Before You Tell Me I’m Too Much

What Being a Black Woman Has Taught Me About Who Gets to Be Angry

I have been told, “You’re a lot.”

I have been told, “You’re just too much.”

Too much what, exactly?

Too emotional?

Too outspoken?

Too willing to say that something hurt instead of pretending it didn’t?

I grew up being called a crybaby. Actually, no, the main term was a tittybaby. Same basic meaning, with the added insult of still nursing at my mother’s tit. Hilarious to me now, since I wasn’t breastfed.

I was constantly told I was too emotional and to suck it up. I felt things quickly and deeply, and I was around people who didn’t express themselves the same way. So I made my feelings something I needed to manage before they inconvenienced anybody else.

Poor little Dia. Hadn’t heard the word “neurodivergent” or had any idea ADHD could present as anything beyond high-energy kids who couldn’t be controlled back then.

As a Black girl, there was another lesson underneath that one: be quiet. Don’t draw attention to yourself, and if you do, it better be for positive reasons.

Do what you’re supposed to do.

Be “good”.

I was naturally a cautious, shy child. Everything about my personality wasn’t a response to the stigmas around race and gender that I had yet to discover. I was just more reserved. I’m like that now. I have moments where I’m “on,” followed by a long recovery period of not wanting to deal with anybody.

As an empath, I have always been finely tuned into the people around me. What wasn’t being said verbally would be energetically shouting to me. I didn’t want to make the energy worse in any situation, so often the best thing seemed to be shrinking as small as I could.

Don’t be a problem.

Don’t get in anyone’s way.

Looking back, I know I kept myself small for a long time and that it was out of fear. Fear of being disliked, fear of being misunderstood, or fear of being too much.

What I find myself questioning now is why being smaller felt safer.

Almost twenty years ago, I was hanging out with this guy I was seeing; he mentioned something about me seeming shy the night before at a party we’d been to. I responded that I was actually pretty outspoken; I told him he had a big personality. I had let him take the lead while I stayed more reserved.

I don’t think I was even aware I was doing it at the time. But when I mentioned it the next day, he said, “You don’t have to do that with me.”

I still remember that.

Shoutout to Dennis, whom I still have so much love for.

Looking back, I think I liked the balance between us. I liked that sometimes I could “take the night off,” and sometimes he could. I didn’t always have to be the person carrying the conversation and tiptoeing around the energy of things that weren’t being said.

Being quiet can feel good when you know you’re welcome to speak. There’s room to relax.

That is a very different experience from holding your tongue because you’re worried about what will happen if you don’t.

How Society Reacts to Black Womens' Anger

When we talk about someone being angry, we don’t always spend enough time talking about what happened before they got angry. We start the story at their reaction.

She raised her voice. She got an attitude. She made it uncomfortable.

Okay. What happened before that? How many times did she let the disrespect slide before she reacted? How long had she held her tongue?

That feels like a pretty important part of the story.

I’ve had a guy admit that he only went out with me because none of his friends had been with a Black girl. Apparently, I was supposed to be an experience he could report back about.

Don’t worry. He didn’t get any.

I’ve also had a man heavily pursue me, then call me a “Nigger” in a text a week later. When I ran into him a few weeks after that, he tried to apologize.

I told him, “I don’t want to hear it.”

Those were two different experiences with two different men. What they have in common is that being interested in the experience of me or the desire for my body e did not mean respecting me. Wanting to date me did not mean seeing me as a whole person but an achievement to be unlocked, like a video game.

Where, in a situation like that, is my acceptable response supposed to begin and end?

How much hurt am I allowed to express before someone decides I’m bitter?

How direct can I be about racism before the conversation becomes about whether I’m making everything about race?

If I had cussed him out and called him out of his name right there in front of a bar full of people, who in the situation would have been seen as the crazy one?

It is extremely exhausting being expected to explain your pain in a way that protects everybody from the discomfort of hearing about it. Especially when the person who caused it didn’t seem particularly concerned about the harm they caused.

And this goes way beyond dating and romantic relationships.

When we learned about slavery in school, some of the kids made jokes like, “I could own you.”

That was part of my experience in the classroom.

It’s so funny to me now that some of my childhood “friends” don’t understand why I don’t keep in contact with them or let them know when I’m in town.

During my senior year, the 2006–2007 school year, there were 489 students enrolled. Of those students, 438 were white and 17 were Black.

Almost 90 percent were white. About 3.5 percent Black.

Those numbers include everyone enrolled at the high school that year. They aren’t just the numbers for my graduating class.

I was one of those 17 Black students.

