Who Told You That?

The Black Woman Lifespan Triad provides the structure for examining these patterns. Who Told You That? provides the question through which they are investigated and interrupted. Who Told You That? is the research and public interaction and inquiry housed within Black Woman Lifespan Triad. It asks Black girls, women, and gender-expansive people to examine the messages, rules, stereotypes, and inherited expectations that have shaped how we understand ourselves and one another.

The inquiry is not intended to place blame on individual Black families or communities without examining the conditions under which survival practices were developed. Instead, it creates space to question what has been passed down, identify who or what those expectations once served, and determine whether they continue to serve us now.

Within the Black Woman Lifespan Triad, Who Told You That? becomes a method of interruption and a proposed solution through first inquiry, research and then programming.

It invites us to pause before repeating familiar judgments.

To ask whether protection has become control.

Whether responsibility has become parentification.

Whether strength has become emotional suppression.

Whether care has become compulsory sacrifice.

Whether tradition has become an unquestioned pathway for transmitting harm.

The question also opens a path toward reclamation. When Black girls, women, elders, and gender-expansive people identify the sources of imposed beliefs, they gain greater authority to decide what they will retain, revise, refuse, or repair.