Introduction

“I am a Black woman

writing my way to the future”

- Audre Lorde

I figured out at a young age that reading made me happier than anything else. Shortly thereafter, I contemplated being a writer but never shared it out loud with anyone because of the financial precarity associated with being an artist. I wrote down my secret professional desire in my colorful Lisa Frank journal and buried it inside my heart like a treasure. As with most middle-class Black families, money was there but always inconsistent between my divorced parents. I played the long game of flirting with being a medical doctor because I noticed that it always brought smiles to my family's faces when I quipped about my very real passion to help others around me. My elite Northeastern liberal arts college quickly killed that pediatrician dream and what resurfaced in its place was a pursuit of a PhD. I chose to get a PhD ultimately because it felt like something distinguished and stable enough to get regular paychecks and make my family proud. Before that, I got an MSW because I was terrified of the job market and the only thing I knew I was really good at was school. So, I got a master's degree in social work to continue to build a skillset at something I already did for free—organizing. Attempting to build a bridge between me getting my MSW and me figuring out how to be a better adult ally to youth-led organizing, I pursued a PhD to ultimately use research, specifically Participatory Action Research, to do the same thing and gain potentially more resources. For the first two years of my doctoral education, I collaborated with, and sometimes followed the leadership of, youth conducting their own research. Despite absolutely being some of the most instructive spaces in my entire career as a researcher and organizer, patriarchy and unhealed trauma converted them to breeding grounds for violence and harm, particularly to Black femmes. When I chose to bring up issues of being a Black woman and the implications for others similarly situated to me. Black cis-gendered men consistently shut me down, belittled me, argued with me, or ignored me. bell hooks wrote, “Let me begin by saying that I came to theory because I was hurting-the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away.” I wrote my dissertation on the love Black women and girls have for one another because I too was hurting after being shown the exact opposite from non-Black femmes in several New York City organizing spaces. There appeared to be no space that wanted my authentic self, beyond my labor. I was positively obsessed with finding spaces that celebrate Black femmes and gender-expansive folks. The anger ultimately forced me to leave New York and hop on the Amtrak to Philadelphia. Over the course of several years, I built relationships with The Colored Girls Museum, Our Mothers Kitchens, and Black Quantum Futurism. Writing the dissertation provided salvation. It was deeply gratifying to explore the magical inner workings of these people and spaces but attempting to do so during a global pandemic stirred up so much grief inside of me. These Black girl collectives that I leaned on for inspiration and survival and that I so desperately wanted to build with we’re off-limits due to the pandemic that rendered our collective breath was possibly toxic to one another. How quickly something that holds you together can turn into your undoing. We all adapted to communicating in a virtual world. Through this conversation and retrospective reflections, I pieced together an unwieldy 300-page mosaic of a dissertation. Still marred by grief, I called up my Aquarian role model, Executive Director of The Colored Girls Museum, Vashti DuBois, on the phone to talk more about how I did everything I was supposed to. I wrote my dissertation, I defended it with distinction, and I got a tenure-track job, but I was still reeling from those hurtful, racist, sexist, exploitative experiences and was intimidated by what other forms of rejection l the next six years of pursuing tenure might bring. She told me to come work at the museum as a Scholar in Residence. Everything that felt impossible to do at my academic institution, I could do there. The creative sides of myself that I was worried to explore since I was a child could run free. Writing the way I wanted to on my terms and not for of the consumption an editor or publisher was now on the table. I will be forever grateful to Vashti for giving me permission and consistent encouragement to do my heart’s work that I without a doubt would have continuously pushed off for the competing pressures of being an assistant professor. I never in my wildest dreams thought that I could work at a museum, let alone a museum about ordinary colored girls just like me. 22 years ago, a younger version of myself wrote, “I want to be a writer”. She deliberately wrote me into the future. This blog is dedicated to that little girl who still lives inside of me and for little Black girls, young and old, everywhere shirking comfort, convenience, and convention and choosing courage. It is dedicated to the Black women around us who witness our gifts and who give us opportunities to grow into them. It is dedicated to the only museum with a mission to archive us all. The future is ours now.