Alexandria Onuoha is on a bright spare stage dressed in white, bare feet, her black hair slicked tightly back. She is kneeling, but when the music begins, she quickly rises, arms eager and legs unbound. Her joints share a smooth vocabulary. She is soft wrists and loose limbs, blooming bones and fluid hips. She dances from the inside.
I ask her, What does it feel like to dance?
“Like everything makes sense,” she says.
She lingers there, speaks of history, family, Blackness, womanhood. I count one, two, three, four times she tells me:
“I feel free.”
Alex is a dancer, but there were times when people did not think she moved like one. She was a Black woman studying dance at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college in the Northeast. She moved her body according to the instruction she was given, but she often felt stiff and mechanical. “Robotic,” she said. The dance genres she grew up in, the languages her body spoke easily, were hip-hop, liturgical, West African, dancehall. She used movement to fuse culture and art, sexuality and spirituality, past and present.
Alex struggled in her dance program, and she recounted to me the aftermath of going public with her experience. She had been unsettled by a white male guest dancer’s comments on her body throughout rehearsals: the way it was failing, the way it did not fit.
She doesn’t remember precise words, but she remembers his tone registering as sarcasm.
Alex spoke to a professor about the guest dancer’s comments, but she did not feel she was taken seriously. When she got her grade, it was less than she believed she deserved, and she brought it up again to her professor, who she says dismissed her, telling her, in substance, “Sorry, this is just dance.” Alex didn’t think it was just dance.
Other professors made comments that suggested her body didn’t belong, and seemed baffled by the way it moved. She didn’t know what to call these critiques. Professors and guest dancers said they didn’t understand what her body was doing or what her art meant. She produced a choreographic piece combining dance from her Jamaican and Nigerian roots. When it was time to perform it, a guest artist said, “I don’t really understand what your piece is about, like, I am kind of confused, like, what’s the point of having Bob Marley speak?” She again told a professor she felt the comment was not right. The professor said the comment was fine. She told Alex to grow thicker skin.
Alex tried, but near the end of her program, she was exhausted. She was exhausted by the side-eye, the erasure of Black art, and what she saw as favoritism of white bodies. She decided she needed to speak. She wrote an opinion piece for her school newspaper on what she experienced in her program. She called it “Dancing Around White Supremacy.”
When the article ran online, friends saw it and texted to say they were proud. But at night, when she got back from an event and logged on to Instagram, she saw the other messages. She read them alone in her room.
She did not cry. She was still. She thought: “I can’t believe I go to school with people who think like this.”
She didn’t recognize names, and not everyone used avatars, but she assumed the DMs were from other students. Who else, she thought, would read her school newspaper? In a school with a student body of less than two thousand, she imagined the messages were sent by people she ate with in the dining hall, sat with in class, passed on the way to her dorm. Online, they called her a “black bitch.” They called her a “n*****.”
The day after the op-ed was published, Alex had dance class. She walked into class with dread in her step. She felt sweat coat her back. She didn’t want anyone to know what was happening inside her body, so she made it unreadable. She disciplined her face.
When class began, Alex said, the professor didn’t talk about Black art. She didn’t talk about Alex, how she felt, what she and the other students of color needed. Instead, she suggested that students should be careful, especially with what they say about guest artists. Someone could get sued, Alex remembers the professor saying.
After class and the professor’s not-so-subtle chiding, some of the white women dancers from her class came up to her in the cafeteria and said, “Oh Alex, we appreciate you being so courageous.” But Alex said none of them spoke in front of the professor.
Members of the school administration met with her after the op-ed was published. They said her choice could follow her, and they wanted to make sure she understood all the potential ramifications for her future academic career.
They did not say the words perhaps silence will keep you safe. But that was what she believed they meant.
Violence online is linked to a struggle over the structural power of white supremacy
The problem of women’s online abuse is almost always framed as a problem of misogyny, but Alex’s story, and the stories of countless other women, show that violence online is also linked to a struggle over the structural power of white supremacy, to the other systems with which it intertwines. Alex could not ignore what people were saying to her online, because language can be used to maintain power or to resist it. It can be used to keep certain people in their place or to fight a system that ranks human life. Language influences how we see ourselves, how other people see us, how they treat us. Language shapes public life. So do silences.
When Alex was abused online, she was punished through multiple attack vectors: her gender, her race, and the norms of behavior for Black people in predominantly white spaces.
Before the 2014 harassment campaign dubbed “Gamergate” became a cultural inflection point for the issue of women and online abuse, Black women were already navigating rampant misogynoir online. Gamergate was an explosion of masculine aggression toward women game developers, feminists critiquing video game culture, and anyone who dared defend them. Trolls organized on forums like 4chan and Reddit and the text-based chat system IRC to spread lies and disinformation about women they did not like, and they used those stories to justify attacks.
