Re: Glorilla, Reproduction, and the Old American Trick

The discourse surrounding Glorilla irritates my actual being.

“Ten kids?!!!”

“She was the ONLY one with movement!?”

“...ofcourse she ‘owes’ them! ”

People say things like they’re neutral statements, like it explains something.

But what it actually does is rehearse one of the oldest American tricks: take a structure you built on purpose, then blame Black people for surviving inside it.

This country has always had a strategic relationship to Black reproduction. As long as Black women were having babies, the country had what it needed: a working class, a talent pool, bodies to extract from. Labor didn’t have to be protected if supply was guaranteed. Support was never the point. Continuity was.

At the same time, other populations were being sterilized, experimented on, or prevented from reproducing entirely. Puerto Rican women. Native women. Disabled women. That wasn't a contradiction. It was sorting. Some bodies were deemed exploitable. Others were deemed disposable.

That distinction matters, because when reproduction is encouraged without protection, the cost doesn’t vanish. It gets privatized.

Families absorb it.

Women absorb it.

And when one person in the family “makes it,” they absorb it.

So when Glorilla becomes successful, the comments immediately frame her as infrastructure. Not a person who got lucky or worked hard, but a resource node. The one who “has motion.” The one who should carry the rest.

People love to call that entitlement. But entitlement implies greed. What this actually is, is forced responsibility filling a policy vacuum.

This is the part that never gets said plainly: Black success in America is treated like communal debt because the state never planned to show up. Survival was always meant to be handled privately, inside families, inside women’s bodies, inside whoever could hold the weight longest.

And Black women are trained for that role early.

We’re taught, culturally, socially, economically, to absorb instability. In households. In caregiving. In families. In entire industries. Boundaries get framed as betrayal. Distance gets framed as abandonment. Saying no gets framed as selfishness.

That’s not family dysfunction. That’s governance by deprivation and capture.

Slavery worked this way. Strip resources. Deny wages. Deny land. Deny margin. Then reroute survival through systems that can be monitored and controlled. Ownership didn’t end when chains disappeared. The tools just changed.

Deprivation creates vulnerability.

Vulnerability creates dependence.

Dependence enables capture.

Sometimes capture looks like forced labor.

Sometimes it looks like eligibility rules, surveillance, paperwork, and punishment for missteps.

Sometimes it looks like being allowed to survive, but never to stabilize.

That logic never left.

This is why the conversation around Beyoncé and Rihanna always turns strange. Admiration flips into entitlement. Success becomes obligation. Boundaries become betrayal. Solitude becomes suspicious instead of protective.

And it’s why so many Black women fear success without being able to say that out loud.

It’s not fear of achievement. It’s fear of becoming infrastructure.

I know that fear intimately. I’ve lived it in caregiving, in work, in family systems. I’ve watched how quickly competence turns into expectation, how visibility turns into demand, how “you’re so capable” becomes “you can handle this too.”

So when people say, “Well, she has money now,” they’re missing the point. Money doesn’t automatically buy margin when the structure is designed to keep extracting from you. Wealth isn’t just cash. It’s time. Rest. Protection. The ability to walk away without everything collapsing.

That’s what was stolen. Not just wages,but margin.

And this is why attacks on reproductive autonomy right now aren’t about suddenly valuing life. Birth rates are falling everywhere. The old supply model is breaking down. Instead of building systems that support people choosing to have children, the response is coercion. Restriction. Moral language masking economic panic.

It’s the same logic. Different moment.

So when people reduce GloRilla to a statistic, or her family to a punchline, they’re not telling the truth about her. They’re telling the truth about the system they’ve learned to normalize.

Black women didn’t fail this country.

Black women were used to keep it running.

And when one of us makes it to the world stage and dares not to carry everything with her, the backlash isn’t about family values.

It’s about a structure losing control.

When I say the structure is losing control, that doesn’t just show up in policy or public panic. It shows up inside Black families and relationships too.

Black men are not outside of patriarchy. Many have wanted access to it. Historically, some tried to align with it, to be recognized by it, to gain proximity to its protections, at the expense of Black women. That’s not a secret. It’s documented. It’s human. Patriarchy promises safety and status to those who uphold it.

But here’s the part people avoid saying plainly: Black men were never allowed full access to that power.

So when the system that exploits them also humiliates them, when they can’t punch up at institutions, employers, the state, or the economy, the violence doesn’t vanish. It redirects. And too often, it redirects toward the women closest to them.

That’s not because Black men are uniquely cruel. It’s because patriarchy teaches that manhood requires dominance, and when dominance is blocked at the top, it gets exercised at home.

And Black women are expected to absorb that too.

We are expected to hold the family together. Hold the emotional center. Hold the economic fallout. Hold men’s frustration with a system that never intended to let them win. When we do, we’re praised as strong. When we don’t, we’re framed as the problem.

Difficult.

Selfish.

Cold.

Ungrateful.

That’s the trap.

So when a Black woman like Glorilla becomes successful, she isn’t just confronting state expectations or public entitlement. She’s confronting gendered expectations inside her own community; expectations that say her success should stabilize everyone else, especially men whose power has been structurally denied.

When she refuses to become the anchor for all of that, it reads as betrayal instead of boundary.

That’s why this backlash isn’t just about money or family size. It’s about control slipping on multiple fronts at once. The state can’t manage reproduction the way it used to. The economy can’t guarantee masculine provision the way it promised. And Black women are increasingly unwilling to become the shock absorbers for both.

When we stop holding everything, the system doesn’t read that as relief.

It reads it as rebellion.

And that’s when the labels come out.

That’s when we become the problem.

Not because we broke something.

But because we refused to keep carrying what was never ours to hold.