So when people talk about how uncomfortable it is to learn or talk about racism, I have questions about whose discomfort we’re considering. There were Black children sitting in those classrooms, too. We were hearing the history and whatever our classmates decided to do with it.

If a little Black girl can handle hearing the (rose colored version) of the atrocities done to her people during and after slavery in a room full of white kids, those white kids can handle learning what happened—including what some of their ancestors did.

I remember one day in history class with a girl who was half Black and half white. We were filling out forms, and she said, “I never know which box to check on these. Do I check Black or white?”

Then the epitome of whiteness spoke.

Seriously, if I went to Bayside High, she was Kelly Kapowski with blonde hair. For those who missed Saved by the Bell, Bayside was the high school, and Kelly was the popular “it” girl.

“Well, if it makes you feel better, we see you as white.”

I wish I had been recording the moment. Granted, this was the early 2000s, and if you wanted to record something, you needed an actual camera.

The way she said it was like it was a compliment or something to comfort her. Like she was telling her the test results came back and she didn’t have cancer.

What I heard underneath it was: Don’t worry, we don’t think of you as one of them.

I remember the biracial student responding in a confused tone, “Okay. Thanks?”

And that was that.

I would love to talk with her today and see how our environment impacted her life moving forward.

The words “We see you as white” stung like a personal attack on my own Blackness. I don’t know how that moment sat with her. To me, it sounded like she was being told she could be with them because of her whiteness, but to leave the Black stuff over there.

I randomly remember those moments from time to time.

The History of Black Women’s Mistreatment and Objectification

Enslaved Women and a Presidential Scandal

Enslaved women were subjected to rape and sexual violence by enslavers operating within a system that treated human beings as property. The people harming them had power over their lives, their families, and whether they could ever leave.

**I use enslavers deliberately. I want language that names what they did without making ownership sound like a legitimate relationship between people.**

Sometimes in cinema and the media, you see sexual relationships between enslavers and enslaved humans portrayed as romantic and consensual. But how can someone freely consent when the other person is legally owned like livestock or a piece of land?

That is why I want to talk about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.

Monticello was Jefferson’s Virginia plantation. Today, it is a museum and historic site that researches and tells the stories of the people who lived there, including the people Jefferson enslaved.

Its historians identify Jefferson as the father of at least six of Hemings’s children. Four survived to adulthood. She was a teenager when their sexual relationship began; he was more than thirty years older.

But what do we know about Sally herself?

She worked as a nursemaid, a lady’s maid, and a seamstress. As a teenager, she traveled to Paris accompanying Jefferson’s daughter Maria. Her brother James was there, too, training as a chef.

In France, Sally had a possible path to freedom. According to her son Madison’s later account, she initially resisted returning to Virginia. She agreed after Jefferson promised privileges for her and freedom for her future children when they reached twenty-one.

She was about sixteen.

I keep thinking about how young that is. And about having to negotiate with the person who held power over your freedom for children you hadn’t even had yet.

There is no surviving written account in Hemmngs own voice. There is so much about her we cannot recover. What made her laugh. What she enjoyed. What she would have wanted to tell us about herself.

That absence matters to me, especially when so much attention goes to deciding what her life means for Jefferson’s reputation.

When I see their history softened into a love story, I want us to remember the conditions she was living under. He had power over her freedom and her children’s futures. Calling it romance does not remove that power or the horrific nature of the situation.

There are descendants alive today whose family histories carry this. Seeing those faces makes it harder to pretend this is just an abstract argument about a man in a history book.

Entertainment as Oddities

Sara Baartman’s story is another example of the objectification of black women, which breaks my heart.

She was a Khoikhoi woman brought from southern Africa to Europe in 1810. In Britain and France, people paid to look at her.

Her body, particularly her large butt, became an object of scrutiny, mockery, and sexual fascination. She was exhibited in a cage, her body presented to crowds as entertainment.

People bought admission to stare at a woman.

And even death did not give her privacy or dignity. After she died in 1815, her body was dissected, and her remains were kept and displayed.

She had a name. A life. An experience of being herself that the people paying to look at her did not have access to.

Yet they treated looking at her body as if it told them everything they needed to know.

I think about the different ways people have claimed access to Black women while showing so little interest in our humanity.

Looking at us.

Wanting us.

Studying us.

Making money from us.

Appropriating us.

Where, in all of that, were we allowed to belong to ourselves?

My dating experiences are not interchangeable with Baartman’s life or with enslavement. But they make me unwilling to accept the idea that fascination with a Black woman’s body is evidence of respect for her.

You can want someone and still dehumanize them. You can find her attractive and still believe her feelings are inconvenient, her boundaries negotiable, and her anger unreasonable.

