An Introduction to black femme neuro
Introduction:
As a self-identified black feminist neuroscientist, I approach neuroscience in a way that integrates a black feminist (BF) societal understanding. Using this critical lens, we can reveal new avenues forward that can honor and empower various forms of knowledge previously unrecognized and dismissed from formalized knowledge institutions. Black feminism focuses on centering and valuing black women and recognizes the knowledge- and thus power- everyone has via their lived experiences (1,2). Within this perspective, all individuals are recognized as intellectuals and experts in their experience. This knowledge is affirmed simply through being and a recognition that we are all alive and interconnected. Hence, communication of individual experiences through dialogue contributes to what is collectively known.
Integration of this knowledge and societal critique within neuroscience (NS) and the ethical approach to neuroscience reveals the limited ability our quest for knowledge has in serving all of society.
Combining these understandings, we can begin to see how language built through narrative - esp. moral language- becomes the building blocks for how we relate to each other in society. Bf theory has wonderfully articulated how morality, language, and societal construction converge to create to a white supremist, patriarchal, heteronormative landscape in America (3). This landscape tells a narrative of limited possibility/ potentiality for oppressed groups, and formalized systems of knowledge listen to, observe, and respond to this narrative in turn sustaining the landscape (4). Black feminism offers us a way to critique sciences part in maintaining colonialists and patriarchal narratives by unraveling how concepts of objective and rational morality intertwine with people’s bodily realities in order to establish and preserve systems of oppression (5). Incorporation of black feminist and anti-colonial ways of knowing in neuroscience can provide us with new language for how to understand the field’s and our positionality within systems of oppression. Thus, expanding our limited view and revealing the need to contribute to a new narrative that actively challenges a system in which we are an integral part of.
It is a challenge for myself to engage with science differently, if purely for the science of it all.
BF/NS?
What does this mean? Is it the space in between… two worlds that I in habit.
The distanced I’ve traveled so that I can be myself…
First learn who I am go back to save her, show her the world is yours to create
And then create it.
Creating a science that feels like me
Like home
Believing I deserve a space in science, in life
There is no science without black women
Without our labor, our bodies…
The first black woman scientist I knew was my 7th grade teacher Ms. P
The thing I remember most about her is the freckles, they dotted her face.
Spots of darker brown, inhabiting her cheeks
To me freckles were a symbol of whiteness before I met her
I think I envied them
Inspired by how they moved, danced with her scientific excitement on her brown skin.
I appreciated how although different, darker, and standing out they moved in unison with a smile displaying clearly how emotions dance with our body.
I later learned I had freckles on my hands and as I grew older freckles emerged on my face as well. Which I now realize are just moles
A full circle moment as we teach ourselves about ourselves and the excitement in sharing knowledge through simply being us.
Her image in my mind is not of her science but of her face, her smile
A visual lesson that taught me my joy has a place within the study of ourselves
And I think this is what I mean. To go beyond what is taught and logically deduced as science and truly honor and appreciate the life underneath
Science as an act of love
That allows us to satisfy our minds and hearts
Expand how we think. With this instrument
Of love, there is power for movement
supported by understanding and thus infinite potential for growth.
Science is inherently spiritual,
deeply enmeshed and embedded
within our relationship with the unknown.
Current notions of science are centered around reason.
Rationality and objectivity serving as the foundation5 for how to know
In this science our relationship with the unknown is one that resembles fear.
Which we respond to with control(s)
Focusing on what we know, ignoring what we cannot define within our understanding of significance.
And to be a black feminist neuroscientist is to wonder what it means to do science when there is a loving relationship with the unknown…
Loving the unknown and the people that are labeled as such
Living within the undefined, finding solace in the unknown.
In this space, where paradox occurs.
We find black women and femmes
Words that in the American lexicon (as perfectly articulated by Hortense Spillers)3
Oppose each other. Antithesis to the other, serves as the foundation of definition
Within this pretense, an undefinable tension builds inside the bodies of those who experience life inside this intersection of narratives
As we come to know ourselves in the nothingness that is prescribed to the unknown
An ancient knowledge is recognized
An ancient bond reformed as we realize how love exists within nothing too, and the power of embodying this knowledge within everyday life.
