Source: Lucy Snow-Red Table Talk / Lucy Snow-Red Table Talk
This week on the Red Table, Gammy, Jada and Willow are joined by activist Tamika Mallory to discuss some of the implications of what it means to be a Black girl and a Black woman in our society. The conversations touches on everything from the maternal mortality rate, the killing and Ma’Khia Bryant and how Black women often feel invisible in our society.
See what the women had to say on the topic of invisibility and the dismissal of Black women’s feelings in the transcript and clip below.
Tamika Mallory: People don’t understand what feeling invisible means. Because it’s like I’m loud. I talk a lot, talk all the time. So people are like you can’t be invisible. We can’t miss you. You’re always there. But my feelings are not always valued. My opinion of things, I’m constantly having to raise my temperature in order for people to know that I know what I’m talking about.
Jada Pinkett Smith: It’s interesting when you talk about needing to turn up the temperature because I don’t know how many times I’ve felt like I had to turn up the temperature and then you get ostracized for that.
Gammy: Then you get labeled as the angry Black woman.
Willow: That stereotype breaks my heart because that has been stuffed down and repressed and then it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re just an angry Black woman.’ But it’s so much deeper than that.
Mallory shared that the feeling of being ignored or disregarded drove her to addiction. On this same episode, Gammy shared that while she was pregnant with Jada, she was also mistreated by hospital staff. Another woman, a pregnant college professor. And the doctor who went viral after she was treated as an “incompetent Black woman” on a flight shares her story.
