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The pain and challenges felt and experienced by black women
have received disparate attention as compared to the life
course struggles of black men. Philanthropic investment in
mentoring and programs promoting black male achievement, for
example, have been in excess of $100 million compared to
less than 1 million dollars in funding targeted towards
women of color.
“I think, as black females,” says Valorie Burton of the
Coaching and Positive Psychology Institute, “we’re not
celebrated very much in our culture. And when we are, it’s
often for the wrong reasons.”
Burton, a bestselling author of 10 books and a regular
guest on the TODAY show, will appear October 23, 2014 on
behalf of the Women’s Initiative of United Way at the
Radisson at The University of Toledo. The event, titled “A
Night of Inspiration,” is a fundraiser to help launch Dolly
Parton’s Imagination Library. The literacy effort will send
one monthly, age-appropriate book to children from birth to
their fifth birthday in seven Toledo zip codes – 43604,
43605, 43606, 43607, 43608, 43610 and 43620.
Women’s Initiative
focuses directly on issues and challenges that concern women
and children and is “excited to play a critical sponsor role
in the lives of very young children and invites other women
to join us,” says Adrienne J. Green, vice chairman of
Women’s Initiative of United Way Board.
Indeed, black girls and women are over-represented in
negative life outcomes experiences including homicide rates
that are higher than that of any other group of females, and
even higher than white and Asian men. African-American women
also experience a wide range of health, wealth and income,
emotional and mental wellbeing, unemployment and
incarceration disparities. These disparities are even more
pronounced where gender intersects with race and class.
“I do think that the years, and years, and
years of injustice gets overlooked too much,” Burton
explains. “And I don’t think it’s necessary to just harp on
things, but the fact of the matter is we’ve been in this
country close to 400 years; 350 of those years were either
in slavery or Jim Crow. So, we’ve had 50 years for
everybody to say, ‘Oh, y’all should all be doing great, and
racism isn’t an issue.’ And I think it’s a problem. It’s an
American problem of which we don’t like to look at our
history, and I look back and around - not to be angry, but
to say, ‘Okay, this is what it is.’ Now, how does that
impact our present?”
Burton’s methodology requires keeping women’s focus on
opportunities and possibilities rather than pain and
challenges, an approach with roots in Positive Psychology,
the subject of her graduate studies at the University of
Pennsylvania.
“Traditional psychology tends to focus on
fixing what’s wrong with people, which is very important,
because obviously we all have issues, but positive
psychology is the study of what goes right with us; what is
it that happens when we’re happy, when we’re resilient, when
we tap into our strength, when we connect with others, when
we serve?
“And
it works, particularly when people are needing to bounce
back from setbacks. When we think about depression in the
black community - we don’t seem to talk about it so much,
and particularly because we tend to be people of faith, and
people can even feel ashamed, and ‘you must not have enough
faith if you’re dealing with mental health issues.’ And I
think it’s really important to help give people the tools
that they need to lift themselves out of depression, or
other issues, but also to kind of take that stigma off of
it, as well,” she
continues.
“So, the message I’m going to be talking
about in Toledo combines my new book with the one I wrote
that came out last year, Happy Women Live Better. So,
I’ll be talking quite a bit about resilience, and happiness.
When we think of women, it’s kind of surprising that over
the last 40 years women’s happiness has actually started to
decline, while men continue to get happier. I thought that
was a curious thing, when you consider all of the advances
for women. Why would we be less happy?
“And
it tends to seem to happen right around the time we reach
our early ‘40s. And I think a lot of it has to do with the
amount of pressure that women feel, the expectations of
doing it all, and many women get to that point in life; it’s
not quite what they thought. A very large percentage of
black women by age 40 have never married, and many of them,
especially ones that have professional careers, and did all
the right things, and got their education, many of them
don’t have children. They had not pictured that for
themselves.
“And
there’s also just a lot of, I think, judgment that women
feel like, well, ‘I failed with my kids; I feel like I
should be doing something professionally.’ If I’m
professional, and I have kids, then I’m not spending enough
time at home. The single women who have their careers
together, get questioned, ‘Oh, you chose career over
family,’ and which often isn’t the case, oftentimes that’s
just how it turned out, not necessarily what they were
hoping for.
“I
think women, in particular, are dealing with a lot of
pressures that can really make it hard for them to be happy,
and when I look at the core of that, people go, ‘Oh, it
doesn’t really matter that happiness isn’t the aim of life,’
but the truth is people who are happier live longer; they
get sick less, are more likely to get promoted, and get
raises. There are a lot of benefits to being happy.”
Not only does A Night of Inspiration
help families build up in-home libraries for children, it
also promises to inspire women to live more fulfilling
lives.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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