Identity and Belonging

 I was raised in Zimbabwe by Jamaican grandparents. On Saturday mornings, my grandfather and I would watch cartoons. X-Men was the cartoon I remember being most excited to watch. I know we can all agree the X-Men theme song slaps to this day but I digress. Watching X-Men as a 6 year old dark skin black girl, I wasn’t grateful for the dark hue of Storm’s skin. Storm’s complexion was unremarkable to me because in Harare in the early 90s to be black was to be the default. The President was black. The bus driver was black. Everyone from the teacher to the newsreader was black.

Tiffany Haddish failed. The comedian and actress took the stage for a sold out New Year’s Eve gig in Miami and she bombed. Badly. Rather than ignore reports of her failure, Haddish posted an article from The Root and tweeted an admission “Yes this happened. I wish it was better Miami. I prayed on it and I have a strong feeling this will never happen again.” That should have been the end of the debacle. Alas, when the comedian involved is both black and a woman failure is rarely an isolated incident but rather evidence they were never worthy or talented in the first place. In 2019, I want to see more black people fail. Especially black women. Pick your jaw off the floor. Here, take my hand friend and allow me to explain why the spectre of failure cripples black women when it should be seen as a necessary part of success.

I have a romcom blind spot. I grew up watching Mission Impossible and The Fifth Element, Interview with a Vampire and Independence Day on repeat. I can more readily quote these films than I can romantic comedies. And yet, despite my glaring romcom illiteracy, even I knew Rebel Wilson’s claim that she was the “first ever plus sized girl to play the lead in a romcom” was incorrect.  

Long before Where Hands Touch premiered at Toronto International Film Festival, the film had been plagued by accusations that it’s writer and director, BAFTA winner Amma Asante had “romanticised” Nazis. The film follows Leyna (Amandla Stenberg) as her mother Kerstin (Abbie Cornish) fights to save her daughter from the Nazi’s forced sterilisation plan by moving her family to Berlin. Once in Berlin, Leyna meets and subsequently falls in love with the son of Nazi officer and a member of the Hitler Youth, Lutz (George McKay). The film is powerful, far from kind in its portrayal of Nazis and I say this confidently because I have actually seen it.   

Stephanie Yeboah is a leader in the body positivity movement. Her website nerdabouttown.com is a treasure trove of sartorial and intellectual musings from the blogger and body positivity advocate. Far from new to the game, for years Yeboah has done and continues to do the very important necessary work of dismantling societal perceptions of what an acceptable body looks like. Her identity as a dark skinned black woman means her work takes place on two battle fields hostile to fat women and black women.

Diaspora wars are an especially tedious for me. The constant compare and contrast of the African, Caribbean, Black British and African American experiences is tiring because I am a black woman who was born in London and raised in Zimbabwe by Jamaican grandparents before moving back to Britain to be raised by my immigrant mother. I find it impossible to take sides during these mammoth social media debates all while white people are running off with our things in my periphery. Diaspora wars are draining because they offer little room to listen, to apply nuance and activate independent thought lest you be seen as a traitor.

**cracks knuckles**

I expected Serena Williams’s 24th Grand Slam win against Haiti and Japan’s Naomi Osaka to be a cake walk. Sure, Osaka had made it to the final but this is Serena Williams we’re talking about; the greatest athlete of all time. Osaka, however, was eerily focussed, calm and determined. Every serve was executed to perfection with one purpose- to rattle Williams. And rattle her she did. Williams began racking up unforced errors like lines of meth at a nitty convention. I was in my house in Catford, South London screaming for her to fix up. Down one set with everything to play for, her coach Patrick Mouratoglou attempted to coach Williams from the stands.  Williams did not see Mouratoglou’s motions but the umpire Carlos Ramos did. He penalised her one point. A cluster fuck ensued.

I found an old diary I kept when I was fourteen. To my horror it was entitled Being Overweight. Dated the 7th January 2004, the first page is a lamentation on how much I hated my body. I was fat and I was going to lose weight. I had cut out pictures of bodies I found acceptable, stuck them neatly to pages with captions and detailed what aspects of their bodies I needed to achieve.

The common misconception is the BeyHive are collectively insane. The media would have you believe our support is disproportionate considering the object of our affection is a performer. On Saturday April 14th 2018 at approximately 11:18pm PST (woulda been 11:10 had dry head Post Malone hurried tf up) Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter delivered unto us evidence further justifying the depths of our fandom. The first black woman and only the third woman in the festival’s nineteen year history, Beyoncé took to Coachella’s main stage for a two hour tour de force banging out hit after hit after hit. I don’t know ‘bout you, but she’s left my scalp tender having snatched my edges clean from their roots.

You lot hate black women who you do not find attractive. You will go to any lengths to deny “misbehaved” black women their due. You heard Viola Davis well well when she told you to pay her what her white counterparts are getting. You cried for Octavia Spencer when she told you Jessica Chastain helped her get her things. But Mo’Nique, with her “misbehaved”, non-conforming fat black womanhood, you can’t hear her. You don’t want to hear her. A hearty, soul deep fuck you all to everyone choosing to ignore her calls for equality. She’s fighting for me. Mo’Nique is telling other black women they are worth more than they’ve been offered. She is worth more than she was offered.

Alice Walker coined the term colourism which David Knight on tolerance.org describes as “within-group and between-group prejudice in favor of lighter skin color…” The idea is that people with lighter skin complexion have a closer proximity to whiteness and therefore are more desirable. In old tweets that have resurfaced today, British multi-hyphenate musician Stefflon Don, displayed the kind of colourism that is ingrained in the consciousness of not just those with light skin but is planted in the minds of those with dark skin who in turn learn to believe they are less than. “All you dark-skinned hating on light skin bitches like if God gave you a choice you wouldn’t change your colour lool…”  tweeted Stephanie Allen, the singer’s real name in 2013. I believe Stefflon is as much a victim of this societally entrenched prejudice as she is a past perpetrator and should she simply hold her hands up and say “rah, you know what? I said stupid, hurtful, informed shit back in the day. I’ve learned and I’ll do better.” I’d be inclined to say ignore this, but this “I never ever tweeted that” nonsense denial as if we’ve all lost the plot and didn’t see the tweet from her account with our own eyes, before she deleted it, but simply decided to come for her out of the blue is jarring. So, let’s talk about this. Follow me into the kitchen, I’m serving tea.