Black Girls Need to Be Able To See Themselves in Media
When you are 11 years old, where do you search for your future possibilities? How did you look for all the ways you could be yourself? What did you think you could look like? Who did you embody? How did it come to be that you were able to relate yourself to them?
When Marley Dias was in the beginning of her fall semester of 6th grade she got tired of only reading about “white boys and their dogs” and was encouraged by her mother to start a book drive called #1000BlackGirlBooks. The book drive received domestic-wide attention in the beginning of February 2016.
Raven-Symoné Christina Pearman played Raven Baxter on “That’s So Raven”, and was Disney Channel’s first Black girl star. As Raven Baxter, she takes on an almost multidimensional lead role scripted to fulfill a dominant narrative ideal of how to be a young Black girl.
Sesame Street gave young children the song “I Love My Hair” sung by a brown puppet (presumably an African American puppet). Who sings about how much she loves her hair and all of the wonderful styles and things she can do with her hair. Encouraging young Black girls to be proud of their hair the way it grows naturally. The song starts “Don’t need a trip to the beauty shop, Cuz’ I love what I got on top”. Scholar Treva Lindsey writes of “I Love My Hair”, “Within a two minute segment, this musical video incorporates two of the key elements of a discourse of empowerment for black girls: healthful expressivity and the representation of a self-schema that affirms the uniqueness of black girlhood” (Lindsey 28).
Willow Smith came out with “Whip My Hair” about a week later in 2010. The music video came out and presented an array of individuals learning to come into and be happy with themselves as depicted in their coming to life when touched by the color that comes from Smith’s hair. Lindsey says of Smith’s piece, “the video for and lyrics of “Whip My Hair” draw attention to resisting identity assignment based on prevailing norms. The moving visual text also offers its audience an opportunity to imagine a space that validates the significance of individuals choosing to express and identify themselves on their own terms” (Lindsey 31).
Through a variety of psychologist’s studies and papers it has been proven and discussed an absurd amount of times that Black American children are influenced by what they absorb as a child and internalize it to either help or harm their own personal self image. By looking at a few significant areas of recent popular media which feature and center Black girls, as well as a recent charity campaign. Each of which have had significant literature written about them, it is no challenge to discern that there are great and wonderful representations in media of Black girls for Black girls, but there are just far too few examples to adequately support the Black girls growing up in America right now.