What does it mean when you symbolize the unknown within society?
Especially in a field that is obsessed with knowing through definition.
What do we do when we don’t know?
Well, what do we do with our null results?
These don’t get published. We learn but this knowledge
Is not worthy of public recognition. It does not have the right (p) value…
And thus, our ability to learn is taken away.
This silencing of the unknown.
It is easy to think that the unknown is silent, maybe at times it is, but I believe this interpretation of silence is reflective of our teleological quest for truth.
Trying to find meaning that fits into what we already know, we devalue the chaos and uncertainty of the undefined
Although we do not report these null findings, they shape our science, shaping the path forward, creating the context in which we step toward our desire to become significant and recognizable
This lived knowledge
embodied in our scientific choices, decisions, actions.
What we deem unknowable decides what we can know.
How we define knowledge creates the context of our unknowing..
And with this I am back to black women and femmes
Grounding myself in this deep knowledge we have of the societal unknown,
pushed by a divine refusal to be fragmented, rejecting the need to be understood in a linear fashion
choosing to live embodied and aware of the cyclical, remembering to come back into ourselves as we push towards more, honoring how we be
“Before a new nation can be born there must be a new person”
I want black women to be known in a way the extends beyond the limited narrative that science and systems of oppression can reason and rationally articulate into legibility
I want to honor this drive towards the unknown and the sacred commitment we have to ourselves and creating a life that reflects all of what we know
And this is where the love comes in.
Love (6) and its magic. Power. Power to move
Heal across millions of fragmented pieces back to one.
In my spirituality, I’ve come to know love deeply, by means of myself, as myself
By listening, holding, and comforting parts of the self that have been distanced and cut off to love
swallowed in darkness and in fear of what this means..
This is called shadow work. The practice of bringing love to the dark. Allowing for illumination. Holding both light and dark together. Not in a duality of judgment or tension but in one of love.
And to me this is what love is. ONE. An energy of one, coming back, being in, around, under, behind.
To allow for whole again
So, when I speak of BF NS I speak of love. Of sewing back together all of the divided parts of self/ knowledge so that we can operate fully within a conscious understanding and thus embodied experience of love.
Black femme neuro is a kind of self-love for myself that I give to/ share with others. In this exchange it is my attempt to bring to light a kind of science that can hold all my being.
It is a shadow work practice, choosing to look into the dark at the unknown, go into the past to learn, understand, love and hold what can never be recovered.
Love is central to my science because it is central to me.
In my refusal to accept prescribed separation of my various identities and thus knowledge systems. My love has created a need for me to work towards a science, a way of knowing the unknown that is accepting and understanding. That listens and reads between the lines, which holds space for what we cannot know, that listens to the whispers in what is omitted.
A science that surrenders to the divine, as the divine expresses itself through black women and femmes
Holding it all without the need for right or wrong, just what is.
Black femme neuro is a kind of intellectual playground where we have the chance to engage with the deep interconnections of life, honoring our natural ability to synthesize, philosophize, and create/ sustain life
Realizing the enmeshment of various aspects of our lives then challenges us to do science in a way that honors lived and embodied knowledge of life in the infinite ways it is experienced
It acknowledges the folly of control and limits of objectivity and chooses to surrender to and listen to love as it lives within us and in the world
~
Concluding Thoughts
In following the guidelines of science’s intellectual thread, we are taught to imagine what is possible. Black feminist and anticolonial literature have taught me how to think outside of that box of possibility. They remind me to center/ ground my belief of power/ possibility in myself and the experience of others like me. In our knowledge of life that gets canceled out, we learn intimately how to survive in a land of alternative possibilities while simultaneously maintaining and contributing to the narrative of what is known (7,8). We learn rejected nulls serve as the base of knowledge… because there is power in the ability to observe something else.. see a different outcome see what is under, behind, and maybe above depending on positionality. In my positionality (as a black feminist neuroscientist), I see the value in the chaos (that which cannot be statistically understood, more relational and lived knowledge) and how this works in concert with what can be rationally deduced. Life becomes a lesson on how to maintain a sense of self (alternative perspective/ possibility outside of what is controlled) while also navigating and upholding structures designed to reject any kind of potential beyond the scope of the current intellectual thread. This rational rejection manifests within physical, intellectual, and imaginative obstacles in my efforts to create a neuroscience dissertation experience that incorporates my lived experience of balancing the relational with the rational.
