Black Girls Rock!

Owning Our Magic. Rocking Our Truth.

Beverly Bond, Beverly Bond

• Publisher: 37 Ink
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501157936
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Volkskultur in der Kunst

From the award-winning entrepreneur, culture leader, and creator of the BLACK GIRLS ROCK! movement comes an inspiring and beautifully designed book that pays tribute to the achievements and contributions of black women around the world. Fueled by the insights of women of diverse backgrounds, including Michelle Obama, Angela Davis, Shonda Rhimes, Misty Copeland Yara Shahidi, and Mary J. Blige, this book is a celebration of black women's voices and experiences that will become a collector's items for generations to come.Maxine Waters shares the personal fulfillment of service. Moguls Cathy Hughes, Suzanne Shank, and Serena Williams recount stories of steadfastness, determination, diligence, dedication and the will to win. Erykah Badu, Toshi Reagon, Mickalane Thomas, Solange Knowles-Ferguson, and Rihanna offer insights on creativity and how they use it to stay in tune with their magic. Pioneering writers Rebecca Walker, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Joan Morgan speak on modern-day black feminist thought. Lupita Nyong'o, Susan Taylor, and Bethann Hardison affirm the true essence of holistic beauty. And Iyanla Vanzant reinforces Black Girl Magic in her powerful pledge. Through these and dozens of other unforgettable testimonies, Black Girls Rock! is an ode to black girl ambition, self-love, empowerment, and healing.Pairing inspirational essays and affirmations with lush, newly commissioned and classic photography, Black Girls Rock!: Owning Our Magic and Rocking Our Truth is not only a one-of-a-kind celebration of the diversity, fortitude, and spirituality of black women but also a foundational text that will energize and empower every reader.

IV.

LIFT EVERY VOICE

her story

---

THE RBGs: REVOLUTIONARY BUT GANGSTA

SOJOURNER TRUTH, HARRIET TUBMAN, NANA YAA ASANTEWAA

These three women warriors were “revolutionary but gangsta” in their fight for truth, justice, and humanity.

SOJOURNER TRUTH

THE TRUTH

“Truth is powerful and it prevails.”

At the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention held in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth delivered one of the most famous abolitionist and women’s rights speeches in American history, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Her question called out the hypocrisy of the first-wave feminist movement, which overlooked the human rights struggles of black women and other women of color.

HARRIET TUBMAN

THE ORIGINAL GANGSTA

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”

Harriet Tubman was a fierce freedom fighter and a leading abolitionist. Not only did Tubman escape slavery but she also returned to the South nineteen times to liberate enslaved men, women, and children, leading them to freedom along the Underground Railroad.

NANA YAA ASANTEWAA

THE ILL NANA

“I must say this, if you the men of Ashanti will not go forward, then we will. We the women will. I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight till the last of us falls in the battlefields.”

Yaa Asantewaa was a queen, an intellectual, a politician, a human rights activist, and a dynamic leader. She became famous for leading the Ashanti rebellion against British colonialism to defend the Golden Stool of the Ashanti people. She is also known for her prominent role in promoting women’s emancipation and gender equality.

ANGELA DAVIS

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Educator, activist, intellectual, and author

I DIDN’T MAKE A DELIBERATE decision to devote my life to social justice. I don’t think there was a single epiphany or moment of realization. Rather, I grew up under conditions that required that kind of resistance. The forces of racism were all around us. My mother and father taught us that the only way we could preserve our own integrity and self-confidence was to struggle against those forces. All the messages around us were telling us that we were inferior and that we didn’t deserve to live decent human lives; that we didn’t deserve education, that we didn’t deserve to live the life of free citizens. Therefore, from a very young age, I was involved in collective campaigns of resistance, and for me it became a way of life. I cannot imagine my past or future life in another way.

