Invisible Scars: A Letter To My Black Sisters

Kuol Malou | AMA contributor

To my dear Black sisters,

I Am Sorry for What We Made You Carry

There are wounds we can see, and then there are the ones people learn to carry so quietly that an entire community can stand beside them and never know they are bleeding. Some scars never break the skin. They live in the flinch when a voice changes, in sleeping lightly, loving cautiously and surviving silently.

To our sisters: I am sorry for what we men have made you carry.

I am sorry for the violence we have caused, the fear we have normalised, and the times we protected a man’s reputation before protecting a woman’s safety.

Many of us come from cultures built around communal care. Yet behind closed doors, some of us turned protection into possession, leadership into control and love into endurance.

Distressed sister dealing with challenges of life in a family environment

We called our sisters strong when what they needed was safety. We praised resilience without asking what made resilience necessary. Sometimes what a woman needed was not praise for surviving. She needed us to stop being something she had to survive.

Then came the silence. Women learned that telling the truth could cost them family, that leaving could make them the one blamed for breaking the home, and that protecting themselves could be called betrayal.

Everyone was protected except the person being harmed.

We men have participated in that silence too. We have called violence “private.” We have defended brothers before asking whether their partners were safe. We have worried about reputation before asking what happened to her.

That is not communal care. That is communal silence.

Silence teaches children that love and fear can live in the same room.

This is what I mean by Invisible Scars. The violence may stop, but the body can keep remembering. The relationship may end, but trust does not automatically return. Survival is not the same as healing.

When I say I am sorry, I do not want forgiveness to become another thing we demand from women. Trust is not owed. Reconciliation is not owed. What is owed is accountability.

That means men speaking to men. Challenging the brother instead of protecting him. Raising sons who understand that love does not give them ownership. Believing safety matters more than reputation.

I am sorry to the women who learned to recognise danger in faces that looked like home. To those who spoke and were not believed. To those who stayed silent because they already knew what the community would say.

If we truly come from cultures of communal care, then our responsibility is to recover what was worth carrying forward: protection without control, leadership without fear, accountability without hiding behind shame.

Before we ask our sisters to walk beside us again, perhaps we need to become men they can walk beside without having to look over their shoulders.

I am sorry.

But saying sorry is the smallest part.

What matters is what we refuse to carry forward.

END

Kuol Malou is the founder of AfroNile Foundation and a regular contributor of AMA |

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