Prince Harry isn’t the only one with a ‘misogynoir’ problem

If I were to reduce our current moment to an image, it would be a painting by the artist Navi Robins, showing the metaphorical scene after Donald Trump’s re-election. Four Black women are calmly sitting on a rooftop sipping tea. Beneath them, America burns.

Robins’s painting was a reference to a statistic that haunts me: the single voting group to defiantly resist the turmoil this administration has, as promised, unleashed, were Black women. While Black men, Latin Americans, white women and men supported Trump in unprecedented numbers, 92 per cent of Black women stood firm as the conscience of the nation and guardians of freedoms they themselves have never fully enjoyed.

Instead of recognising the debt of gratitude society owes Black women, we instead experience unique vitriol and aggression. “The way this world treats Black women is sickening,” the musician Lizzo wrote earlier this month, regarding the hostility that Black women artists receive in their lifetime. She referenced Janet Jackson and Whitney Houston as examples of how the music industry waits until these artists are at the end of their careers, or dead, before giving them their flowers.

The scale of rhetorical and literal violence that Black women face is so unprecedented that it has provoked scholars to create new terminology, like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “intersectionality” in 1989. The digital age has created new opportunities for people to hate Black women, and so that, too, needed a name.

In 2008, the scholar Moya Bailey created “misogynoir” to specifically define the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience, particularly in online spaces. Bailey described misogynoir as “the uniquely co-constitutive racialised and sexist violence that befalls Black women” and put it down to “their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender marginalisation”.

Black women have been experiencing misogynoir for as long as there have been digital spaces. But now, the concept has reached wider traction. Not because the world has finally caught up to Black feminist theory or because the role Black women play in protecting us all is finally being recognised. Because there has been a falling out with Prince Harry.

I don’t know the details of what has occurred at Sentebale, the charity founded in 2006 by Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho to honour the legacy of Diana, Princess of Wales and to help people in Lesotho and Botswana living in poverty and suffering from HIV and Aids. In 2023, a Black woman, the formidable lawyer Sophie Chandauka, was appointed as chair of Sentebale. This week, her relationship with the founders deteriorated to the point where they resigned. Chandauka has asked the Charity Commission to investigate her trustees, alleging poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny – and misogynoir.

The battle lines are being drawn as we speak: either Chandauka is a villain who ousted the noble founders from their own charity, or she is a victim whose treatment proves that a competent and professional Black woman will always be maligned.

For people interested in misogynoir, their research would lead them not just to Crenshaw and Bailey, but to the seminal work of bell hooks. One of hooks’s numerous contributions was her caution about the pitfalls both of normalising stereotypes of Black women and of insisting on positive images. Both limit our agency to exist in the world, seeking instead to control our experience and legacy on terms we did not create.

I may not know the true goings-on at Sentebale, but I do know this. It took two royal men to bring the concept of misogynoir to mainstream attention. I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate that it exists.

Afua Hirsch is author of ‘Decolonising My Body’ (Square Peg), and ‘Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging’ (Vintage)