And when I return to the experiences of Black women, I want us to ask whose account of the harm gets heard. How much room is given to the person who caused it to explain himself? How much room is given to the woman to describe what happened without being punished for her anger?

Striking Moments in Film

Two films come to mind when I think about these questions.

In A Time to Kill, Samuel L. Jackson plays Carl Lee Hailey, the father of a little Black girl who has been brutally raped and attacked by two white men.

The men are arrested. Carl Lee goes to the courthouse with a gun and kills them as they are being escorted to their arraignment. He is then arrested and charged with capital murder.

During his closing argument, the lawyer, played by Matthew McConaughey, asks the jury to imagine what happened to the little girl. Then he says, “Now imagine she’s white.”

I understand what that line is exposing. He is confronting the jury’s racism by asking them to recognize suffering they might more readily acknowledge if the child were white.

Even seeing this movie as a young child, I understood that, to many people, my life had less value than others simply because of my skin color.

I keep thinking about the little Black girl who was already there in the story.

Why does she have to become someone else in their imagination for her suffering to receive its full weight? Everything they needed to care about her had already been said.

Then there is Rosewood.

John Singleton directed it, and the cast is incredible: Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Esther Rolle, Elise Neal, Jon Voight, among others. The film has so much talent, bringing these people and the Rosewood community to life for viewers.

I have only watched it once.

Once was all I could handle.

The killing of Aunt Sarah, played by Esther Rolle, and the hangings were especially hard to watch. Those scenes stayed with me long after the movie ended.

So did Jewel, played by Akosua Busia. I remember her murdered body being shown with her dress pulled up, and I remember knowing instantly not only had the mob killed her, but they also raped her.

I want to be clear that this is my memory of a film I have only watched once.

The film depicts a white woman’s false accusation against a Black man being used to justify mob violence against a Black community.

That is what I keep coming back to: the men claim to be defending a white woman while committing violence against Black women, black children and black men who weren’t guilty of the accused crime.

How did these men justify, averaging one woman’s claim by committing a massacre of innocents? The punishment does not fit the crime.

Whose bodies deserve protection? Whose bodies do they treat as available for violence? Who gets to be furious, and who has to explain why they are hurting?

If you haven’t watched Rosewood, I encourage you to watch it when you feel able to sit with something that heavy. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable. Then learn about the actual Rosewood massacre.

The film dramatizes that history and includes fictionalized characters and scenes. Jewel’s storyline isn’t a verified account of a specific historical victim. There is more to learn beyond what the movie shows us.

Read about the people who lived there, the community they built, what was taken from them, and what survivors fought to have acknowledged. Their stories deserve attention beyond what happened to them on their worst days.

I keep coming back to this question: who gets to be angry and still be treated as a person with a reason?

Because I don’t feel that Black women are consistently given that consideration. “Angry Black woman” is such a ready-made explanation that it can save people the trouble of listening. Once that label is attached, everything we say can become evidence for it.

Even explaining why we’re upset.

And there are very real reasons to be upset.

There is racism in our daily lives.

There is sexual violence.

There is the grief of Black women mourning sons, brothers, nephews, partners, and friends whose lives were taken—and the work of insisting that those lives mattered.

Then there is the expectation that we will keep holding everybody together while we’re hurting.

Go to work. Take care of the family. Explain what happened. Be patient with the person who doesn’t understand. Find the words that will make them understand. Try again if they don’t.

And remember, watch your tone.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Cornell Seven case and LSU student Kendall Francis.

A woman’s lawsuit alleges that seven fraternity members sexually assaulted her at Cornell in 2024. Prosecutors reopened the investigation in September 2026.

Seven men.

I keep stopping there. Before the conversation gets swallowed up by a university’s reputation or what this might mean for the men involved, a woman is telling us she was harmed.

Then I read about Kendall.

According to WAFB, LSU’s own Title IX process found a football player responsible for sexual assault and forcible rape. He appealed, and the finding was upheld. He was found guilty twice!

LSU defensive end Damien Shanklin was still allowed to play football for the school after these findings.

That is a university finding, separate from a criminal conviction. A criminal investigation was also opened.

But LSU had already reached a finding through its own process. I don’t understand how that doesn’t make people stop and pay attention to what Kendall is saying.

Kendall Francis is a Black woman. I don’t know the race of the woman identified as Jane Doe in the Cornell case, and I’m not going to assign her one. I don’t need to know her race to care about what she alleges happened to her.

I want Kendall to receive that same consideration.

Both cases have received coverage. But Cornell has come across my feeds more often. I haven’t counted every article or measured the coverage, so I can only speak to what has reached me.

Still, it leaves me wondering how long people will stay with Kendall’s story. Whether they will keep asking what happened after the posts stop circulating. Whether her pain will be treated as something that deserves their attention.

