Wit & Attitude Quote by Barbara Smith

Steel hides in that second sentence. Smith isn’t offering a compliment so much as naming a price: in a society engineered to punish Black women for innocence, error, or trust, “foolishness” isn’t a cute personality trait. It’s a liability with consequences. The line flips a familiar insult on its head. Instead of arguing that Black women deserve respect because they’re morally superior, Smith points to the harsher truth: respectability has often been a survival strategy demanded by violence, poverty, and institutional neglect.

The specific intent is corrective and political. Smith, a key figure in Black feminist organizing, is pushing back against stereotypes that paint Black women as gullible, irresponsible, or unserious while also complicating the opposite trope: the endlessly strong Black woman. “We couldn’t afford to be” carries both pride and exhaustion. It acknowledges a collective intelligence honed under pressure, but it also indicts the conditions that make constant vigilance necessary.

Subtextually, the quote speaks to the forced adulthood Black women have historically shouldered: raising families with scarce resources, navigating workplaces hostile to them, and surviving a public culture that alternates between erasure and caricature. It’s also a quiet critique of movements that treated Black women as foot soldiers rather than thinkers. Smith is insisting on political agency: Black women weren’t just present; they were perceptive, strategic, and clear-eyed because they had to be.

The brilliance is its blunt economy. One sentence asserts competence; the next sentence exposes the system that made competence compulsory.