Welcome to the Black Girl podcast.

Kelly here.

And today I want to talk about silence.

And the painful weight silence carries in our community and particularly for us as black women.

I've mentioned this before, but there's a quote by Zora Neil Hurston that I hold near and dear to my heart.

And it says, if you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

And when I think about the experience of black women and how many of us are so silent or feel silenced,

whether it's the fact that black women historically don't speak up about

their pain and don't go to annual doctor's visits. And as a result, black women are much less

likely to be believed in the medical community when they express their pain, right? There's a lot of ways in which the culture encourages

silence, and there's a lot of ways that we are silent to our own detriment. And so today I want to

talk about how to opt out of silence and focus in on speaking up and speaking out about

the abuse that black women are facing today and have faced for many years, particularly

when it comes to domestic violence and sexual assault. Now I will say there's a trigger

warning here for those of you who have experienced it.

And as I go over the statistics, there are many of us who have been victimized by either domestic violence or sexual assault.

I will provide helplines and hotlines at the close of this podcast to tell you where to go if you want to

talk more about this and to get help through reliable, competent sources. But I want to put that out

there that if this is a hard episode for you to listen to, then by all means, take care of yourself.

What made me feel compelled to speak about this is the fact that in our culture now,

there are becoming more and more conversations about the abuse that black women face,

whether it be the Mute R. Kelly movement or the docu-series on Bill Cosby, there has been a

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