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Collected in this post are some of the quotable moments from OWN’s Black Women OWN The Conversation.
Episode 1 “Beauty”
“Who am I good enough for?”
— Audience Member
“I can’t grow if you don’t show me who I am.”
— Kym Whitley
“You enter a space the way you want to be perceived.”
— Stacey Abrams
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“There has not been what I am. Therefore, I am going to be what I am.”
— Stacey Abrams
Texturism is to hair as colorism is to skin.
— Interview Participant
I get that there’s a way that we should do certain things, but there should be no judgment when it’s done.
— Monica
A processed head is not the sign of a processed mind.
— Stacey Abrams
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Our hair does not tell a story that we don’t want told.
— Stacey Abrams
We should not only have the right to choose, but we should have as many choices as we can imagine.
— Stacey Abrams
I walk with my head up because I have not a reason to walk with it down.
— Audience Member
Episode 2 “Motherhood”
I think I’m going to be a work in progress until the day I’m not progressing.
— Ryan Michelle Bathe
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Babies don’t save marriages, they just prolong bad marriages.
— Audience Member
Instead of saying “What’s Wrong with me?” we [need to] begin to ask the question, “What happened to me and how do I begin to heal that?”
— California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris
The environment dramatically changes the odds.
— California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris
Any moment is an opportunity, and you are a living example of it.
— California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris
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When you are nurtured by others, and when you nurture yourself, when you do that self-care, that’s when we break the intergenerational cycle.
— California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris
Many people think that if it doesn’t leave scars on you, it’s not damaging.
— California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris
The shepherd uses the rod to guide the sheep, not to beat the sheep.
— Audience Member
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We take a quick cop-out when we beat our children or whip them, because it’s easier to give them a five-minute whipping and you’re done. But if you take the time to spend with that child and explain to them and talk to them, they’ll be much better children.
— Audience Member
Self-care isn’t selfish.
— California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris
Episode 3: Love
Do I want to stay here ’cause it feels comfortable or do I want to love myself enough to wait?
— Angelica Ross
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If we continue to think wrong, ladies, we are never gonna get along.
— Audience Member
Your interactions with people are just that. It’s not “A white man did this to me, so I refuse to date white men now.” That white man did that to you, that Black man did that to you. That is their decision, not a racial decision.
— Winnie Harlow
Episode 4: Mind, Body & Soul
There’s a range to mental illness and […] there’s a level of anxiety that comes with being a human being. That anxiety becomes problematic when it is not addressed.
— Tina Lifford
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When you feel yourself not being congruent with yourself, that’s a red flag.
— Tina Lifford
A great question is, “What do I really want in this moment?” We have inner needs, y’all and nobody outside can determine what those needs are. And if we’re not acknowledging them, who is?
— Tina Lifford
Yes, Black women are strong but the demand that we be strong in the face of that kind of tragedy is a completely inhumane demand and we deserve better than that.
— Brittney Cooper
If it is true that we teach people how to treat us, sometimes you’ve got to be a little vulnerable and say, “I actually don’t have it all together. Actually, I’m a mess” and then what you find out is that a whole lot of sisters were struggling, too.
— Brittney Cooper
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We have a responsibility to take care of ourselves by learning who we are. To take care of ourselves by learning who we are. Our society has not given us those tools up until now.
— Brittney Cooper
We’ve romanticized our strong Black womanhood but we’ve also romanticized for non-Blacks that vulnerability is a right for them, whereas for us, that’s a luxury.
— Audience Member
We go to a doctor to get treatment for the “symptoms,” and we don’t really discuss the underlying issues.
— Person From Video Segment
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Say, “I love me. I am not the conditions that surround me. I am not my experience. I am more than the circumstances that I have gone through.”
— Tina Lifford
I have learned that hope and possibility are not just nice words. They are active, aggressive, powerful ways for us to own our lives and shift our energy from what is controlling us to us being able to make choices.
— Tina Lifford
I carried a lot of things and I carried it in a very creative way. “Are you okay?” “Yeah, I’m fine.” I carried a lot of bags and a lot of baggage for a lot of people. A lot of bags that didn’t belong to me.
— Audience Member
We all do what we do for personal reasons and rather than try and come up with some answer that fits everyone, I think the starting place is to get to know yourself so that you can examine why you do what you do. Because you do what you do for a very good reason. That reason, you might have outgrown or, better yet, if it’s a reason that you’d want to outgrow, it’s a reason you can outgrow.
— Tina Lifford
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I would love for everyone to just adopt this one practice: Whatever you want, write it down just the way you want it because if there’s a part of you that has, you know, thought, “Well, it would be nice, but…” Let that part have a place to live. And who knows what it will deliver into your life.
— Tina Lifford
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