The Black Sheep - by Danielle Daniel

They taught the lie early, and they taught it beautifully.On screens, in textbooks, in billboards and cartoons,they painted Blackness in margins and shadows,and called it representation when we finally appeared as background noise.They told us history started in chains and ended in speeches,as if kingdoms, science, art, and language had not existed before ships arrived.As if Africa had not been erased first,so slavery could look like our beginning instead of their crime.And somewhere in that long edit of our humanity,they slipped in the verdict that still echoes through dressing rooms and job interviews and courtrooms:“You committed two sins when you came into existence, you were born black and you were born a woman.”They didn’t just mean survival.They meant beauty.They meant worth.They meant who gets to be soft, and who must always be strong.They crowned lighter skin as safer, straighter hair as professional,smaller noses as elegant, fuller bodies as jokes or threats.They sold self-hate in magazines and called it aspiration.They sold whitening creams and called it confidence.They sold filters and called it progress.They built an industry on teaching Black girls to edit themselves.Even when we win, they rewrite it.They take our music, soften our accents, copy our slang,then give awards to people who learned Blackness from a distance.They love our rhythm but fear our rage.They love our culture but not our communities.They love the parts of us they can profit from.Not the parts that demand justice.They turn our grief into hashtags and our resistance into threats.They show riots without showing the funerals that caused them.They show broken windows but not broken policies, broken schools, broken promises.They tell the world that racism is over because it’s no longer polite.But it still lives in algorithms and housing maps and medical charts and hiring rooms.It still decides whose pain is believable,whose childhood is protected,whose death becomes a debate instead of a tragedy.They call it coincidence.We call it a pattern.And through all of it, Black women stand in the crossfire of every narrative:too Black for safety, too female for power, too loud for sympathy, too quiet for visibility.Expected to carry movements, families, churches, classrooms, communities —and still be grateful for survival.They write us as side characters in our own history.But we have always been the infrastructure.From stolen land to civil rights to modern revolutions,Black women have been organizing while being erased,leading while being overlooked,building while being blamed.So when they ask why we are angry,what they are really asking is why we refuse to forget.Because forgetting is how systems survive.Forgetting is how injustice becomes tradition.Forgetting is how oppression starts calling itself normal.They told us our existence was a problem to be managed,our beauty a flaw to be fixed,our voices a danger to be controlled.And the truth is,they are still managing, still fixing, still controlling.The edits never stopped.The damage never closed.The story never corrected itself.So don’t call this misunderstanding.Don’t call this the past.Don’t call this progress.Call it what it has always been:a narrative built to justify harm,maintained by silence,and protected by comfort.And it is still being written.

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