Midwifing—A Womanist Approach to Pastoral Counseling

Investigating the Fractured Self, Slavery, Violence, and the Black Woman

Myrna Thurmond-Malone

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532643279
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Conseil religieux

Midwifing--A Womanist Approach to Pastoral Counseling: Investigating the Fractured Self, Slavery, Violence, and the Black Woman, is an investigation of intergenerational trauma. Exploring the impact of slavery, violence, racism, sexism, classism, and other isms on the self of the Black woman. This examination of the complexity of pain speaks to the multidimensional reality of some Black women and the necessity for a therapeutic technique that invites the fullness of the Black woman's historical narrative. Dr. Thurmond-Malone's work exposes hidden pain in a safe and sacred space that speaks to the deep-rooted anguish experienced through generations of Black women and invites her readers to understand the necessity for a rebirthing to occur. This work also empowers women of African descent to become unarmored through the naming, claiming, and reauthoring of their story, and empowers therapists to become midwives adept at empathizing with the intense pain carried by some Black women. Lastly, the book provides clinicians with insight into how to become midwives capable of holding the accounts of Black women while illustrating the author's approach as a method of interdependence, communal, and cultural competency. Taking an analytical look at the counselee's past then births hope for their future as a whole and transformative self.

1

Historical Background

Emancipation did little to protect black women from sexual victimization. No longer the property of a particular white slaveholder, freed black women were vulnerable to sexual assault by any white man.

—Bernadette J. Brooten and Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Beyond Slavery

Slavery was just moments away . . . women . . . survived the auction block, involuntary separation from their families, and . . . being raped by white men. Mrs. Smith [a midwife after the emancipation recalls her experiences in Greene County, one of Alabama’s known lands of slavery], too, experienced deep suffering and discontent.

—Margaret Charles Smith and Linda Janet Holmes, Listen to Me Good

The experiences of black women are unique and need to be lifted up in order to highlight and acknowledge their experience. Black women have been forcefully removed from their homeland and enslaved. They have been dehumanized and domesticated. They have experienced racism, sexism, and classism. In addition to all of this, they have suffered mental, emotional, and physical violence and abuse perpetrated against minds, bodies, and souls by white men, white women, and black men. To gain insight into black women’s normality and psychological development, I begin by providing descriptions of the effects of slavery, dehumanization, domestication, racism, sexism, and classism, utilizing several voices of men and women who have also studied the experience of black women.

The remnants (legacy) of slavery can be seen in the negative identification of black women for whom I have provided counseling, care, and mentorship. Their fracturing appears to be fused with a lack of identity and/or the embracing of the identity placed on them by others. The self-hatred that emerges through the narratives of many black women points to the legacy and history of violence. A concept that voices this experience is maafa. Maafa is the genocide of Africans and their descendants during and after slavery. To provide greater insight into maafa, I will highlight scholars and pastoral theologians’ voices to lift up how it has impacted the identity of black women (although men were also affected). Scholar Makungu M. Akinyela, who explores the consequences of slavery and its influence on black women’s normality, writes:

The maafa concept explains the condition of disorganization, disunity, self-hatred, and alienation affecting African people. . . . Maafa, or great destruction, is a Ki-Swahili word that is culturally distinct, self-determined naming of the genocide experienced by Africans under Western colonialism and slavery. . . . Maafa is an apt description of African enslavement and the after effects of Jim Crow, white supremacy, and racism as a source of much of the emotional stress that affects black people.6

Pastoral theologian Lee Butler describes maafa as “ranging from maiming to murder . . . those degrading and dehumanizing experiences have caused us [African Americans] to feel isolation, despair and rage.”7 Continuing from that perspective, womanist pastoral theologian Carol Watkins Ali writes, “In light of the dehumanizing treatment of blacks physically and psychologically during slavery . . . its aim was to brainwash the slave, destroy the mind, and replace it with the mind of the master. . . . A slave would have no sense of himself/herself that was separate from the self the master wanted him/her to have.”8

A critical construct of maafa for this researcher is its aim to dehumanize African Americans. This paper also endeavors to examine how the denial of maafa’s aim continues today and remains a means of oppression and violence against the minds, bodies, and souls of African American women (and men), impacting the psychological development and identification of self. Lastly, in “Lifting the Veil: The Shoah and the Maafa in Conversation,” Brad Braxton explains that the violence experienced by the descendants of those enslaved from West Africa was so great, a term was created to speak to their experience, highlighting the destructiveness and impact of chattel slavery. Braxton writes:

During the two and a half centuries of chattel slavery, millions of Africans were physically mutilated, sexually violated, and ultimately murdered by a multi-national political and economic system with a voracious appetite for the sugar and cotton produced in those ‘concentration camps’ called plantations. The physical and psychic rupture of slavery upon the global community was, and is, so dramatic that a special term had to be created, “The Great Disaster.”9

In slavery, black women were used as objects by white women, to be their domestic servants (wet nurse, cook, and mammy to the white children), and as sexual objects by their husbands, other white men, and black slave men. Micki McElya, author of Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America, writes, “The institution of slavery was wracked with sexual depravity and the rape and concubinage of black women by white men.”10 McElya describes how black slave women’s physical attributes were seen as opposites of the desirable, white femininity. This image, created in the minds of white captors, allowed them to violently sexualize black women slaves, father black women’s children, and continue the cycle of domestication of their mixed and/or mulatto children. Moreover, white women’s use of the term “mammy,” even after the end of American slavery, allowed them to continue in the fantasy that black women were still their slaves. David P. Geggus, author of Slave and Free Colored Women in St. Dominique, describes the horrible acts of violence toward female slaves at the hands of their white captors as “vicious sadism.”11

In Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence and Resistance Ethics, Traci West examines the exploitation of black women in America. Beginning with the dehumanizing brutality of chattel slavery within the United States, West lifts up slave and contemporary narratives to give an account of a long history of injury imposed on the minds, bodies and souls of African American women:

Slave women lived with the threat of sexual violence whether they worked in the master’s house or in the fields. White masters, white overseers, and black drivers raped slave women. They also faced forms of sexual violence that were the peculiar inventions of the slave system . . . as ‘forced breeders’ were made to submit to sexual relations with black slave men . . . [additionally] sexualized torture for slaves was the practice of whipping pregnant women and beating nursing mothers . . . [so] severely that blood and milk flowed simultaneously from their breast.12

Another remnant of slavery injurious to black women resulting from sexual exploitation is described by psychologist Nancy Boyd-Franklin, who writes:

Sexual exploitation on the part of the white slave master resulted in many ‘mulatto’ or light skinned children. . . . One of the consequences of the system of slavery. . . . Black families have identified with the dominant society and incorporated some of the prejudices of the majority white culture. All African Americans, irrespective of their color, shade, darkness or lig...