if all we do is save ourselves, is that enough?
Short Answer: Yes.
i.
Just because doing right by Black women would save everybody, does that make Black women obligated to save everybody?
I been asking myself this question a lot lately as I read slowly through Cassie Knight Steele’s Digital Black Feminism, bell hook’s Rock My Soul, and Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice. 1
Black women en masse said they were setting their capes down in 2024. I saw that in the viral image of Black women sitting atop a skyscraper, watching the world burn. Don’t ask me to go to no protest. Get somebody else to do it. Ya’ll have fucked around. Time to find out.2
And whereas, I personally don’t think this is the time to watch the world burn, per se3 I do think everybody who is not a Black woman needs to get off Black women’s back.4
But lately, I’ve been asking myself: What if it’s not? What if all we do is save ourselves? Would that be enough?
I think it would.
ii.
When I think about the frameworks Black women have created—womanism, Black feminist thought, I see them as gifts. They are tools, available to anyone who chooses to pick them up and use them. These frameworks and knowledge bases are keys, unlocking doors for anyone willing to walk through.
And yet, I also know that liberating Black women (especially Black, disabled, neurodivergent women w sexual trauma who are a lil gay, a lil fat, and off yt Jesus) would mean dismantling so many systems that others would inevitably be lifted too. A rising tide lifts all boats or whatever.5
In that way, our liberation is inherently collective, even if we don’t make it our explicit mission to save anyone but ourselves.
Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” - Audre Lorde ; The Masters Tools
iii.
I think about my grandmothers often. Both of them carried so much. Both worked tirelessly, loved fiercely, and survived in a world that didn’t always see her humanity. When I think of her, I realize that saving ourselves is not a small thing. It is not selfish. It is not insignificant. It is, in fact, revolutionary.
Because to save myself is to honor her. To save ourselves is to say to every Black person who came before us: Your sacrifices were not in vain. We are here. We are living. We are free.
Even if saving ourselves didn’t automatically save others, it would still be enough.
If all we do is live—fully, unapologetically, freely—then haven’t we already fulfilled the wildest dreams of a thousand thousand people?
How is that not liberation?
But it also requires us to ask: Who are we demanding to save us? And what would it mean to take up the tools of liberation ourselves, rather than waiting for another Black women to do it for us?
Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, Buy Me A Book!
-B
These books are all on the Essential Soulwork Reading List! You can read along with me on StoryGraph!
I’on like who all is saying this catchy little phrase. But that’s a different essay.
Wrote more on that in an essay called ‘you’re not burned out, you’re being exploited’ read that here
CC all the People are clamoring for Kamala Harris and Michelle Obama to DO SOMETHING, as if their mere presence can patch up our fractured system.
The Combahee River Collective’s assertion that “if Black women were free, it would mean everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the end of all systems of oppression”