Sad Girl BookTok Romanticizes Whiteness

In comparison, people of color usually only appear in these books to help show the Sad Girl’s deteriorating mental health. In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Esther kicks a Black male orderly because he served two types of beans at a dinner. In the film version of Girl, Interrupted, Winona Ryder’s Susanna puts on a blaccent to mock and exert power over Nurse Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg). In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the narrator’s obsession with Whoopi Goldberg also plays into that dynamic as she watches Goldberg’s movies to fill a void within her. Marginalized people, especially Black people, exist in these Sad Girl narratives as props and punching bags and plot points along some white woman’s journey to peace and wellness.

In the 2018 essay “How White Women Use Strategic Tears to Silence Women of Colour,” writer and academic Ruby Hamad notes that white women cry “to muster sympathy and avoid accountability” when people of color confront them about harmful behavior. The tactic is intentional. White women are the models for traditional femininity. While white women are socially assumed to be helpless and delicate, Black women are stereotyped as angry aggressors. During a confrontation, white women can easily play into those stereotypes to their advantage. Their tears can suppress any dissenting opinions from women of color with the understanding that their sadness will be taken more seriously than a Black woman’s.

Late in 2019, Jada Pinkett Smith shared on an episode of Red Table Talk that she used to see her daughter’s crying as “offensive.” She said, “The way we grew up, the way my mother grew up, you feel like you have to be strong and the first thing you want to do is teach your girls how to be strong.” Jada would tell her daughter to cry somewhere so Willow would be the only one who had to witness that pain.

In my own family, tears induced eyerolls and teases. Any performance of sadness was to expose a weak spot. This was not the kind of vulnerability that opened me up to connect deeper with someone else but the kind that made me feel unsafe in my body. The kind where adults would see me crying and say, “I’ll give you something to cry about,” so I’d stop. And when I did stop, it was evidence enough for them that physical pain was a truer form of suffering than emotional pain.

The lesson I took away from them was to appear strong even when I’m at my lowest. Hold it in and wait to let it out in the privacy of my bedroom. How was I supposed to express vulnerability if I never learned how to?

I thought of those early childhood lessons while reading Zeba Blay’s 2021 essay collection, Carefree Black Girls. In an essay titled “Strong Black Lead,” she writes, “There were not many examples in my life of Black women crumbling, struggling, reaching out for help.” All the Black women I knew also waited until they were alone to fall apart.

She further criticizes the Strong Black Female trope, one that is as inherently tied to and dependent on race as the Sad White Girl trope. The myth that Black women constantly need to be strong is unrealistic as well as a silencing tactic. If we never speak up about what is making us unwell, the wrongdoing will continue to go unvoiced. “‘Strong’ says that life for Black women can only be an aggregation of pain,” Blay writes. “That we were made for pain. ‘Strong’ says that it is part of the natural order of things for Black women to remain all alone in their pain even as they lift entire communities up.”

When Pinkett Smith told her daughter to go somewhere with all that crying, she came from a place of survival, as most mothers do when it comes to what lessons they pass on. In a society that is actively trying to kill you, to give in to pain is to never come out of it.

“Black women,” Heven Haile writes in “The Unbearable Whiteness of the ‘Disaffected Young Woman’ Genre” for i-D Magazine, “are not afforded the luxury of dissociation due to the continuous cycle of racial violence we are forced to confront.”