The Plank in Your Eye: Misreading the Collapse of Black Women

“Straw” by Tyler Perry wrecked me. 🥺🫂

I mean that was a BAD 48 hours.How overwhelming for it to be a glimpse into it all?How ordinarily traumatizing. 💔 Mental wellness is NO joke. Black sisterhood rooted in care is no joke. Straw brought up the real: that I’ve mastered the art of appearing okay while feeling like I’m underwater. This is why I’ve strengthened my boundaries with things and people. This is why I started naming the harm and hurt. And feeling deeply and voicing/archiving my life. I don’t care if it gets on people’s nerves. Because I know—even if one person can feel seen, valued, appreciated, and loved—then the noise doesn’t matter.

Sometimes people see my glow but don’t always see the grit it took to shine.That I am praised for my resilience, but rarely nurtured in my softest places. ❤️‍🩹I have been so tired and so burnt but I am so grateful for my faith and my determination to preserve myself. This world is NOT that kind to Black single mothers shouldering it ALONE. I want a soft life. I’ve said that. I mean that.I want safety, steadiness, and space to fall apart without losing everything I built.I want to be held, not handled. Chosen, not just tolerated. Seen, not just used.

I am deeply spiritual. But that doesn’t mean I don’t cry.Even Jesus wept. Even goddesses collapse.I am not exempt from needing tenderness just because I’m cloaked in favor.Straw reminded me of that sacred truth:the breakdown is holy.The tears are a ceremony.A ceremony I’ve yearned to partake in.And slowly, slowly, I am re-regulating my nervous system.My voice matters—even when it shakes. The film pulled at everything I’ve buried but have slowly been unearthing:the invisible labor,the longing to rest,the rage I’ve spiritualized instead of voiced.And I’m still sitting with it all. Letting it rise.

So much sadness for Janiyah. ❤️‍🩹💔Taraji did well. She showed out. 🤍Like that one scene about gratitude… I am so, so grateful that in spite of it all, the Lord has mercy on my soul. 🙏🏾🤍

AND STILL! I can't get over the PLANK in the eye for everyone who looks and still doesn't see Black women—especially Black single mothers from and in working-class communities.

This film was about the presence of poverty, pressure, and pain.It was about what it feels like to be a Black woman barely holding on—with no safety net, no room to collapse, and no real support. And I felt that. Deeply.

As someone doing it all from a working-class legacy, I recognized myself in Janiyah’s unraveling.Not because I lack a partner.But because I live in a world that romanticizes my struggle while refusing to actually support my survival. I live in a body created by a mother who struggled with mental illness, and had to be a single mother for a while—until it was the last straw for her, and my great-grandmother (PRAISE THE LORD) stepped in at 75+.This film shows how exhausting and enraging it is to continuously feel the sharp sting of how profoundly society continues to misread the emotional and material reality of Black womanhood.

A man, y’all? For real?This interpretation is not only reductive, it is a dangerous misdiagnosis.It centers patriarchal rescue fantasies over structural critique.Straw is a searing indictment of the conditions under which Black women are expected to survive.It is a meditation on poverty as violence, on grief as accumulation, and on the psychic and spiritual exhaustion produced when a woman becomes both the infrastructure and the last line of defense in her own life. I needed to see this film at a time like this.I watched it with recognition.I recognized the fatigue that doesn’t just sit in the body, it rearranges the soul.The kind of fatigue that comes from being systematically unsupported, perpetually overextended, and invisibilized under the guise of “resilience.” Janiyah’s descent was the result of a society that withholds basic care:affordable housing, healthcare for her daughter, livable wages, the ability to rest without catastrophe.

This is where bell hooks becomes instructive, where her analysis of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy hits.The film demonstrates how these intersecting systems conspire to make Black women the mules and mammies of the WORLD,tasked with absorbing the failures of capitalism, the neglect of public policy, and the emotional labor of everyone around them. Like Dr. Thema said: mini messiahs. In this way, Straw is a case study in structural abandonment.A term Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us: the deliberate withdrawal of resources from already marginalized communities.

Now let us tell the whole truth if we are to tell it!

Marriage, in and of itself, is not a remedy to systemic oppression.Without redistributive justice, a husband becomes another individual within a broken system,not a savior from it.In fact, the myth that marriage inherently resolves economic hardship ignores the data.Many married women,especially Black women,continue to shoulder disproportionate labor within their homes, often without economic freedom or emotional reciprocity.

So you thought it was a bad movie? Possibly.Nothing is great about a story like Janiyah’s. But it holds burdensome truths.This is why representation like Straw matters.Because it counters the sanitized, performative depictions of Black motherhood with something more dangerous—and more necessary: truth.

It refuses the binary of either strong or broken, and instead shows us the lived dialectic of endurance and collapse.It reveals what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlife of slavery”,how dispossession is inherited, how the past persists in the precarities of the present. For those of us trying to break generational cycles, this film doesn’t just evoke emotion, it provokes philosophical reckoning.It reminds us that the condition of being a Black mother is not merely personal.It is ontological. Political. Ethical.So no,she didn’t need a husband.She needed a society that values her life.She needed a redistribution of care.She needed a system that doesn’t treat her breakdown as failure but as a logical response to structural harm.

She needed what we all need:A world where Black women can rest before they implode.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t name the spiritual meaning in the title.In early Christianity, straw was often contrasted with grain,something weak, easily burned. In Matthew 7:3 it says,“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust [straw] in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” Straw symbolizes the small thing, the flaw, the perceived overreaction.But what if that “small” thing is actually a final thing?The straw that breaks the back.

The protagonist’s collapse is misread as an overreaction to a speck,when in reality, the weight of the world had already buried her.And in that misreading, theologically and socially, we find the truth:We underestimate the depth of another person’s suffering.We critique the speck in their eye while ignoring the systems pressing on their chest.

I’m left with so many questions:How many straws do we ignore in others? In ourselves?How often do we benefit from someone else’s silent labor?How long do we let Black women carry everything before we pay attention?

Why do we wait until collapse to offer care?