This blog serves as a space to free myself from these obstacles, to think outside of disciplines and the belief that black feminism and neuroscience are separate and explore what it means to then enact on this possibility. Which to me is where neuroethics comes in. The choices I make as a researcher- that honor and value people and perspectives historically rejected and devalued as sites for legitimate knowledge- reflect a black feminist commitment I have to my science. In this commitment, there is an understanding that the current way knowledge is constructed perpetuates a narrative of limited possibility. Thus, black feminist neuroscience can serve as a neuroethical tool to expand perspective. In this perspective, there is space to observe how our faith in the power of rationality developed side by side with white supremacy, colonialism, and eugenics5. Consequently, incorporation of this perspective necessitates the revaluation of alternative ways of knowing (i.e. black women’s lived experiences and intellectual and creative contributions) and how this revaluation interacts with neuroscience from an integrative theoretical and practical perspective. There is a growing presence of neuroscientists working to incorporate black feminist understandings and critique within neuroscience research (9,10). This practical integration is necessary in order to create science that can adequately view, understand, and thus serve black women. Accompanying this effort, this blog focuses on the need for creative, imaginative, and interdisciplinary understandings of neuroscience that are grounded in the lived experiences of black women and femmes. This creative effort serves to highlight how much knowledge exists outside of our formalized and accepted ways of knowing, and is an exploration of how to begin creatively incorporating this understanding, along with who I am, into science.
Intentions for blog:
· Creating a space to be still and reflect, a place that cares little for separation, distinction, and definition. This space allows for things to come together and fall apart, allowing us to learn outside of structured knowledge, reveal new connections, and build new understandings.
· In this stillness, there is a commitment to being open and listening to what is not overt, what is unknown and unspoken yet vibrantly influences every facet of our lives.
· This is a space to engage with neuroscience creatively and in a way that honors our internal knowledge systems. Thus, beginning to merge and find balance between external/internal and relational/rational forms of knowledge (Learning from art, feeling how the self comes in and out of spaces, learning from community)
· Build community with others who also want a space to engage with neuroscience differently.
References:
1. Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective statement. Zillah Eisenstein, ed, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, (1979).
2. Hill Collins, P. The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, 745–773 (1989).
3. Spillers, H. Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. Diacritics. Vol 17 N 2: Culture and Countermemory: The ‘American’ Connection 17, 64–81 (1987).
4. McKittrick, K. Dear Science and Other Stories. (Duke University Press Durham and London, 2021).
5. Mhlambi, S. From Rationality to Relationality : Ubuntu as an Ethical & Human Rights Framework for Artificial Intelligence Governance. Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (2020).
6. hooks, bell. All about love : new visions. (First edition. New York : William Morrow, [2000] ©2000, 2000).
7. Camp, S. M. H. Closer to freedom: Enslaved women and everyday resistance in the plantation south. The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London (2004). doi:10.2307/4486108.
8. Haley, S. No mercy here: Gender, punishment, and the making of Jim Crow modernity. The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill (2016). doi:10.1093/jahist/jay368.
9. Webb, E. K., Cardenas-Iniguez, C. & Douglas, R. Radically reframing studies on neurobiology and socioeconomic circumstances: A call for social justice-oriented neuroscience. Front Integr Neurosci 16, (2022).
10. Carter, S. et al. Approaching Mental Health Equity in Neuroscience for Black Women Across the Lifespan: Biological Embedding of Racism From Black Feminist Conceptual Frameworks. Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging (2022) doi:10.1016/j.bpsc.2022.08.007.