Most mainstream coverage of Gamergate focused on misogyny as an animating force, neglecting a deeper interrogation of the way racism also shapes the experiences of women online. Savvy Black digital feminists had already documented the harmful behavior of 4chan users who coordinated to impersonate and harass Black women. Just months earlier, Shafiqah Hudson, Ra’il I’Nasah Kiam, and Sydette Harry had created the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing, a nod to Hudson’s Southern roots, letting the trolls know “we see you.” Scholar Jessie Daniels, an expert on Internet manifestations of racism, told me the cultural conversation around Gamergate flattened the race element. White supremacy online, she said, does not get nearly enough attention as misogyny, despite the fact that misogyny and white supremacy are constitutive of each other. They are, she said, “of a piece.”
White supremacy is what Alex implicated in her op-ed—the same belief that animated the people who would call her slurs, the same belief she suspected influenced her professor’s reaction after the op-ed ran and which she believes also explains why some of the white women in her class did not defend her that day, a silence that tells its own story about white women’s complicity in Black women’s oppression.
In 2017, shortly after the first inauguration of President Donald Trump, I interviewed Kimberlé Crenshaw, a leading critical race scholar who coined the term intersectionality to describe the unique combination of racism and sexism Black women face. I asked if she would characterize the moment and explain what was at stake. I was so naïve that day.
She told me we have acclimated to the violence women face. She said a system of power is so normal that even those who are subject to it are internalizing and reproducing it. Remember that in 2016 nearly half of white women voted for Trump. Never forget that less than 1 percent of Black women did. In 2024, white women helped deliver Trump another win.
Black women’s experiences of abuse have been historically minimized and sometimes outright erased. Their prescience about the dangers of a nascent alt-right were largely ignored, and at least some of the online harms people experience today are a result of white people, including white women, refusing to heed Black women’s warnings. Black women’s pain is rarely deemed worthy of serious attention, which was precisely the point Alex made in her op-ed when she denounced the dance department’s lack of protection for Black women.
“They completely disregarded my feelings because in their minds, I was not capable of feeling,” she wrote.
After Alex’s op-ed was published, she tried to ignore the abusive messages people sent her online. She told herself: “These people are just crazy. These people are wild. They’re insane. I don’t care.”
But she did care. There are so many ways that words matter.
There are so many ways that words matter.
In her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that our brain’s most important job is to manage our body’s metabolic budget so that we can stay alive. We are not conscious of every thought, feeling, kindness, or insult functioning as a deposit or a withdrawal against that budget, but she says that is precisely what is happening inside us. Words that are generous and connective function as deposits, while words that are degrading and exclusionary function as withdrawals.
“The power of words is not a metaphor,” she writes. Words are “tools for regulating human bodies. Other people’s words have a direct effect on your brain activity and your bodily systems, and your words have that same effect on other people. Whether you intend that effect is irrelevant. It’s how we’re wired.”
Knowing the history of a word makes it that much harder to set aside. CNN race reporter Nicquel Terry Ellis and I were former colleagues at USA Today, and I interviewed her because I witnessed her abuse, which was differently textured than my own. She was called not just a “cunt” but a “house slave.” When we spoke, she told me about the time she was home on the couch, exhausted after a long day, and saw the message that had been posted on her Facebook fan page: “N*****.”
She thought about her former manager, another Black journalist, a person she respects and admires, who told her she should try to ignore this language, who stressed that Black people faced worse during the civil rights movement—bombings, lynchings, beatings. Ignore it and do the work, he encouraged.
She couldn’t. Terry Ellis told me: “To have someone send you a message, someone taking the time out of their day to send you a message and call you the N-word . . . a name that was given to your ancestors who were slaves, who were called that by slave masters when they were told to get out in the field and pick cotton. I mean, you think about all the historical implications of that.”
Jennifer M. Gómez, a Black feminist sexual violence researcher and assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Social Work, told me the slur was directed at her when she was Zoom bombed—a disruption from harassers during a video conference—during a virtual awards ceremony hosted by the American Psychological Association. The interlopers put up swastikas. They shouted “fuck the n*****” over and over. The audience left. The audience tried to return, but it happened again. Gómez left and did not go back. She sat at home, whispered to herself that it was fine, that she was safe in Detroit, that the interlopers were not in Detroit. But she did not feel fine. She wanted to take a walk. Is it safe? she wondered. She cried. She felt anxious. She scolded herself. She was a violence researcher who should know better. How dare she be shocked?
When she marinated on why the words felt so violating, she realized it wasn’t that the transgression occurred during a private event; it was, she said, that it “happened within my home.”
