Twitter has some ideas for the writer who has a problem with #BlackGirlMagic
LatestElle Magazine recently published a piece by writer Linda Chavers titled “Here’s My Problem With #BlackGirlMagic” in which she explains the many issues she has with the idea behind the popular hashtag.
“[O]ne attitude I’ll never take on is the idea that I can be a ‘magical black woman.’ That somewhere within me is some black girl magic. Because there isn’t,” Chavers explained. “Everything inside and outside of me is flesh and bone and a nervous system (with bad signaling). Nothing magical.”
Chavers’s beef with #BlackGirlMagic boils down to the very real problems like the use of excessive force at the hands of police that stem from people perceiving black people as being literally supernatural.
“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,” Chavers said. “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.”
While Chavers made valid points about the structural violence black women are subjected to, many felt as if she fundamentally misunderstood what #BlackGirlMagic was about.
“#BlackGirlMagic isn’t about dehumanizing black women, who are called upon time and time again to exercise super-human strength and ridiculous levels of forgiveness in the face of every ‘-ism’ in the book,”Amy Juicebox wrote for Blativity. “#BlackGirlMagic wasn’t what killed Sandra Bland, it’s what got her name out there in the first place. #BlackGirlMagic wasn’t what put Marissa Alexander in prison, it’s what eventually got her out.”
Unsatisfied with Chavers’s thesis, many supporters of #BlackGirlMagic took to Twitter to conjure up ideas for her next article with the hashtag #ChaversNextArticle.
Unsurprisingly, Linda Chavers doesn’t seem to be much of an active Twitter user, but suffice it to say that if and when she decides to sign on, her welcome might not be so warm.