“Being pretty is not ambition young queens. You need to have more to offer than just your body ✊🏾”, I read as my face twisted in disgust at the ridiculous Instagram post.
You would think when Black women graduate from higher education, the first thing that could come to mind would be a “congratulations”, right? Wrong.
Its graduation season, and recently my timeline has been flooded with pictures of Black people, specifically Black women, putting on for the culture of higher education. I could only hope that when when the community sees a picture of a Black woman in a graduation cap, they have no other thought than of how she’s going to change the world. But social media continues to prove me wrong.
The post featured two Black young women in their graduation caps and stoles smiling excitedly. They’d just made it through one of life’s most taxing tasks: college. They looked happy. They probably posted their success to Facebook for families to congratulate them on their newest milestone. And they deserved it. They deserve to be congratulated for this. As an onlooker, I was happy for the two strangers. But it was the caption on the picture that sent my joy into a downward spiral. It read, “Being pretty is ambition young queens. You need to have more to offer than just your body ✊🏾”
To this I say: STOP USING SUCCESSFUL BLACK WOMEN AS SCAPEGOATS FOR YOUR MISOGYNY. Stop using successful Black women to reinforce the idea that women have to be a respectable type of woman. I was disgusted. My first thought was “how dare you?”. How dare you take an focus away from graduating Black women to push your agenda of respectability politics and misogyny? Telling women how to be women? Telling them that they shouldn’t capitalize on an industry of hyper sexualization that is primarily supported by men? Don’t tell women that being “pretty” is not an ambition when you avidly fund the industry for your own personal consumption. How dare you tell us what our ambition should look like while ignoring the fact that Black women have statistically fewer opportunities than their other counterparts in the workplace? Stop ignoring that higher education is treated as a privilege in this country, and understand it is not accessible to everybody. All I could think of is how those young women didn’t get their degrees for your approval. They didn’t go through multiple years of hard work so they could get your cyber ‘pat-on-the-back’. We don’t need your daddy-lessons and mansplaining on what ambition is supposed to look like and what it takes to become a successful woman all while using an example of their success to mask your misogyny.
What you can do for us, however, is combat the system that doesn't allow for Black girls to have equal opportunities. If you want to be helpful, you can get educated and try to combat misogynoir amongst your peers. But what we don’t need you to do is tell us what our ambition should look like. We can also spare you using our success to pit us up against other women.
So, if pretty is her ambition, then let pretty be her ambition. If she only has to offer her body, then let her do just that.
Black women aren’t your tools. We aren’t for somebody. We aren’t for you. We’re for ourselves. And that is how it should remain.