Kweku’s Cypher: The Assault on Black Women

I recall that during Trump’s initial presidential campaign, his most notable appeal to the Black community was his claim that the Democratic Party had long betrayed and taken the Black vote for granted. He famously asked, “What the hell do you have to lose?” In response, we saw that 92% of Black women voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris when she ran against Trump in his second term. So, what did we have to lose? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 300,000 Black women have lost their jobs in the workforce since Donald Trump’s return to office. To contextualize this figure, Black women comprised 14% of the workforce but accounted for 54% of the job losses. In contrast, white women gained 142,000 jobs during the same period in 2025.

              I remember when Black men would run to the protection of their women, even willing to risk their lives for their women and children. And though that still holds true for many Black men, there is a growing trend of men who love their women so much that they love them to death. Barbara Deer was killed by her son. She was 51. Pastor Tammy McCollum was shot by her husband. She was 58. Nancy Metayer Bowen was the vice mayor of Florida, and her husband has been charged with her death. She was 38. And most recently, Cerina Fairfax was killed by her husband, a former Lt. Governor. She was 49.

              Between the World and Me, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, illustrated the trials of Black male journey as they navigated through neighborhoods that brought as much danger as the government of the country that enslaved their ancestors. Well, what Black women are going through is even worse. Their trauma is three-fold because they must navigate a country where they are double, triple, and quadruply marginalized, then deal with the same unsafe streets of far too many urban neighborhoods, but then they have to deal with the real issue of sleeping with the enemy. The very person who vowed to love them, entered into their holiest of holies, may be the biggest threat.

What must happen? Five things we can do immediately:

1. The men who see their fellow brothers, fathers, friends, and/or sons violating the code of protection of womanhood must do something, even if they are brothers, friends, or mentors.
2. We need to begin teaching our youth about IPV (interpersonal violence) and DV (domestic violence). We need to instruct young people on ways to make sure they do not become victims or perpetrators of this diabolical phenomenon.
3. We must equip our young and older women with knowledge on how to detect and protect themselves from emotional, physical, and verbal abuse.
4. We need to teach, continually, how to properly love and how to resolve disputes in all developmental stages of our lives across all the places we interact with loved ones, from the home, school, communities, sports and clubs, churches, and mosques.
5. Mental Health is a real problem. However, instead of blaming mental health as a problem, we need to solve the systemic problems of the country that help to create environments that help to breed this type of behavior, this type of individual.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list, and there are many things that need to have happened that a 500-word count article could not articulate. Action item: Choose one of these five to start with if you do not know where to start, or do something else that was not listed, but can help, or what you have been doing that has had some levels of change and success.