Black Women and Wellness

Abstract This essay engages one fundamental question: How might Black women rethink the meaning of wellness within a society that is itself unwell? Black women’s empowerment requires cultivating self-defined knowledge that both criticizes the existing social order that makes Black women unwell and reconceptualizes wellness within these social relations. To develop this thesis, I explore how the construct of controlling images aids in rethinking Black women’s health, healing, and wellness. I argue that the specific controlling images applied to Black women as mammies, matriarchs, bad mothers, and jezebels constitute social scripts that justify and reproduce Black women’s subordination. Uncritically accepting these controlling images fosters illness. But rejecting these social scripts and imagining new ways of being Black women constitutes an essential aspect of rethinking Black women’s wellness.