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Introduction 11 allow white people to feel better about themselves. Morrison explained that needing “someone to be shorter than you in order for you to be tall” is not actually information about your height but rather confirmation of your need to feel elevated over others to know your worth (Greenfield- Sanders, Giebelhaus, Walker, & Thompson, 2019). Black women and girls bear the brunt of serving this role for all who step on our backs for a higher position on the racial-gender-caste hierarchy. In this writing and in all corners of my consciousness, I choose to choose Black women. As a Black woman, I choose me. I use this book to model the ways Black women can and must choose ourselves, particularly in regard to our relationship with our work and labor. Though it would be the height of all irony to write a book about Black women yet not speak directly to them in that writing, it is not uncommon. In fact, it happens all the time. As a student of psychology, I was struck by the numbers of books, policy briefs, and scholarly articles written about Black people, Black families, and especially Black women and girls by people who had no intimate knowledge of their interiority. It explains why my first experi- ences in the field were rife with deficit modeling about common aspects of my childhood, those cultural sustaining practices that made me proud and/or that were a source of pride and identity were labeled deficient. Though I know now that deficit thinking about my background was best explained by structural inequalities and systemic oppressions, at the time, being viewed in that way as a student and early professional only ampli- fied my sense that I was an imposter. This book is for Black women so as not to erase us but to provide understanding with the nuance and com- plexities our lives deserve. In her essay “Marginality as the Site of Resistance,” bell hooks (1990) writes in the voice of the “colonizer,” an outsider looking in on an othered/ devalued group: There is no need to hear your native voice, when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still the colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk. (p. 343) Thus, I write this book as a Black woman who writes about being a Black woman. I write this book with the spirit of disruption. It is informed by my subjectivity and expertise drawn from living and breathing on this planet, watching myself, witnessing my loved ones and strangers be character- ized and dismissed in all too familiar ways precisely because we/they are Black and woman. Similar to Black journalists who were initially dis- couraged and/or reassigned stories at the dawn of the Black Lives Matter