The words people use to speak to us and about us tell us a great deal about how other people see us, which impacts how they treat us. Misgendering or deadnaming a trans person doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is connected to laws being passed in legislatures across the country that deny trans people human rights. Calling a woman a “cunt,” reducing her from a human to an anatomical part, is connected to a rape culture that makes sexual violence against her permissible. Calling a Black woman a racial slur reinforces her position in a white supremacist society that values white life above all other life, that demonizes Black bodies and brutalizes Black bodies, often without consequence. How other people see us, how they speak to us, shapes our lives—the privileges we are afforded, the dignity we are denied.
One night I was swiping through TikTok at an unreasonable hour when the algorithm delivered Jools Rosa (who would later create the viral “demure” trend). Rosa is a trans plus-size Afro-Latina beauty influencer with more than two million followers on the app. In the video, Rosa painted the word fatty on her chin in color corrector and blended the insult into her face. Impressed with this symbolic approach, I scrolled through her feed. I saw a woman challenging stereotypical depictions, fiercely funny, serially self-deprecating, and at times painfully vulnerable. On a trip to Las Vegas, Rosa posted videos of herself in full glam to watch Beyoncé perform, posted another at the pool lauding herself for not sweating off her makeup, posted another divulging that she had met a man the night before. She felt good with that man, connected, but she is a trans woman in America, her safety is routinely threatened, and she started to question her reality, to grow paranoid. She convinced herself the man was going to round up people to assault her, so when he went to the bathroom, she slipped away.
I reached out to Rosa, and when we spoke, she told me she is subject to a daily torrent of racist, sexist, transphobic, fatphobic messages online. Men call Rosa disgusting. Children call her a gorilla. Thin, white, passing transgender women deride her for not being trans enough. One of the strangest parts of the abuse, she said, is how it morphs into a preoccupation with the way not only people on the Internet but everyone sees her. Someone once commented on one of her videos that if they ended up sitting next to her on a plane, it would ruin their entire flight. She carries that now, that specific wondering about what fellow passengers think of her.
“I start picking up on how I perceive people are perceiving me. I’m like, great. Everyone thinks I’m a nasty bitch. Everyone’s looking at how big I am. Everyone’s disgusted by me.”
Working out how other people perceive us is an important part of understanding communication. It’s why a lot of the online abuse you would not think would demand our attention does, especially some of the less obvious kinds. It’s easy to assume what a person sending a rape threat or death threat thinks of you. It takes more work to sit with the subtler messages. Linguist Emily Bender told me that understanding language includes imagining what the other person is trying to say.
“Even if we are able to set it aside afterward, we still have to have made sense of it, and it’s very, very difficult to do that sense-making without modeling the mind of the person who said the thing,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
I don’t want to suggest violence should be a woman’s problem to solve. I don’t want to suggest that there is a single solution, neatly wrapped, that she can take into her life, into her work, into her body to feel immediately better or stronger or more resolute. I won’t suggest that there is a way we can feel better about sexism or racism. I do not want us to feel better about sexism or racism.
I began my book, To Those Who Have Confused You to Be a Person, wondering how women were surviving violence online. I wanted to know how women coped. I thought there would be a clear number of beneficial strategies and I would be able to sensibly arrange them.
I have learned a great deal about how women cope, but I cannot be honest about those findings and package them as I’d hoped. Coping involves a number of strategies influenced by alternating priorities. Everywhere there are binds, and everywhere women are getting tied up.
Everywhere there are binds, and everywhere women are
getting tied up.
What Alex knows with certainty, what she told me again and again, was that she tried to ignore the abusive messages but could not. She told herself she was unbothered. Her instinct to ignore her feelings is part of the unseen labor that Black women and other people who experience oppression perform daily.
Like Alex, many women online try to regulate their emotions, to control what they feel and express. Emotion regulation is defined by psychologist James Gross, a pioneer in emotion research, as “the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions.” Emotion regulation can be done unconsciously, and it can be taught. The strategies people use to regulate their mood and behavior can be based on what they believe about emotion, and their tactics are also influenced by what is culturally accepted about emotion.
When I researched emotion regulation, I noticed two common strategies in the literature: expressive suppression, when a person tries to hide an emotion, and cognitive reappraisal, when a person tries to think differently about a situation to change an emotional response.
If you are engaged in expressive suppression, you try not to let anyone around you see how you really feel. I think of Alex in her dance class, the way she controlled the muscles in her face so no one could read her distress.
Cognitive reappraisal is generally considered a healthier emotion regulation strategy. Sometimes it is used to dull a negative feeling or to feel something else altogether. It may involve going over a situation in your mind several times to come up with an alternate take. You might see the situation one way, then try a broader perspective.
