I’m a rising senior at Stanford majoring in Economics with a minor in Civil Rights history. I decided to take History 54N because it sat directly at the intersection of my interests. In the class as the quarter went on, I kept noticing the same pattern across texts: Black women were present in the archive, but their voices were repeatedly constrained by the social and institutional settings around them.

In our very first classes, we talked about Amy Sherald and Anita Hill, and even though this was my first real introduction to black womens' experience, I could clearly see the cage these women were trapped in. For Black women, speaking up often meant choosing between testimony and community protection. Telling the truth could be framed as harming the legacy of a successful Black man. We saw that dynamic from Anita Hill’s testimony on Clarence Thomas to Drew Dixon’s account of Russell Simmons. Later, in the antebellum unit, the same structure appeared in a different form: enslaved Black women were documented less fully than Black men, despite facing severe sexual and physical violence. Harriet Jacobs, for example, had to manage visibility and credibility at the same time. Yet when we discussed slavery’s brutality, violence against Black men often dominated the frame; once we moved into Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the specific horror of lynching dominated it, and that frame too centered mostly on Black men. White Southerners even used the specter of lynching as a retroactive justification for slavery, claiming that enslaved Black men had been docile but emancipated Black men had become dangerous—so white men “had no choice” but to lynch. In both eras, that framing crowded out the sexual and physical violence Black women endured.

Nell Painter’s discussion of soul murder and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl clarified the depth of that silencing for me. Together, they pushed me toward the core question I could not let go of: why did this pattern of silence persist, and how does it shape Black women’s lives today?

As we moved through Tera Hunter’s To ’Joy My Freedom, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s TED Talk on intersectionality, and Serena Williams’s near-death hospital experience, that question of the silencing and invisibility of Black women became sharper. By the time we had our class conversation with Drew Dixon, I no longer saw this as an isolated pattern. I saw it as a systemic problem, and that is what committed me to this project.

Going in, I definitely underestimated how deep this ran. I figured the politics of respectability were mainly a burden for high-profile Black women like Anita Hill or Serena Williams whose every word and outfit carried weight. It was always clear to me there was some form of systemic discrimination at this level, but I assumed this mostly affected women who had to think about respectability because they were, in effect, always on display.

What I found was much bigger. Dissemblance is very much real in today’s society, and it affects Black women of every age and social strata. For instance, even looking at routine things like going to the hospital, a Black woman can be stereotyped as having higher pain tolerance and as a less competent witness to her own body, even as clinicians undertreat her pain. At the same time, she faces overlapping expectations to perform composure, prove credibility, and avoid being read as angry or unprofessional the moment she advocates for herself. And this is just one example; these pressures show up in classrooms, courtrooms, and workplaces alike, which over time wears down the mental and physical strength of Black women. We discussed this concept in class as "Weathering", and I find this present in nearly every source below.

Overall, what I found is that progress is real in some places, but there is a large difference between the public narratives of advancement and what Black women actually face in clinics, classrooms, and courtrooms. The fact that this is so much worse than what most people think motivated me to make this a website to inform others.

I don’t think this problem goes away on its own. If anything, doing this research made me see how easily the same patterns repeat, from courtrooms to hospitals to social media. But I also don’t think Black women have ever simply accepted those terms (If there's anything I took away from History 54N, it's this). From Harriet Jacobs to the Combahee River Collective to women speaking up in the #MeToo era, there has always been refusal alongside dissemblance. Progress is real in some places, yet the gap between how far we say we’ve come and what Black women actually live with every day is still huge.

On an individual level, the change I keep coming back to is pretty basic: stop treating a Black woman’s composure as proof that she is fine, and stop demanding that she perform respectability or trauma before you believe her. We need to believe the next Anita Hill or Drew Dixon when they come forward, not 10 years down the line. We need to believe the Black woman trying to explain her pain in an ER without treating her like she is exaggerating. We must stop framing disclosure as betrayal of the broader Black community when a Black man is involved. It's that simple: just listen without prejudice.

On the institutional level, they must carry the weight individuals can’t. Hospitals need to stop undertreating Black women’s pain. Schools need to stop treating Black girls as older or less innocent than they are. Workplaces and courts need systems that don’t punish women for speaking up the way Anita Hill was punished. And honestly, history classes and public memory need to stop treating Black women’s stories as optional. Policy moves slowly, but an informed public can move these policies much faster. That is the hope I have for this website: if more people understand what dissemblance looks like in practice, maybe fewer people mistake silence for consent.