On Wednesday, Elle published an essay by Linda Chavers lamenting the use of the popular phrase “Black Girl Magic.” Chavers’ essay was prompted by Essence magazine’s using the catchphrase for female black excellence on its February cover issues.

“There’s something else that rubs me the wrong way about the phrase ‘black girl magic,’" writes Chavers. “The ‘strong, black woman’ archetype, which also includes the mourning black woman who suffers in silence, is the idea that we can survive it all, that we can withstand it. That we are, in fact, superhuman. Black girl magic sounds to me like just another way of saying the same thing, and it is smothering and stunting. It is, above all, constricting rather than freeing.”

Chavers surmises, “Black girl magic suggests we are, again, something other than human.”

Ummmmm.