There is enough concern to give both women. There should be.

When a Black woman tells us she has been harmed, do we listen? Or do we start asking what she should have done differently before she has even finished telling us what happened?

I know that feeling in relationships, too. I’ve been nervous to express a feeling that wasn’t positive because then I was being too much or being dramatic. Attempts to express those feelings were often met with what felt like punishment.

Eventually, you start anticipating that response. Before you say anything, you’re already considering whether it’s worth bringing up.

The hurt still happened. Now you’re carrying the hurt and the work of deciding whether you’re safe to mention it.

The Long-Term Effects

There is also a physical cost worth seriously considering.

Researchers have a term for keeping your thoughts, feelings, and needs to yourself because you’re afraid of conflict or losing a relationship: self-silencing.

I read that and immediately thought about all the times I decided it was easier to say nothing.

One study looked at 290 women between the ages of forty and sixty. Women who reported more self-silencing also tended to have more plaque in the arteries in their necks—the ones that carry blood to the brain. That connection remained even after researchers accounted for several other health risks.

The study doesn’t prove that keeping quiet caused the plaque. It also doesn’t mean speaking up will prevent it.

But it made me pause. We spend so much time talking about how to keep our feelings from affecting other people. How often are we asking what constantly holding them in might mean for us?

Another study followed 48,305 Black women from 1997 through 2019.

Women who reported experiencing racism in employment, housing, or interactions with police had an estimated 26 percent higher rate of coronary heart disease than women who reported none of those experiences. Researchers accounted for other factors, but this study still shows a connection rather than proving one single cause.

Nearly fifty thousand Black women. More than twenty years of follow-up.

I want us to sit with that.

The American Heart Association’s 2026 statistics also report that 59.5 percent of non-Hispanic Black women age twenty and older had cardiovascular disease, based on data from 2021 through 2023.

That category includes high blood pressure. It does not mean that nearly six out of ten Black women have had a heart attack. It also includes coronary heart disease, heart failure, and stroke.

It is still a number worth paying attention to.

None of this means that every time you hold your tongue, you’re damaging your heart. But chronic stress can contribute to high blood pressure, and high blood pressure raises the risk of heart attack and stroke.

So when we talk about what Black women are carrying, I want us to consider our bodies, too. What does it take to keep showing up in places where you’re bracing yourself for disrespect? To keep swallowing a response because speaking might cost you something? Knowing sometimes it could even cost you your life?

Those are questions I want taken seriously.

How Do We Move Forward?

I don’t want this turned into another instruction for Black women to manage ourselves better.

Another thing we’re responsible for fixing.

I want us to ask what needs to change in the relationships, workplaces, and institutions creating that stress. Where are we safe to express a need? Where can we get support? Who is willing to change their behavior rather than asking us to get better at tolerating it?

I’ve been doing a lot of work to understand my emotions. Therapy, friendships where I feel safe, and honest conversations have helped me ask better questions.

Why did that irritate me so much? Is this about what just happened, or did it touch something older? What do I need to do with this feeling?

Those questions matter. I’m responsible for how I treat people, including when I’m upset. Having a feeling doesn’t permit me to do whatever I want with it.

But understanding my reaction should leave room to examine what I’m reacting to.

Two things can be true at once. I can want to handle something differently and still have a legitimate reason to be angry. I can have compassion for somebody’s experiences and still decide that their behavior is unacceptable.

I want to be able to question myself without automatically deciding that I’m the problem.

And I want that room for other Black women, too.

I want us to be able to say something hurts before we have a polished explanation. To need help without making a case for why we deserve it. To be quiet because we’re enjoying the night, and outspoken because we have something to say.

I want people to know our stories well enough to see more than our ability to survive them.

When I think about the Black women I love, I know their humor, their particular tastes, the things they get excited about. I know there is more to them than what they have carried for everybody else. I want that part of their lives to have room, too.

And to the Black woman reading this: you don’t have to turn everything you’ve survived into something useful for somebody else. You deserve support while it still hurts. You deserve relationships where you can take the night off without disappearing. You deserve to be known beyond what you can handle.

I feel deeply. That includes sadness and anger, but it also includes getting ridiculously excited about new episodes of my favorite shows. It includes loving my dogs, my garden, and the people who make my life feel good. My joy is beautiful.

There is a whole person here.

If you only notice how much I feel when those feelings make you uncomfortable, you’re missing a lot of me.

And before you tell me I’m too much, I would like you to consider what you’re asking me to have less of.

Sources and Further Reading

Writer's Note: Since I started writing this essay, I am happy to say that more news coverage has been given to the LSU case and Kendall Francis.