In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Speaking for Ourselves: Reclaiming, Redesigning, and Reimagining Research on Black Women’s Health
  • Jameta Nicole Barlow (bio) and LeConté J. Dill (bio)

Days after the 2016 US election, we, two Spelman sisters, public health sistren, and lovers of all things Black Feminist and Womanist, sat down at the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference in Montreal and strategized. We reimagined a way of life for the health of Black girls and women. We explored philosophies of science, considered ontologies and epistemologies, and lamented over the major gaps in public health and health promotion efforts to effectively address the health of Black girls and women. We nodded in agreement with narratives of family and friends managing fibroid tumors, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, cancers, and mental health conditions. We considered the sacrifices of the warrior women we knew who battled—and sometimes lost, but also sometimes won—against interpersonal violence, police brutality, and structural inequities. We admitted, without any shame, our personal exhaustion with this work.

The exhaustion was real. The exhaustion is real.

We know, as our foremothers of the Combahee River Collective (2015) declared in their seminal 1977 statement:

The only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, [End Page 219] our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

(212)

We both found solace in the directives within the writings of foremothers like Anna (J. Cooper), Zora (Neale Hurston), Audre (Lorde), Lucille (Clifton), Toni (Cade Bambara), June (Jordan), Octavia (Butler), Beverly (Guy-Sheftall), Layli (Maparyan), and Sonia (Sanchez), as well as all those womenfolk who fed our foremothers and those womynfolk of today. We traded stories on how we engage this work in our classrooms in radical approaches to holistic and healing pedagogies. We quickly understood that it fell upon us to start the conversation. We were both uniquely positioned as trained public health practitioners who are also skilled community health, action-based research, psychology, sociology, urban planning, critical race theory and consciousness, Africana/Black studies, and women’s and gender studies. This distinctive, transdisciplinary standpoint permits our understanding of the nuanced ways in which public health programs could benefit from Black girls’ and women’s ways of knowing. The next day Jameta attended a National Women’s Studies Association session on academic journal writing, and after sharing our struggle and vision she was invited by the inimitable Paula J. Giddings to propose a special issue in Meridians. She shared the invitation with her sister LeConté and together (after their fangirl moment at the invitation), began this effort to reclaim, redesign and reimagine Black girls’ and women’s health.

We don’t have to imagine anymore.

Two daughters of Spelman College, smitten with Black Feminist and Womanist praxis and committed to improving the health of Black girls, adolescents, and women, have strived to produce what we hope will be the beginning of an ongoing conversation and action plan, bridging academic disciplines, where Black women scholars speak for ourselves about our health. Black women’s health does not belong to medicine, nursing, or public health. We all have something to contribute to our survival. We must confront the epistemic violence of erasure and silos that minimize the voices, expertise, and ways of knowing of interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and anti-disciplinary scholars, practitioners, writers—and, yes, poets! Scholar Patricia Hill Collins (2016) reminds us that special [End Page 220] issues of journals illuminate the continued need for scholars to “remain oppositional, reflexive, resistant, and visionary” (133). Many thanks to Meridians and the journal’s new editor, Ginetta Candelario, for her encouragement and acceptance of this expansive vision.

In 1990, The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves, edited by Evelyn C. White, captured the unique, intersectional experiences of Black women and the belief that Black women can be their own best friends and can self-reflect on what “ails us and how we can get better” (xv). It is this ownership of the gaze that serves as what Byllye Avery, founder of the National Black Women’s Health Project, now known as the Black Women’s Health Imperative, explained as...

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