With All Due Respect, You Can’t Step Into Our Skin

I appreciate the sentiment. I really do. But Sandra Bullock will never truly understand what it feels like to be a Black woman in America.

She may raise a Black child. She may love that child with every fiber of her being. But love doesn’t substitute for experience. And no matter how good her intentions are, she cannot wear a skin she wasn’t born into—nor can she inherit the pain, history, or daily reality that Black women carry.

To feel what a Black woman feels is not just about raising a Black child. It’s about being one—before the child, before the headlines, before the hashtags. It’s about growing up in a world where your very presence is politicized. Where your confidence is called attitude. Where your protection is never guaranteed. Where your beauty is judged against someone else’s standard, and your pain is often dismissed entirely.

It's about the weight of history pressing down silently through generations—400 years of it. Slavery. Lynching. Rape. Being silenced, dismissed, or used. It’s woven into family trees, passed down through the eyes of grandmothers who held their dignity while holding back tears. Through mothers who raised daughters with strength and sons with fear. Through whispered warnings and silent resilience.

You don’t get to understand that just because you love someone Black.

And yes, her child is Black. But that child is also wrapped in the blanket of her privilege. That child will grow up protected in ways most Black children will not—doors will open, assumptions will shift, and the world will offer more grace than it would to that same child born into a poor Black neighborhood with no famous mother to shield them.

And that’s not hate. That’s just reality.

Sandra Bullock may stand beside Black women. She may advocate. She may empathize. But empathy is not experience. It’s the same reason I, as a man, would never claim to understand the pain of childbirth—because I can’t.

And that’s okay.

But what’s not okay is when empathy crosses into assumption. When people believe that stepping into our world for a moment gives them access to the depth of our reality. That’s the kind of unintentional privilege that shows up with a smile and still does damage.

Because no, you don’t get to step in and out of Blackness. You don’t get to visit our pain, make a statement, and leave when it’s no longer comfortable.

Our lived experience isn’t a costume or a cause. It’s our life.

So with all due respect to Sandra—and to anyone else who believes love is the same as lived experience—it’s not. And it never will be.

#BlackWomensTruth #LivedExperienceMatters #YouCanLoveUsButYouCantBeUs #MotherhoodAndRace #WhitePrivilegeIsReal #EmpathyIsNotExperience #AnotherPerspectiveWithMartinJarvis