The Strong Black Woman Trope — A Clinical and Community Reckoning
Three therapists who work with African and Black women in clinical and community practice sit down to discuss what the 'strong Black woman' framework has cost us and what is replacing it in serious therapeutic work.
2:58 AM · 90 min
The cultural framing of African and Black women as inherently 'strong' is one of the most consequential and least examined narratives shaping our mental health outcomes. It produces an internal rule against asking for help, a presumption that we will absorb whatever the workplace, the family, and the community puts on us, and a clinical picture in which burnout, depression, and chronic anxiety are often misdiagnosed or self-managed until they break us.
This 90-minute panel brings together three therapists who specialize in working with African and Black women across community-clinic, private-practice, and academic-research settings. They walk through what the 'strong Black woman' framework looks like inside the therapy room, how it shows up in women in their thirties, forties, and fifties differently, and what the emerging clinical and community-based alternatives — including the work of Inger Burnett-Zeigler and the broader research literature — are putting in its place.
For African and Black women at any career stage. The conversation is substantive and assumes a working knowledge of therapeutic frameworks. Live Q&A in the final twenty minutes.