When I first met Omisade Burney-Scott I was an eight-year-old sitting in an audience at the Know Book Store on Fayetteville Street. She, like my parents, had brought her elementary schooler to learn about resistance and culture at Durham’s Black-owned Southern Mecca of diasporic scholarship. Over two decades later, our activism would cross paths and contribute to an overlooked intersection of Black queerness and an unsung branch of Black feminism: conversations around menopause.  

Continuing the tradition of Black storytelling and movement-building that defined the institution where we first crossed paths, Burney-Scott is still telling stories through a new lens, a new microphone, and a new perspective in a PBS documentary, The M Factor, which debuted earlier this month. It centers some of the leading voices in the conversation around menopause, like Burney-Scott’s (she is also the founder of the podcast and platform Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause). 

I spoke to Burney-Scott for the INDY during Menopause Awareness Month. 

INDY: How did living in Durham contribute to your growing political consciousness?

OMISADE BURNEY-SCOTT: When I think about how I ended up [in this space], it’s connected to how I ended up in Durham—Durham and a nonprofit organization called Public Allies in 1995. Next year will make 30 years working in nonprofits in Durham. Public Allies was a leadership development program for young people who wanted to do social change work inside of the nonprofit sector. We would do these amazing political educationaI training sessions. At that time, I was 28. [My son] Che was three years old when I started working at Public Allies and would often come with me to work and come with me to rallies to protest, to training, to workshops. But in that period of time, that would influence my thinking and understanding of all manner of things that would happen after that. I had access to older people in our community who were alumni, old-school organizers from the civil rights movement, from the Black liberation movement, from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—all of these folk who connected with me were working inside of organizations, and we got to learn a lot about how to organize, how to engage in popular education.

In the same way that we were offering training to these young people, we were being transformed as staff. We had to do deeper dives into political education to be able to offer them something. 

And I learned that we have an ancestral imperative. It is around liberation for all Black people. Not just middle-class college-educated Black people, but all Black people. So I got cemented in why it’s an “all of us or none” kind of ethos in my twenties, and now I’m in my late fifties. I’m grateful that the training that I received continues to be iterative; it’s not a one-and-done inside of the social justice movement space.

How did this lay the foundation of your work in reproductive justice that you’ve been doing for about 15 years now?

I think about all of the amazing advocacy, policy, public education campaign successes that [came from] the reproductive justice movement, which was started by nine Black women 30 years ago this year, in 1994—because you got to know that you didn’t give birth to yourself. Those are the mothers of the reproductive justice movement. They gave birth to the movement, the framework, so I could do that work. Many of them are still alive right now. So when you’re thinking about [the fact that] we’ve been able to address contraceptives inside of the reproductive justice framework, maternal mortality rates of Black women, we’ve been able to address LGBTQIA+ issues and needs, we’ve also been able to address sex positivity—why have we not addressed menopause and aging? Is there, in fact, something inherently connected to the mortality of ourselves as human beings, people who are assigned female at birth, women? Because that also associates with our productivity and our ability to reproduce that falls inside of more traditional gender roles, or gender notions held up by patriarchy.

Credit: Photo by Angelica Edwards

How did that give birth to Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause?

The Black Girl’s Guide was born out of it, inside of a menopausal body. It was born inside of a body of a person who still—there’s a little Black girl still inside there, and I needed a creative outlet to connect with other Black people in my community. After I was let go of one of my jobs, I felt like the Durham community rose up again to support me as I moved into 2019. I was like, I’d like to have conversations with Black women in my community that I trust, that I love, to explore this conversation around intimacy getting older. People like [poet] Jaki Shelton Green, and Mama Dee Eaton, who is now an ancestor. 

This was before the pandemic, so the first season of the podcast, I thought it was going to be a finite podcast and then I’d go back to work somewhere. I did not think that I was laying the foundation for a culture, a narrative of reproductive justice and menopause. I interviewed Chass Grissom, who is an ancestor now, in that first season.

Then I said, “We’ll host a couple of events,” right? The first was in Washington, DC. I knew I wanted to co-facilitate this event with a millennial—each event in 2019 was co-facilitated with a millennial, so that way it would intentionally feel [like] an intergenerational conversation. So we co-facilitated [the first event] with [community organizer and consultant] Aja Taylor and [did it as] a “calabash tea and tonic.” It sold out. 

Events cost money; [these] were all free of charge, but we had space limitations. [So I] came back to Durham and we said we’re going to do one at NorthStar [Church of the Arts]: Young, Gifted, and Broke with [curator and creative director] Marcella Camara. I worked with a diverse group of people throughout the podcast and event curation. I had also connected with [creative strategist and artist] Angel Dozier and [influencer] Mariah Monsanto. I asked for advice and they offered it, and they also volunteered and they helped me get this thing started. People like [community connector] Aidil Ortiz and [organizer] Erica Moss, people like my cousins Cheyenne and Charla, like the community again as it always has done since I’ve lived in Durham. The last five years, we have grown because I believe there’s something particular about how Durham sits at the intersection of liberation and creativity, of social justice and the arts. There’s a really beautiful way that we sit at that space where we figure out how art isn’t innocent.

How is the conversation around menopause evolving post-pandemic?

When I first started, I just wanted to see how people were talking about menopause. The vast majority of the organizations or institutions were coming from a very technical or medical perspective, or a medical or research perspective.

Then there were people discussing it from a peer perspective, but they were white, cishetero, middle-class women. I wanted to see what was in the multiverse. I say “multiverse” because there are infinite possibilities of how someone born with a uterus can have different experiences. The menopausal multiverse has been unmapped for marginalized people. So it’s a very solitary experience. [In] 2019, not a lot of people were talking about it from a queer, intergenerational perspective. There was one explicitly queer menopause platform, it’s called Queer Menopause by Tania Glyde. They’ve done tremendous work. 

There were these white, cishet groups that you had to pay to participate. Conferences, resources, retreats, there was a paywall. It was not accessible. I got a lot of gratis invitations, but those dried up quickly. When I got there, I realized they were looking for a particular cishet, lighter-skinned person [with] a particular class and background. They wanted someone who talked about diversity but not liberation.

What we have seen is a proliferation of podcasts, yogis, nutritionists, mental health professionals, dietitians, psychologists—and what we have with Black Girl’s Guide is a reproductive justice platform on the vanguard. We are the only [platform that is] Southern-based, Black-woman-led, Black-people-centered, explicitly and exclusively, through a reproductive justice and Black feminist lens. From 66 to 24 years old, we have survivors, cis people, trans people, nonbinary, queer, survivors of cancer, divorce, bad credit, bad decisions, mothers, daughters, neurospicy— we run the gamut!  

We also self-published a zine, which many think [of] manuals of how to navigate menopause, but they’re more than that. The first one was illustrated by Tema Okun. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Eden Segbefia, and Gina Breedlove did contributions to that one. The second was about mothering, designed by Assata Goff. There was a poem by adrienne maree brown. The last one was in 2022, around folklore. Gemynii did the artwork for that with a contribution from Arielle Sankey. 

What’s next, and what’s continuing?

We have so much work to do. We are now working with currently incarcerated people. There’s a large population who likely come in as a menstruating person, and they will become a menstruating person inside of a carceral system that already has the worst health care on the planet. 

I really feel held and supported in this community. I consistently have people who lean in and say, “Are you free? Are you sure?” And it makes me say, “Are you free? Are you sure? Do you want to sit with me and tell your story?” It’s such a delicious invitation. I know you have a story, would you like to tell it to me? Because I have time. And you are the expert in your story.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The story was updated to correct transcription errors following publication.

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