There is a psychological experiment playing out in front of our faces every single day on every single app. I call it the gender war experiment. It is the constant back and forth between Black men and Black women. The bashing. The think pieces. The clips about who brings what to the table. The “modern woman” talk. The jokes about “dusty men.” The nonstop stitching of pain and calling it content.
I am not saying other groups do not have problems between men and women. What I am saying is this: When I log in to social media, my timeline is not flooded with white people tearing each other apart as an identity. My feeds are full of Black people doing it. We have built whole platforms off dragging each other. It no longer feels like “community conversation.” It feels like a very successful psychological operation that we walked into with our shoes off.
When I was younger, I tried to understand my place in this world through books. By the time I reached middle school, if I was not writing a story in a notebook or drawing, I was reading. I was learning who I am and who my people are. I picked up Assata Shakur’s autobiography. I read Richard Wright’s Black Boy. I studied the autobiography of Malcolm X. I watched Roots alone at twelve and sat with the heaviness of it. I was submerged in our story, in our pain, and in our patterns of survival.
I remember asking my mother one day, “What is going to happen when they take Black people’s rights away?” She told me that would never happen because Black people have too much power. As a child, I heard her answer, but in my spirit, I did not believe it. Even then, I knew she was trying to protect my mind from something she did not really have the language to explain. Now, as a grown woman in twenty twenty five, watching rights get rolled back in real time, I know she was trying to comfort me more than she was trying to tell me the truth.
Back then, I did not have the words for it, but now I do. Black people have always been the test subjects. If something harmful is going to be rolled out, this country usually tries it on us first and then expands it to everybody else. So yes, rights are being taken from a lot of people right now, but when it hits Black people, it hits at a different frequency because of everything that came before it.
The permanent underclass warning
Years ago, Dr. Claud Anderson warned that Black Americans were being positioned to become a permanent underclass if we did not build real economic power. He talked about ownership, about land, about industries, about control over our own institutions, and more. He was not only talking about feelings or symbolism. He was warning us that without serious power moves, we would be locked out of the rooms where decisions about our lives are made.
Fast forward to now. Look around. Rights are being peeled back. Rules about who counts as a voter are shifting. Protections that people fought and bled for are being challenged in courts. It is not just one party or one administration. It is a long plan that keeps being pushed forward a little more each decade. Black people are still treated as the first group you can test harm on. Once again, we are the trial run.
While we argue, Black women are getting pushed out
At the same time that the gender war content is going viral every day, something else is happening that should have our full attention.
Black women have been pushed to the front of a certain type of visibility for the last decade. We became the face of diversity campaigns. We became the heart of a lot of community work and nonprofit work. We became the “representation” that companies loved to show off, especially when it was time to post about social justice. Black women are one of the most educated groups in this country in terms of degrees. That did not happen by accident. We fought for that… But now we are watching that access get snatched away.
This year, hundreds of thousands of Black women have been pushed out of jobs or out of the labor force. The unemployment rate for Black women has gone up while the national unemployment rate has stayed around the same. You do not have to be an economist to understand what that means. When the overall jobs picture looks “stable,” but Black women are losing work at a much higher rate, that is targeted harm. That is erasure hiding inside pretty national averages.
Black women are losing government jobs, nonprofit jobs, higher education jobs, and health care jobs. The kinds of positions that were sold to us as stable and secure. The same roles that many of us went into serious student debt to qualify for. We were invited in, used as proof that the system was fair, and now we are being shown the door.
This is what I mean when I say the gender war feels like a psyop. At the exact moment that the floor is opening up under Black women, we are being fed a nonstop diet of content that tells us our real enemy is the Black man, and tells Black men that their real enemy is the Black woman.
Let’s be clear, they did not “allow” us in out of love. There has always been a plan around who gets access and when.
In one era, Black families were punished for having a man in the house if they wanted to receive public assistance. Inspectors would check for his presence, and if they decided he lived there, benefits could be cut. That was not a random quirk of policy. That was a deliberate move to destabilize Black households and make survival depend on keeping the Black man away. Go back and watch the movie Claudine…
Then came mass incarceration and the drug war. Entire blocks of Black men were swept into prisons for nonviolent offenses, removed from their families and communities for decades. That was another attack on the structure of Black life, dressed up as “law and order.”
