On Adriana Smith, Anti-Blackness, Experimentation, and Disregard for Black Uteruses and Black Women

Trigger warning: Descriptions of anti-Black woman hate and harm, anti-Blackness, and reproductive trauma.

Adriana Smith and her family should've never had to endure this horrible and traumatic public experiment in postmortem childbirth.

What Georgia did to Adriana Smith would never happen to a person of pallor with a uterus. And there's nobody out there that can tell me otherwise, because trying to deny this fact is an openly raised middle finger to the history of the mistreatment and bodily harm done to Black women and Black bodies for centuries on stolen land.

Even in a country that is on the fast track to remove reproductive rights and body choice from every person with a uterus and jail people for making personal choices that have nothing to do with the state, there is no way this would've been allowed to happen if Adriana Smith were a person of pallor. The news would've been running stories every damn day. Reproductive rights lawyers would've been coming out of the woodwork. But that didn't happen, did it?

And we all know why.

So instead of people of pallor and pallor-led legal aid organizations with power and positionality who claim they care about reproductive rights partnering with Adriana's family to fight for her rights, as they would with any cis woman of pallor with a uterus (because, let's be real, that's about all they would stand up for), last Friday, Georgia performed a C-section on a Black woman who was declared brain-dead in February and forced to be on a ventilator to conceive a child because, you know, laws and sh**.

And now, this 1-pound, 13-ounce child whose deceased mother was kept on a ventilator, unable to provide the nutrients needed to fully nurture his growth and development, is now fighting for his life in the neonatal intensive care unit because, you know, laws and sh**.

Cis women of pallor love quoting The Handmaid's Tale to describe the level of danger people with uteruses are in while openly choosing not to sit with the undeniable fact that Black women and Black bodies have always been subject to centuries of Handmaid's Tale-level sh** at the hands of people of pallor since colonizers forced Black bodies into chattel slavery.

Adriana deserved better.

Her child deserved better.

Black women deserve better.

How to Cook Like The People You Just Deported

Image description: a faux cover to a cookbook entitled, "How to Cook Like The People You Just Deported: Authentic Ethnic Flavors for Bigots who Don't Deserve Them."

It never shocks me how much ethnocultural impact communities of color, the Global Majority, Black and Brown folx, have on people of pallor and what they think is the "American way" of life.

There is no "U.S. culture" without melanin building its foundations and giving the whole thing flavor and life.

A whole lot of y'all hate AAPI communities, yet love your Christmas Day Chinese dinner.

A whole lot of y'all hate Black folx but love fried chicken, peanut butter, every bit of southern cuisine on the continent, and hundreds of dishes and food combinations created by Black folx as the original struggle meals that you now posit as "upscale cuisine."

A whole lot of y'all hate Indigenous communities but have stolen their fashion and cultural heritage to use as aesthetics to deck out your bodies and homes.

A whole lot of y'all hate Mexican, Hispanic, and Latine communities but enjoy the creature comforts of the food they harvest, cultivate, and grow.

But, you know, gon' 'head and deport and endanger the legitimate backbone of your country like it's not going to upend the comfy-ass multi-colored tapestry of an existence you live in and benefit from.

[Image description: a faux cover to a cookbook entitled, "How to Cook Like The People You Just Deported: Authentic Ethnic Flavors for Bigots who Don't Deserve Them."]

On An Election and A Country's True Identity

I'm not surprised. I'm saddened, but I’m not surprised.

I'm unsurprised that 59% of men of pallor and 52% of women of pallor voted the way they did. I'm sadly not surprised that after everything he said and will do to immigrants when he takes office, he still got 54% of the masculine-identifying and 37% of the feminine-identifying Latine and Hispanic vote.

I'm saddened, but I’m not surprised.

I am disheartened but unsurprised.

I didn’t need a reminder, but for those who did, this election was a firm reminder that the United States is precisely what it has always been: a country steeped in individualism and fear of moving forward, unwilling to be progressive and care for all its citizens, and legitimately uninterested in trying to be the country it likes to claim it is.

