“Being born with melanin is one of the most liberating yet exhausting feelings”: Slick Woods on the nuances of blackness

Model and actor Slick Woods exclusively pens an open letter for Vogue detailing experiences of her childhood rooted in Minnesota, the multifaceted threads tied to blackness, and most crucially, her hopes and desires as a mother raising a young black son in the US.

It’s interesting to see the world finally catching up with what has always been mine and so many others’ reality. All of a sudden, blackness is ‘trending’. Black parenthood. Black childhood. Black adulthood. Black livelihood. Yet, there aren’t many conversations about how to actually help black neighbourhoods, [which should be] the source that dictates the narrative of blackness in America.

Many people think I’m from Los Angeles, but I was actually born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prior to current events, systemic racism has always impacted almost every aspect of life for black people in the Twin Cities [Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the state’s two largest cities]. For example, property deeds are still used to enforce racial segregation. The University of Minnesota’s ​Mapping Prejudice Project ​proves there are laws in Minneapolis and Saint Paul that keep the home ownership rate for black households among the lowest across the country.

That second paragraph is specifically for those who still don’t believe there are multiple institutions in place to hold black people back from advancing in society. I have always been unapologetically BLACK, which has earned me the ‘eccentric’ label in the fashion industry—a space where diversity was not really celebrated until my generation of models began to surface.

What people fail to realise is that me and girls like me have always had to watch their level of blackness. Some of us grew up in cities, like Minneapolis, where black skin is essentially a punishment of existence. They don’t care about the PTSD we suffer from, despite our climb up the social economic ladder. They are ignorant of the systems in place to keep the black household, like mine, divided. I don’t think they comprehend how frustrating it is to try to co-exist in a world that doesn’t care to understand you and never will because of how things are structured.

As someone who has experienced black childhood, womanhood and parenthood, I can honestly say that being born with melanin is one of the most liberating yet exhausting feelings. My hope is that my son will never experience half of what I did growing up. I am grateful for his father and I to be in positions that grant him access to a childhood and adult life that we could only imagine. I pray that the systems currently in place crumble before he is of an age to truly understand his lineage so he can feel nothing but proud of who he is.

Coming up how I did, ‘fame’ was far from anything I ever asked for, but I am thankful to have a platform that can allow me to help uplift and restore not only my communities but provide as much assistance as possible for other minority neighbourhoods that lack fair opportunities often provided to others. For the sake of my son, Saphir Bosso—his generation and the ones to come after.

With love,
Slick Woods

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