As a Black mom figuring out how to live my best life after a divorce, I am undoubtedly the target audience for Tamara Winfrey Harris’s A Black Woman’s Guide to Getting Free.
“This preface alone is gonna wreck me,” I wrote in my notes. I resonated immediately with these words:
“With all the advantages I have, the biased narrative of Black womanhood can make me believe, even in a moment of triumph or achievement, that I need fixing.” Like the author, I need reminding “that my largeness and Blackness do not erase my beauty or intelligence or accomplishments or worthiness, or need for love and care.”
The Guide to Getting Free doesn’t ignore the structural barriers keeping most Black women from unabashed freedom. Instead, the book focuses on how we can be free in our minds, preparing us to resist society’s demands to fit into its expectations and to serve it at our own expense, a message women from many backgrounds can connect with.
“I am writing this book, my sister, so that you and I can see ourselves more clearly and value ourselves more fully; so we can navigate the realities of racism, sexism, and other oppressions, making the sometimes hard and punishing choices they require from a place of strength and freedom, preferencing our needs.”
Instead of the unattainable perfection that politics of respectability and phrases like #BlackGirlMagic and #StrongBlackWoman can push us toward, at the expense of our mental and physical health, Winfrey Harris helps her readers “cultivate an unshakeable belief in Black women and girls’ alrightness.”
Winfrey Harris provides the roadmap for living as free as we can in a country built to enslave us. There are six pillars of Black femme freedom you can view as stops along the journey that you can always return to. The Guide first teaches us to spot the distortions, the false narratives about Black women, followed importantly by learning how to know your truth so you can celebrate the real you. Then the book reckons with structural barriers to freedom, helping the reader understand the cost of liberation. For example, Winfrey Harris says “liberation for Black women will always come at a cost. And you, my sister, have to be good at balancing your ledger to determine when and how much you are willing and able to pay.” Finally, the Guide teaches us to practice freedom for ourselves and to see free Black women everywhere in order to nurture collective freedom.
Each of the pillar chapters have a similar format. Winfrey Harris provides context from research, Black women’s writing, and her own life experiences to explain each pillar. She then brings in the voices of Black women she interviewed who are on their own freedom journeys. The chapters end with freedom rituals I found very practical and inspiring. Breathwork and meditation, drawn from Winfrey Harris’s background in yoga, have a strong presence among the ritual options throughout the book. My favorite of these is around “sat nam,” a Sanskrit expression used in meditation to help people consider their true name, or true self.
Knowing our true names and keeping our sense of self is vitally important, particularly so in this moment. As I write this review, it is only three days after Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee. Regardless of one’s political background, the coming months will bring a deluge of racist and sexist language in the media and to many of our communities. I had already interviewed Winfrey Harris before the news, but I knew I had to reach back out for her response:
“Black women will need to guard their peace and freedom over the next several months of the U.S. presidential election. Mere days after, we are already being hammered with gross distortions. For instance, when critics accuse this highly qualified candidate of sleeping her way into her position, they invoke the Jezebel stereotype that has followed Black women for centuries. It is clear misogynoir. When they complain about her aggression, as they did when she faced off against then-candidate Biden during the 2020 election, it is the Sapphire trope rearing its head. The rhetorical shots are intended to wound the Black biracial candidate’s reputation, but make no mistake, Black women—and Southeast Asian women and all women—will be catching strays. Now is the time to commit to freedom rituals—the practices that keep us mentally and physically nourished—and to be particularly vigilant about detoxing from negative images of womanhood and Black womanhood. We don’t have to be front and center responding to every social media shitpost.” Yes. That is the pathway to madness, not freedom.
May our freedom ring louder than the lies.
Images Via Grace Michael Photography
