Black women are not universally angry, because no group of human beings is universally angry. Black women can be kind, warm, sensitive, gentle, thoughtful, and forgiving. Every day, millions of women of African descent around the world prove the accuracy of this statement, prove it quietly, with unseen gestures and whispered words as they go about the business of leading challenging, unobtrusive, but meaningful lives that rarely attract the glare of media spotlights or the sharp tongues of patronizing, preening, pundits. And yet, without the radical kindness of Black women on every continent of this planet, even more Black children would suffer before they had the chance to grow, even more of the elderly of all races would die alone and without care, even more Black women and, yes, more Black men - and more people of all races whose lives have been touched by the kinds of Black women you never see on television or read about in academic articles - would exist with less love, grace, and meaning in their lives. We speak here of RADICAL KINDNESS because Black women have every social, political, cultural, and historical reason to be relentlessly and perpetually unkind, in the interest of their own success and survival, to abandon kindness as an unwieldy and unrewarding burden that they cannot afford to carry. But carry it they do and distribute it with great, and greatly ignored, generosity.

I don’t want you to be no slave. I don’t want you to work all day. But I want you to be true. And I just wanna make love to you. All I want to do is wash your clothes. I don’t want to keep you indoors. There is nothing for you to do but keep me making love to you. And I can tell by the way you walk that walk; I can hear by the way you talk that talk; and I can know by the way you treat your girl that I can give you all the lovin’ in the whole wide world!