Are We Tired of Being Strong Yet?

It's past time to let the myths of the StrongBlackWoman and StrongBlackMan go.

This month, in honor of BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month, I’ll be writing about racism, mental health, and how we heal. Oh wait, that’s what I always write about.

In January I started strength training again after a nearly six-year hiatus. I’d stopped in late 2018 when I was diagnosed with a recurrence of breast cancer. By the time I finished treatment and felt like my energy and immune system could risk going to the gym, the COVID-19 pandemic was knocking at the door. I finally rejoined a fitness center last summer, but it took me six months to work up the nerve to start training again.

You see, the last time that I tried strength training (which happened to be the first time that I’d tried it), I may have caused myself more harm than good. In my eagerness to reduce fat, build muscle, and strengthen my bones, muscles, and joints, I increased weight levels too quickly. It probably didn’t help that the YMCA encouraged us to log our daily reps and weight on this handy little chart. You can’t give an overachiever a chart and not expect us to try to show rapid improvement. That little paper form was too much like a homework assignment and I wanted the teacher to see that I was doing well! I doubt that the trainers even look at those forms again, but in my mind, they’re grading me. So I overdid the strength thing and wound up triggering more pain. Unfortunately, I thought the problem was that I needed to get stronger, so I kept doing it.

A lot of us still haven’t figured out that too much strength is bad for us. Just a few weeks ago, I heard someone exclaim, “We are STRONG Black women!” I wanted to ask her how that’s been working out for her.

I wanted to ask her about her family’s health history, to ask how prevalent diabetes, hypertension, arthritis and chronic pain, autoimmune diseases, cancer, and GI issues were in her family.

I wanted to ask how many of those StrongBlackWomen had died before their 75th birthday, as so many Black women do.

I wanted to ask about the subtle signs of anxiety and depression that can be so common among Black people that we think they’re normal, the symptoms that often only Black therapists know to look for: having a long list of fears and phobias, irritability, somatic symptoms, and reliance on maladaptive self-regulating behaviors such as binge eating and compulsive shopping.

I wanted to know if their emotional vocabulary included something more descriptive than “feeling some kind of way,” if they felt comfortable feeling and expression a full range of emotions, and if they felt being known by others.

I wanted to know if they were able to ask for help when they needed it and to receive it when it was offered.

I wanted to know about the pain and pathology that strength conceals, the kind of pain that I saw advertised on the back of a man’s shirt while walking an outlet mall a few weeks ago.

I couldn’t make this up if I tried. This shirt is a walking billboard of the myth that strength is about power, dominance and self-sufficiency rather than love. Below “F*CK LOVE,” it says “MASTER OF MY OWN DESTINY.” The smaller print says, “Not falling victim to the fire that burns inside of me/Though I am fearful I will not prevent this tragedy/Never forget/That these choices were made by me.”

Both Black women and Black men have ways of concealing their pain behind masks of strength. The features of the masks are slightly different. The core features of the StrongBlackWoman are emotional strength, independence, and caregiving (you can read more about this in my book, Too Heavy a Yoke), whereas for the StrongBlackMan, they are emotional strength, self-sufficiency, and dominance. A StrongBlackWoman is a person who is able to withstand suffering without complaint and to care for others endlessly while never needing (or receiving) from other people. A StrongBlackMan is a person who never shows any sign of vulnerability (emotional, physical, or otherwise), who is able to do everything on his own without any assistance from others, and who must be seen as powerful and tough at all costs.

You know what’s sad? A lot of people will read those descriptions and see nothing wrong with them. They do not understand that the counterbalance to dependency is not self-sufficiency; it’s interdependence. They do not realize that it takes much more strength and courage to recognize our limitations than to pretend that we can go it alone. They do not know that healthy relationships are not built around power, control, or even self-sacrifice, but upon reciprocity, trust, and vulnerability.

Perhaps more importantly, they do not recognize that being strong is often a defensive posture meant to protect Black people from a world that constantly assaults our character. And far too often, it is a trauma response meant to hold together our broken hearts and shield them from further damage. But we were not created to be psychologically strong all the time. No one can sustain that, at least not without doing serious damage to our physical and mental health, our relationships with each other, and ultimately our relationship with the Divine.

Strength has its place, as do independence, caregiving, self-sufficiency, and power. But as I had to learn with exercise, the key to strength training is to not do it too much, too hard, or too often. A little bit of weight has to be followed by a whole lot of rest. In the StrongBlackWoman and the StrongBlackMan, that order has been inverted, inevitably leading to breakdown. Just as when we overtrain, we start to experience muscle breakdown, buildup of stress hormones, irritability, anxiety, depression, and greater susceptibility to illness.

Aren’t we tired of being strong, already?

Remembering Bebe Moore Campbell

Today I am thinking about Bebe Moore Campbell. A lot of people know Campbell as the author of bestsellers such as Brothers and Sisters, Singing in the Comeback Choir, and What You Owe Me (which, incidentally, is a great narrative about racism, immigration, and the cosmetics industry). Fewer people know that she is the inspiration behind July’s designation as BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month. The formal name for this month’s observance, as established by the US House of Representatives in 2008, is Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month.

Campbell, who died of brain cancer in 2006, was a great example of an activist artist. She used her novels to highlight contemporary and historical racism. She was a particularly strong advocate for destigmatizing mental illness and reducing barriers to treatment among African American communities. Her 2005 book, 72 Hour Hold, was groundbreaking in its depiction of a Black mother’s desperate attempt to help her mentally ill daughter amidst a failing mental health system. In real life, Campbell’s daughter, actress Maia Campbell, has faced some public struggles with mental illness and addiction.

Since 2008, the term minority has fallen out of style (and rightly so), hence the use of the term BIPOC. But let’s make sure that Campbell’s legacy doesn’t get lost in the process.

2024 BIPOC Mental Health Toolkit

Each year Mental Health America creates a free BIPOC Mental Health Toolkit. It includes fact sheets, sample newsletter articles, outreach ideas, and social media images. Whether you are an organizational leader, small business owner, or just a person who wants to support the health and well-being of Black, Indigenous, and people of color, get this year’s toolkit. We all need to do our part to normalize talking about mental health and treatment among Black, Indigenous, Latiné, Asian, Alaskan, and Pacific Islander communities. And yes, “we” includes the descendants and beneficiaries of slavery and settler colonialism.