When I began this research, I thought emotion regulation sounded like a reasonable strategy for coping with negative feelings. Things feel awful, things are awful, so you do what you can to manage your emotions, to feel better. We cannot snap our fingers and rid the world of violence, so we might as well learn to regulate our emotions around the violence we face, minimizing their disruptions. We can’t ignore the abuse, but we can reframe a situation to dismiss individual instances of hate and maintain a sense of self-worth, to continue to participate in public life.
But when I dug deeper, I began to find the trouble.
In 2018 Alfred Archer, a philosopher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, read a paper by philosopher Amia Srinivasan in which she writes that victims of oppression are often asked to turn away from valid emotional responses to give themselves the best chance of ending that oppression, a choice, argued Srinivasan, that constitutes an affective injustice. Archer was contemplating the paper’s arguments when he heard renowned emotion researcher James Gross give a speech, prompting Archer and fellow Tilburg philosopher Georgina Mills to think about the relationship between affective injustice and emotion regulation, concluding that “the demand faced by victims of oppression . . . is a demand that they regulate their emotions.”
Archer and Mills argue that while cognitive reappraisal may make a woman feel emotionally better, it can also involve “turning away from the injustice.” They offered the example of a woman who is angry at being sexually harassed, cognitively reappraises the situation to decide it wasn’t harassment, and then essentially ignores the problem and “gives up on attempts to challenge the injustice.” (The goal of reappraisal is to change your emotion, so the story you settle on may be one that makes you feel better but not necessarily one that is true.)
To illustrate the problem with suppression, they give the example of a woman who does not express her anger. That choice may keep her safe from further discrimination and avoid making other people around her uncomfortable, but it can decrease her positive emotions, cause problems with cognition, and lead to poor health outcomes.
When Archer and I Zoomed to lean into these complexities, he admitted that while some form of emotion regulation is necessary to survive life, in the context of oppression, the act of trying to control your emotional state is fundamentally unjust.
“The fact that you have to try and work out how to respond, how to keep yourself healthy in the face of this, shows how big a difficulty it is. Because not only are you faced with all of these options, each of which brings costs, but thinking through how you are going to respond to a situation is enormously cognitively taxing in itself.”
José Soto, a professor of psychology at Penn State who has conducted research on how culture can influence emotion regulation, said that when a person is trying to manage emotions around aggressions that are group based and identity based, the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies is also likely going to be influenced by that person’s goals. The goal of self-preservation and the goal of fighting oppression may require different strategies.
Alex’s goal was to survive her senior year. And she did. She is a doctoral student now, studying how the messages of fascist groups impact the psychological development of Black girls. She organizes in Boston, writes for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, and conducts research on far-right misogynoir.
“It doesn’t stop,” she told me of the abuse. “Anytime I write something, it doesn’t really stop.”
Alex told me the difference now is that she doesn’t “pretend it’s not there.”
Learning how to regulate emotions is important for psychological well-being, but the strategies we use can force us into near-impossible choices about what is good for the moment and what is good for the future, what is good for the individual and what is good for the collective. I struggled with how to conclude this essay, because I wanted to end with an idea that felt unequivocal and concrete. That urge was impossible to satisfy, so I landed on a conversation with psychotherapist Seth Gillihan, who teaches people how to regulate emotions by changing unhealthy patterns of thinking. Gillihan, who had been a source during my reporting on the trauma of the January 6 insurrection, told me that if someone is upset about their abuse and is beating themself up for being upset, wishing they had thicker skin, thinking they can’t do this work or that they shouldn’t be sharing ideas publicly if they can’t handle them emotionally, he would encourage them to notice those thoughts, to loosen those attachments, and to question those assumptions.
“Maybe you could ask yourself something like ‘Do any of the people I know who have expressed who they truly are in spite of society’s criticism or hatred, who have really changed society, have they done it without some level of abuse? Is it worth what it’s going to cost?’ And the answer might be no. But someone might realize, ‘Oh, nothing says this should be easy.’ And there can be real relief in that. And realizing this is hard. Yeah, it’s hard. Exactly. That’s exactly how it is.”
Pain and reprieve are the nature of struggle. They formed the poles of Alex’s experiences. They made their way into her art. When I asked Alex for some examples of her choreography, she shared a piece she created during college that featured five Black alums. The piece began with the women moving into a circle, clasping and raising their hands before breaking into smaller groups. One performed a solo, then they came back together, eventually dancing in unison. You don’t have to understand every move to feel the weight of it. Alex told me the piece was about how Black women are rarely protected, so they depend on the love between them to invent safety, to sustain movement.
Alex told me she later watched a recording of the performance. When it ended, in that liminal silence before the audience claps, you can hear a single voice, low and proud:
“Yes.”
It was her mother.
Excerpted from TO THOSE WHO HAVE CONFUSED YOU TO BE A PERSON by Alia Dastagir. Copyright © 2025 by Alia Dastagir. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
