Don’t mind me while I rant.
The night I heard my grandmother’s voice, I had been smoking a lot of weed.
She told me he and I were each a trope, a mocking facade of the other, grasping to define something a shame that hovers just above our line of sight.
Having shame as a commonality isn’t the healthiest way for people to start relationships. Shame leads to self-loathing. Which then leads to self-hate. It’s better to avoid someone who could be such a toxic influence on you. As black men and women, we both can be toxic. But it’s not crazy to know the truth.
You’re not crazy for hearing voices that aren’t yours on repeat. It’s these black men who make a show of eviscerating the community, and their flagrant deprecation of you looping on repeat in your head. As black women, we’re perpetually sorting through an intolerable amount or type of bullshit when dealing with the black men in our lives.
Often because of them we need to escape or abandon the lives we’ve set up for ourselves and start over. Or he’s so incredibly selfish that he could eat three-fourths of a pizza — yet still want to make sure you don’t eat the last slice. He doesn’t care about giving you shit. To him, you have to earn it.
Once you gain the ability to tune him out, you can finally hone your focus and learn to focus on bettering yourself, the way you practice getting better at everything else. You’ll eventually recognize the sound of your own voice more clearly. You’ll know better now when your needs are met. You’ll give yourself permission to go where black women like you are valued.
Right now, however, you still feel like a failure. You keep hearing his voice. Or that of your mother and your father who disappointed you.
It’s a shame you had to learn this way. The loss you feel is unbearable. But I promise, you needed to see him like this.
You have to tune out and move on. Only then are you safe. Only then are you really free.
Harness the power of cognitive dissonance and use it to your advantage the way black men do when obscuring their self-hatred, if you want to live. You’ll notice, black women, that when black men find ways to protect and spare themselves, it’s always to do so from you. They’d rather destroy themselves — and, consequently, you — than to experience the guilt, shame, and powerlessness they impose. Everything they’d die to keep anyone from knowing about them bubbles to the surface like a bloated corpse spiraling into a slow and steady void. If you can stand to be around him long enough, you’ll eventually see the day when dense, tarry undercurrents pull him farther away.
As he drifts into the distance, you question everyone’s intentions in order to remain afloat. But you’re forced to rethink this approach as you earn a reputation for being as argumentative, or distrustful at best, to the rest of your own. If you ever let it get to you and react to this stereotyped perception of you, black men are often the first to salt our wounds by shouting to a world that ignores or exploits them that we are the ones who are unreliable, and that we’re not submissive enough. They are the only group of men on this planet who’ve made a sport of humiliating their own women for pointless and self-aggrandizing purposes.
Most black men are emotionally stunted and limited in their senses. They can’t see in you what other non-black men do. The only thing they see is your perceived betrayal, which used to hurt.
And yet, a sliver of belief lingers.
Why do we struggle to believe what we know over whatever it is we see?
Black Women Divesting 
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