At the same time, the economy started shifting. Black women began finding more opportunities in schools, hospitals, offices, and government work. We moved into the kinds of jobs that required degrees and credentials, while Black men were more likely to be over policed, locked out of those same jobs, or pushed into unstable and dangerous work. That created very real resentment and stress on both sides. None of this happened in a vacuum. These are not isolated events. This is a pattern of social engineering.
The wedge did not build itself
The wedge between Black men and Black women was built over generations. First, through slavery, where control over Black bodies, Black relationships, and Black children was a tool of domination. Then, through policy that criminalized Black masculinity and punished Black poverty. Then, through media and entertainment that 
constantly showed violent Black men and bitter Black women while hiding the everyday reality of love, partnership, and mutual support that also exists in our communities.
Add to that the way money and survival became gendered. Some Black women found a way into the professional class. Many Black men did not. Some women began to see themselves as more reliable providers than the men available to them. Some men began to see women as part of the system that kept them out. That hurt is real, but if we never name the larger structure behind it, we start to believe that the problem is just each other.
Now we sit online and watch people who are deeply wounded turn those resentments into content. Men talk about women as if they are all out for money and status. Women talk about men as if they are all lazy and broken. People speak from their own trauma and then present it as a universal truth.
The gender war is trauma with a ring light. Most of what I see in gender war clips is unhealed trauma performing for an audience. A woman whose father was never there talks like every Black man will abandon his children. A man whose first love cheated on him talks like every Black woman is untrustworthy. People drag their exes, their absent parents, and their childhood wounds into every conversation. They wrap that pain in statistics, half facts, and cherry-picked studies. They call it “data” or “content” when it is really a diary entry.
What we call standards can sometimes be fear. What we call “preference” can sometimes be avoidance. What we call “high value” can sometimes be nothing but capitalism sitting in the middle of our relationships, telling us our worth lies in our income and our appearance.
I am not here to tell anyone that their pain is not valid. Some of us have seen some ugly things, myself included. Some of us have survived emotional abuse, physical abuse, and neglect at the hands of people who looked like us and loved us. That is real. What I am saying is that our trauma is not supposed to turn into a public project where we teach an entire generation to distrust their own people. There is a difference between naming the harm we survived and turning that harm into a brand.
While we fight, the real questions go unanswered
While we argue online about who should pay for dinner, lawmakers are deciding who gets to vote and whose vote counts. While we debate submission and gender roles, they are quietly rewriting labor rules and cutting the small programs that kept some of our elders afloat. While we tear each other down in comment sections, they are investing in more surveillance, more policing, and more ways to make people disposable at work.
We are not going to out-debate systemic racism. We are not going to out-caption economic collapse. We are not going to talk our way out of a plan that was designed in boardrooms and government offices generations ago.
What we can do, and what we must do, is become more honest about what is driving us. We need to tell ourselves the truth about how our personal experiences shape the way we speak about each other. We need to recognize when we are being pulled into content that leaves us more bitter and less clear. We need to remember that our grandparents and great-grandparents survived because they found ways to stand beside each other even while they were broken inside. They did not have the luxury of turning each other into enemies for entertainment.
We also need to put more energy into building something real with the people around us than into winning arguments with strangers online. That might look like actual community meetings, mutual aid, cooperatives, study groups, healing circles, and businesses rooted in us rather than built on our divisions. It might look like therapy. It might look like apologizing. It might look like choosing silence instead of another viral rant that adds nothing.
Healing is not cute. It is not always aesthetic. It is slow and it is humbling. It may not get you a brand deal. But it might save your life. It might save your child’s life. It might be the only way we stop failing this psychological test that we never volunteered for but are trapped inside anyway.
If we do not wake up, Dr. Anderson’s warning about a permanent underclass will stop being a quote we share and become the permanent condition of our lives. And when that moment comes, there will be no comfort in knowing that you “won” the gender war. There will only be the quiet realization that the person you spent all that time fighting was never the real enemy in the first place.
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