I believe wholeheartedly in the internal spiritual work that Black women must do to save our own lives. But I also wonder whether our spiritual work is a match for the structural systems that would crush us alive. Audre Lorde famously said, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” But what do we do with this push for self-definition and self-recognition in a system that would crush us anyway?
