Rooted Responses

a regular column of questions answered

Welcome to Rooted Responses—a space where I respond to real questions about leadership, power, communication, and liberation.

These are not quick-fix answers. They’re reflections shaped by lived experience, ancestral knowing, and a refusal to play by colonial rules.

If you are reading this and want more, you can search (Rooted Responses here on my substack to find past entries—and come back for new ones each cycle.

Let’s get to it.

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This is such a powerful question, and it cuts directly into one of the deepest roots of colonial patriarchy: the weaponization of “rationality” to silence, discredit, and dehumanize. Let’s name this clearly:

Under colonial patriarchy:

• “Emotion” is feminized, racialized, and devalued.

• “Logic” is masculinized, whitened, and upheld as “objective.”

• This is a false binary designed to maintain power—not truth.

So why are emotions treated like a "bad" thing?

1. Colonial logic depends on separation.

The Western, Eurocentric model of knowledge production separates mind from body, reason from emotion, self from community. This Cartesian dualism ("I think, therefore I am") is foundational to whiteness and patriarchy because it privileges cold detachment over embodied wisdom. It makes emotion something to control, rather than listen to.

2. Patriarchy fears emotional intelligence.

Emotional awareness breeds empathy, community, accountability, and transformation. These are threats to systems built on domination, competition, and hierarchy. So patriarchy teaches men—especially cis men—to suppress emotions and label them as “irrational,” “feminine,” or “weak.” Then it punishes anyone who expresses emotions, especially women, femmes, racialized, and neurodivergent people.

3. Emotions are data.

Emotions are not noise—they are signals. They carry information about danger, joy, injustice, disconnection, and love. Emotional intelligence is about interpreting and integrating that data. To reject emotion is to reject context, humanity, and wisdom.

4. When men say “don’t be emotional,” they often mean: “Don’t disrupt my comfort.”

It’s not about logic—it’s about control. Your feelings force them to confront realities they don’t want to deal with. Labeling your emotions as irrational is a strategy to dismiss what you already know.

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Decolonial Reframe:

Emotion is a compass, not a flaw.
Feeling is not failure—it is resistance. Emotion is how colonized bodies speak truth in a world trying to silence them.

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You’re not “too emotional.” You’re too aware for a world that feeds on numbing and denial.

Would you like help crafting a response to someone who pulls this “emotional vs. logical” nonsense again?