“The wounded child inside many females is a girl who was taught from early childhood on that she must become something other than herself, deny her true feelings, in order to attract and please others.”- bell hooks

Socialization and indoctrination are two of the greatest enemies that the world has ever seen. Why? When a person or group of people have an agenda that he/she/they desire to teach, disseminate, and engrave interpersonally and/or hegemonically, socialization and indoctrination become the tools. They are the tools of our wounding, our oppression, domination, and debilitation. They become the exacto knife, etching a premeditated agenda into the minds and hearts of people, creating the “wounded child” who is taught to deny themselves and the truth. For women in general, gendered thinking and expectations dictate every aspect of women’s lives and experiences, engendering the “wounded child.” For Black women, specifically, race and gender collide to teach us who we are, what we are, and why we are (exist). Effectively, we are taught to denounce our true feelings and identities from early childhood onward to stunt our growth into healthy, self-actualized adults. We are taught to be “palatable.” Then once wounded, we remain trapped and unable to see the path that leads to our transition from “wounded childhood” to “healing adulthood.” We also become blind to supporting members of our community finding their pathway to healing.

According to the late, renowned scholar bell hooks, “attracting and pleasing others,” denying our true feelings, becomes the crux upon which many girls and women build their whole identities and personalities. For Black women, who are treated as threats to the agenda of oppression and domination, our intersectional socialization and indoctrination requires the premeditated murder of our self-determinism and love. Therefore, we are socialized and indoctrinated to believe we are valueless until we seek our value through others’ expectations, we are given “value” based on others’ expectations of us, and we perform others’ expectations of us to their standards. This is the first stage of our wounding, being taught the lie of our “inferiority” and “dispensability” until we become “palatable,” then perform our palatability well. The second stage comes from us believing the lie, and the third is how we put the lie into action. Stages 1-3 are palatability politics. We are taught to debilitate ourselves; debilitation is most effective when we support our own demise. Then our personal debilitation blocks our work for communal-determinism and love, because we are vital parts of our communities. We are taught to distort, silence, and incapacitate ourselves, other Black women, and by extension our communities. We are socialized and indoctrinated to do the job of our enemies and keep our enemies and their ill-gotten, hegemonic power secure.

Wounding can be premeditated, constant, sporadic, circumstantial, or unintentional. But the results are the same. Our wounding rots us from the inside out. We become unable to transcend our Achilles heel, our need to be palatable to appeal to the supposed “superiors,” the people whose “value” is unquestioned or less questioned. By practicing palatability politics, we become the mammies, who support the white supremacist agenda, which includes racism, sexism, classism, and a plethora of other socio-cultural issues. We practice anti-Blackness, anti- womanness, and other harmful ways of thinking to be acceptable to the white and/or male gaze.

We say things like, “that’s ghetto,” “she/you sound uneducated,” “you’re too loud and aggressive,” “you ain’t going to catch a man looking like that,” “women/girls don’t act like [insert gendered thought here],” “you look better/professional when your hair is [insert imposed comment here], “if you dressed up and wore a little makeup, you could [insert “possibility” here], or “you make us look bad; who is going to respect us if you, [insert complaint here].” We create an intra-communal “they not like us” mentality, ostracizing Black women who are not “palatable.” We implicitly and explicitly demonstrate that going outside of white and/or male prescribed expectations is detrimental to us, instead of seeing the toxicity of that mentality. Our socialization and indoctrination distances us from constructively using our anger to question why palatability politics exist and how and why we must challenge, then kill the “need” to be accepted and validated for our healing. By killing palatability politics, we stop debilitating ourselves and our communities when we internalize and disseminate white supremacy.

The reason for our wounding was for our oppressors to oppress and dominate us as Black women. Our socialization and indoctrination was never meant for our betterment. To seek actual betterment for ourselves and our communities, we must learn to love ourselves, without seeking others’ acceptance and validation. To bell hooks, the appropriate response to our wounding is not “to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget,” but instead we must love ourselves and our people enough to practice a “healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse” by “putting ourselves out of harm’s way.” We must commit to a life-long journey and practice of genuine love for ourselves by not allowing anyone to invalidate us (including ourselves), by knowing our worth and exhibiting our greatness. Despite their attempts to devalue us and make us feel as if we must seek their validation or perish, our oppressors know we are great. We are indispensable and valuable beyond measure. Otherwise, as the late, great Cicely Tyson once said people who demean you would not “bother to beat you down if you were not a threat.” Black women, we don’t owe anyone anything. Oppressors, we owe you nothing. Black women, other people’s perception of us is not our problem. Oppressors, your perception of us is not our problem. It is a you problem; it has nothing to do with us. Black women, we do not have to seek or use a toxic “remedy” (palatability politics) to address a non-existent “problem” that delusionally exist within the minds of people who seek our destruction. Let’s genuinely love ourselves and heal the “wounded child” within.

Love,

Chelsea Buggs

Dr. Chelsea Buggs
Bio: Dr. Chelsea Buggs is a recent graduate of the University of Memphis’s history department. She is also a recipient of the 2023-2024 Dr. William and Helen Lucille Gillaspie Scholarship, among several other awards. Dr. Buggs’s current research interests include: Black women, intersectionality, positionally, and self- and communal-determinism, identity formation and demonstration, Black women’s intellectual-activism, Black women’s agency and autonomy, the connections between white supremacy and Black equality strategies, and her concepts of the “Moral Matron” and “place” identities (not related to geography but socio-racial hierarchy).