He won this election, and it wasn't even close in the popular or electoral vote. A party with a platform of hate, oppression, and regression will be in complete control of the Government come January 2025, and it wasn't even a fight.

And I know so many of y'all voted for this man and this party while playin’ in the faces of the people in your life who you know their policies and governance will do extreme harm to. Most of y'all are quick to bust out a Black Lives Matter sign or bring up trans and reproductive rights just to have a smoke screen to vote against everyone’s best interests.

I loathe that most of y'all won’t own your hatred and fear of losing what you think is exclusively yours - rights, privileges, and safety from tyranny.

I loathe that most of y'all won’t own who you are in front of those your choices impact.

I loathe that most of y’all will be shocked when the people you elected do the exact things you hired them to do and you find yourself and your families adversely impacted and in physical, mental, emotional, and economic distress.

But I’m not surprised.

You're Americans! That's what Americans do, right?

I'm saddened. I'm disheartened. I'm not surprised, though.

This is the American way, y'all.

Note: This poll data is from a subsection of the voter base from 10 states.

On the NABJ and Not All Skinfolk Being Kinfolk

I don't have much to say about yesterday's NABJ Conference debacle and the messy events that preceded it, mainly because Black folx across the internet and beyond have covered all the bases and then some. But one thing that frustrates my soul is the interviewers and the heads of the NABJ trying to put a positive spin on this sh—.

I've seen and heard multiple messages and sound bytes since yesterday’s 30-minute sexist, racist, fragile ego-driven, anti-Black shindig trying to spin this mess as “eye-opening for voters” and doing the service of “showing us who [name redacted] truly is.” But you see, NABJ, there is one problem with this news cycle-level spin job:

WE ALL KNOW WHO HE IS.

Who the f—- didn't know who this man was and what he believed about Black people, women, and intersectionality before yesterday’s hateful antics?!

He didn't need stage time at your conference. None of us needed to watch another round of him attacking women, chastising and harming Black women in front of an audience, and being an absolute racist and white supremacy-driven sack of human excrement. Unless you've been in a coma or trapped in an underground bunker like Kimmy Schmidt for the past decade, this raggedy felon the NABJ scrambled for days to get on their stage for clout and headlines has shown us exactly who he is, to the point that you don't even need him to open his mouth to know how he feels. Did y'all think the public and your association members would buy that this was some altruistic venture, especially when all the behind-the-scenes shenanigans came to light?

Spin that nonsense somewhere else, NABJ.

Take your L. Make amends. But don't sit there acting like this all went pretty well unless you're referring to that well Buffalo Bill had at his house.

Don't act like you created a learning moment for us unless the lesson was that some people are still shocked when a leopard bites their face off.

And don’t act like this all pretty much went according to plan unless you planned to harm Black women.

It looks like the NABJ needs to learn that misogynoir and anti-Blackness can easily be stoked and fomented by Black people.

How about y'all research and investigate that, then get back to us with your findings?

About Sonya

Sonya Massey.

I'm not going to watch the bodycam footage. I stopped that practice many years ago. I can’t keep watching my people die, so I refuse to engage in the trauma porn of our constant suffering.

Doesn’t make the reality of it all hurt any less.

I honestly have no more words for the ever-present harming and willful disregard of Black women. I have rage, sadness, deep sorrow, but no words that verbalize how jumbled it all feels in my brain, body, and soul.

I advise every Black person, every Black woman, to not watch the footage. Please don’t do that to yourself. That said, if you’re a Black person, especially a Black woman, and you feel like you have to watch, please do everything and anything you need to do to take care of yourself in the moment and after you’ve finished viewing it. Your mental and emotional health matter.

Black women just want to live without constant threats to their lives and livelihoods.

I don’t know why this is so damn difficult for people of pallor to want to understand.

Sonya Massey.

Say her name.