Why this KC couple are raising their black daughters to be fearless

“No Daddy, I’m not going up there!”

Joseph, or “Joey” as he’s often called, was visiting a friend and brought Joye along. Why not? There isn’t a shy bone in Joye’s body. Even by a kindergartner’s standards, she’s bubbly and infectious, with gorgeous obsidian skin and a 1,000-watt smile. But at that moment at the porch, she was paralyzed in fear.

And like always, Joey wasn’t going to allow it.

He didn’t pick Joye up and quickly shuffle by the canine. He didn’t call out to his friend to come get the dog off the porch. Joey wasn’t going to shoo the dog away.

Instead, he looked down at Joye, stared her squarely in the eyes and told her they were going to walk straight up to the dog and tell him to get out of their way.

“Fifteen minutes later,” Joey says, Joye was laughing and playing with the same dog that had terrified her. “I don’t teach my daughters to be fearful of anything.”

Joey, 33, and his girlfriend NaTasha Williams, 30, are raising Joye and 1-year-old Abigail with an M.O. of dogged fearlessness and self-assurance. At a time when black women find themselves facing the same police brutality as black men (oftentimes without the recognition) for actions as trivial as talking too loudly to police or knocking on a stranger’s door for help, the approach would seem to border on ill-advised.

But to Joey and NaTasha, it’s their black daughters’ best chance at survival and, ultimately, liberation.

There’s a 5-foot partition that splits Joey’s 18th and Vine hair boutique, 180 V, into two co-existing worlds. On the right is the beauty salon, occupied almost solely by black women patrons. On the left there’s the barbershop, which is visited almost entirely by black men and boys.

Unlike most barbershops, by design there are no television sets: “I don’t really want them,” Joey says. “I want people to come in here and communicate with each other. Let’s have a conversation.”

Lately, that conversation in the shop has often centered on the issue of police brutality against people of color. The partition reaches only halfway to the ceiling. If you listen hard enough, you get a fascinating overview of how the two sides feel.

“On the beauty shop side you hear stuff like, ‘This is what I’m going to do’ and ‘That’s what they should do.’ It’s all about what should be done and what they’re going to do,” Joey says. “On the men’s side, though, you hear a lot of resistance. ‘Yeah, man I want to, but …’ It’s like we know we’re a target. Black men are scared to do anything right now.”

Joey believes this constant state of paranoia black men in America find themselves in has heightened the importance of the black woman’s role as “the protector.” This influences his insistence on teaching his daughters not to fear: “My strategy is to teach (my daughters) that you are strong, you are beautiful, you are the queen … and that you are needed.”

In the context of the current new age civil rights movement, this is an understatement.

From Ferguson, Mo., to Baltimore to Baton Rouge, La., it has been black women who have largely made up, organized and represented the opposition. Black women founded the Black Lives Matter organization. Black women protesters who founded “MU for Mike Brown” and inspired the spirit of activism would lead to the formulation of Concerned Student 1950 and the athletic boycotts at the University of Missouri. It is often black women who put their voices and bodies on the line in the name of justice, and often in the name of black men.

“If I go speak to a cop, I could be dead,” Joey tells me. “Black women, I don’t think that fear is necessarily instilled in them because you don’t hear those kinds of stories.”

Case in point: Trayvon, Michael, Alton and Philando are headlines. But India Beaty was killed by police this year for brandishing a non-firing replica gun. Natasha McKenna died after she was shocked by a stun gun by police while restrained. Renisha McBride was killed while trying to get help after a car crash by a white homeowner who mistook her for a robber. Ever heard of them?

The particular threat black women face is rarely exposed even though, according to the NAACP’s Legal Defense fund, women accounted for 20 percent of unarmed people of color killed by the police between 1999 and 2014.

“It’s a big burden for sure,” Joey says. “You have to be twice as good as a black person. But you have to be twice as good as that as a black woman. That’s four times as good.”

Those are stark odds, but his family has been up against them before.

Little Abigail was born 4  1/2 months premature. At 24 weeks, basic organs like her lungs and eyes were still developing. Joey remembers a conversation with his girlfriend’s white, female doctor as he waited for Abigail’s arrival:

“She told me, ‘I believe your daughter’s going to be OK. You do know black women are the strongest, period, right?’ ”

Joey thought the doctor was just trying to cheer him up. But he did some research. Turns out black girl babies are nearly twice as likely to healthily survive premature births as babies of other ethnicities and genders.

Abigail was no different.

“I’m not just saying this,” Joey says. “To be honest, when Abigail arrived I remember she had this look on her face like ‘What took you so long?’ ”

It sounds almost like she wanted to tell Dad there were more important things to worry about. This wasn’t the time for fear.

This story was originally published July 24, 2016 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Why this KC couple are raising their black daughters to be fearless."