Most people are aware of who I am today because, in the very first place, there was a vast movement around demanding my freedom. I more than likely would still be in prison had it not been for the fact that millions and millions of people in the country and all over the world joined together to conduct a struggle that was assumed to be unwinnable at that time. Richard Nixon was the president; Ronald Reagan was the governor of California, where I was in jail; J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI—and all three of them had dedicated themselves to guaranteeing that I would be sent to the death chamber or spend my life in prison. Although people recognized that I was not guilty of the murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy charges, many people at that time assumed it was impossible to counter the strongest forces in the world—the most powerful forces on this planet.

I remind not only myself but also those who tend to see me as a legend or icon that if I am important, it is only because of the message my presence carries. I think my presence conveys the importance of people coming together. That we can be victorious even when we’re up against seemingly insurmountable odds, and that’s a message that we need even more today.

I think we’ve completely underestimated the power of white supremacy and racism in this country. The 2016 election was a wake-up call. We didn’t do the work we should have done to present a more complex analysis of what was at stake. About a quarter of eligible voters voted for Donald Trump, and we should remember that. Vast numbers of people who would have voted against him simply chose not to vote, and that, I think, has to do with the fact that our movements, while growing, aren’t as powerful as they should be. Had the young people who chose not to vote been given an urgent message regarding what was at stake, perhaps they would have gone to the polls.

One of the reasons it was so important to use our right to vote has to do with the impact on the Supreme Court and how Supreme Court decisions can affect people for many generations to come. Given that analysis, we should have viewed the 2016 election not so much as one that would pick the more perfect candidate to lead us, but as an election that was about creating the space for more radical organizing. It’s critical for us to be strategic. One can analyze the recent overt rise of racism, patriarchy, and white supremacy as a vicious response to having a black president and black First Family in the White House, and to the presence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which represents to some the resurgence of militant, radical activism.

Regardless of the outcome of any election, we must continue to organize at the grassroots level in order to counter the forces threatening our humanity. I remember when Richard Nixon was elected, which was a major defeat in 1968: our response was not so much to mourn the outcome but, rather, to recognize that we had to accelerate our political efforts in grassroots movements. That is precisely what we need to do today.

I’m hoping that this period is going to witness not so much the resurgence of radical activism, but the emergence of a new kind of activism. I always think about the June Jordan line in her “Poem for South African Women”: “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” We have to create that resistance. We know so much more than we knew during the Civil Rights era, and can do so much more. This is going to have to be a period of unceasing resistance to the current political climate.

It’s going to be increasingly important to develop the kinds of strategies that allow people in black communities to recognize that there is no hope for black people if we cannot push back against all challenges to social justice and human rights. It’s going to be important for black people, in particular, to be sensitive to the emergence of new forms of racism, including the current climate of violent Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. We have to stand together with immigrants regardless of their country of origin. We also have to centralize the climate issue because, of course, climate justice is ground zero for social justice. If we have no planet in the future, it will make no sense at all to have won victories in areas of racial or gender justice.

Within the arena of private prisons, it is the immigrant detention centers that are now most likely to generate a huge profit for corporations, and this is why private prison companies have been supporters of anti-immigrant legislation, the most destructive anti-immigrant legislation of this era. And let me say this: racism, of course, is a fuel for all this. If one looks at who’s in prison, not only in the United States but all over the world, it’s people of color. It’s people from the global south, it’s immigrants, it’s refugees. So, we must address the role that prisons are playing in compelling us to look away from the problem, to think about crime rather than education, and to think about crime in a very narrow sense, considering that the vast majority of people in prison have never committed a violent act but only property crimes.

Prison abolition is one of the chief human rights issues of this time. Prison represents ways of refusing to address the most important social problems of our era under the pressure of capitalism. Rather than providing people with adequate housing, education, mental health care, and all the other services they need to live decently as human beings, the strategy that emanates from the United States and the era of global capitalism has been to lock up those people who have problems so that you can forget the problems or needs exist. Prisons have become such an integral part of the general economy that corporations one would think would have little stake in large prison populations are now very much involved in the effort to continue to retain these populations because they have contracts with prisons. From telecommunications companies to food production and medical care—it is all outsourced to these companies, which now seek prisons as a source of profit.

