what i'd tell my daughter one day by Afua Asiamah-Adjei

[Contributor's Note: Below is a letter a sister-friend of mine wrote in 2008. I thought it'd be an appropriate summation of this week's articles bolstering fearlessness, communication, and transparency. But I could have never foreseen its relevance in the wake of today's tragedy which has befallen our brothers, sisters, and babies at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It's important to live and let live while we can...in abundance...and altruistically. - juh] 

what i'd tell my daughter one day.

by Afua Asiamah-Adjei 

If i ever have the opportunity to be a mother and give birth to a black girl-child, I'd write her the following letter and leave it in a box where she would be allowed to read it at 11.... the supposed dawn of puberty.

Dear daughter:

It was your great god-mother, Audre Lorde who had once said this in a letter she wrote and left for me in a collection of essays: "Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it, rather than to recognize it and move upon our common interests.....For so long, we have been encouraged to view each other with suspicion, as eternal competitors, or as the visible face of our own self-rejection." 

I pray you never worship self-proclaimed kings to the extent where you lose yourself, your soul and whatever is black and female....your sister's bond. 

I pray you never walk the earth a scorned woman who only sees vertical dreams while laying horizontal to catch them between your thighs. 

I pray you never weigh yourself down with emotional baggage of self-destruction as a broken heart rips through your chest and pierces your lungs, making it hard to breath with the pressures of what society wants you to feel as a woman...or perceives you to be as a black woman. 

I pray you never plot your own demise by selling yourself short, whether by only loving black men and not ALL men; or telling yourself that you can never fall in love with another woman. 

I pray you never get ugly with a vindictive streak used to slice the egos of other women, your sisters, in the spirit of jealousy over men who can never defecate stools of gold even if they tried. 

I pray you will experience the good fortune of loving another black woman, and not seeing her as a mere competitor or enemy, but as a part of you. 

I pray you will learn how to love as well as you've learned how to survive. Black mothers' gift to their children is survival; but my gift to you will be tenderness in which you can connect elements of the universe with a gift of grace, tolerance and self-love.

I pray you never let a man become the center of your pain upon which you project on your sisters. Not that another woman won't hurt you; but the primary reason why black women hate each other is due to competition to win the heart of a black man...the scarce "prize" they were socialized to believe in that never stays.... no matter how high he's elevated or how deep he is buried inside you.

Dear daughter, I pray you'll find yourself before society finds you and tell you who you should be as a black woman by implanting stones in your heart for you to throw at another black woman, the "said" source of your pain.

(you all should read A. Lorde.)