paravanes:meditations

  (c) Deborah Evans If you are unfamiliar with the term "Black femicide", read the article referenced below to understand what it is and why it is a public health crisis: Black Femicide: A Silent Public Health Crisis  -- from advancingkids.org Femicide is defined as an intentional killing with a gender related motivation. Why is this a crisis in the Black community? In 2022, The Guardian (UK)  reported the rate of death by homicide for Black women increased by 33% in 2020 over the previous year.. In 2020, an average of five Black women per day were murdered in the United States.(FBI statistics) Recent reports do not show a reversal of this trend. Read this Washington Post article about the lack of traction this issue has received. Most of these murders were connected to domestic, family related violence. Victims included spouses, partners, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, co-parents, ex-wives, former girlfriends, women who rejected unwanted suitors. The vast major...

A number of the blogs and feeds I follow have carried intense ( and intensely emotional ) discussions in the last month or two about obesity and black women. A series of recent articles, including one in the New York Times  , have questioned why so many black women are obese, perhaps even morbidly obese. Objections to the tones of  these articles have arisen around the apparent lack of solutions, empathy, or concern for the health of the women whose "issues" are being dissected and discussed. I don't know if more black women are obese, compared to other women. If that is true, then what does it mean, and is there a spiritual component? I have been a variety of sizes as an adult, and those changes have often reflected what was happening in my life at the time. I have jokingly said it took ten years to lose the "baby fat", but it is all gone now. What happened, and why? As an American woman of African descent, here is my take on this subject. I am no...