We must call upon the feminist notion of intersectionality and the deep relationality that animates all social justice questions. Black feminism, in particular, is a feminism that emanates from radical women of color—it is a feminism focused not only on gender, but also on the interconnectedness of all the social disparities women and people of color face. Black feminism has revealed new paradigms of leadership. It’s not simply replacing black men with black women but, rather, it is an emergence of a new kind of collective leadership that Ella Baker argued for many decades ago during the civil rights movement. Not only have black women recognized that it’s important to take credit and seize leadership, but black men have begun to follow our lead, particularly younger black men, who are much more aware of the importance of accepting the leadership of black women. It’s very important that we recognize that black women, more accurately and more fundamentally, represent the interests of all.

I have always recognized that the fate of black people is interconnected with the fate of the planet and the fate of the universe, because of our history: Our history has been a constant struggle for freedom, and black women are the backbone of that struggle—not only today, but historically. From the antislavery movement to the civil rights movement, black women have always been freedom fighters on the front lines for our families and community, even when we weren’t given the credit for our courageous leadership and social justice work. And that is why we rock.

JOY-ANN REID

I AM JOY

Journalist, political commentator, and host of AM Joy

WHEN A WEST INDIAN CHILD says, “I would like to be a doctor,” their whole family pretty much converges around the certainty that she will, in fact, become a doctor. Such was the case for me. I enrolled at Harvard University as a pre-med student, but my mother passed away about thirty days before I started school. I lost all faith in medicine and developed a complete phobia of even walking into hospitals. I literally couldn’t see the idea of entering a profession that I thought failed me, my mom, and my family. So, I entered Harvard feeling very depressed.

After freshman year, I decided to take a year off from school. I went to New York and moved in with my aunt in Brooklyn while I figured out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I wound up getting a series of temporary jobs, one of which was at Columbia Pictures. I eventually got my own place in Fort Greene right down the street from Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and A Mule offices. There were always productions and creative things going on in the neighborhood. The area was kind of a black Bohemia at the time, and that creative energy really motivated me.

The following year, I went back to Harvard inspired to do something creative. I changed my concentration to visual environmental studies, with a concentration in documentary filmmaking. After I graduated, I went knocking around for jobs in New York. I got a job in the production office at the School of Visual Arts, which is where I met my husband. When I got pregnant, my husband and I moved to Florida, where I landed a job at a Fox News affiliate in Miami working as a writer on the morning show. It was fascinating, because it combined the things I had always loved the most: politics, news, and writing. I just loved it. So I fully immersed myself in it. I also started my own tiny political blog on the side. Eventually, I landed at the NBC affiliate in Miami and wrote a column for the Miami Herald.

My very first column got me into trouble because it was in opposition to invading Iraq. I was very much against war and very unsettled by the way we were covering it and the way I felt the news business was not directly in touch with the people who were the most impacted: the families and the people who were going off to fight this war, which was billed falsely as vengeance for 9/11. I just found that unacceptable.

My own personal views on the war led me to go into politics and political journalism. I felt that mainstream journalism had morphed into this middle-of-the-road safe space, and that wasn’t for me. I still had the need to have my own voice and not this regurgitated voice of the news corporation for which I was working. I also wanted to be directly responsible to the public, to provide them with accurate, thorough, informed, and truthful reporting.

Journalism has definitely tried to restrict its voice over the years because of this perception of bias. The fear of appearing biased has caused journalism to back away from telling definitive truths in favor of more neutral reporting. I don’t think it’s a malicious thing. News organizations are sensitive to the audience’s perception that they are on one side of the cultural divide and opposed to the other side. This has evolved for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of race, to be quite frank. If you look back to the turn of the century, when journalism was trying to pull back from the jingoistic, pro-war, Pulitzer-driven tabloid wars, you had the kind of aesthetic journalism in which people would see a lynching and just report on it without any emotion. It was sort of bloodless reporting of horror that generally had to d...