BGPStat: Beyond Measure

“The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: "It's a girl.”  ― Shirley Chisholm

The work of Dr. Monique Morris, co-founder of the National Black Women’s Justice Institute and the author of Black Stats: African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-first Century, makes it easy to begin to broadcast "the good news and the bad contained in the statistics on black Americans." 

The name of this blog is BGPStat or Black Girl Project stat as in statim (immediately or now) because the work that needs to be done to educate ourselves about the big picture and our personal first-hand knowledge of being black and female in the U.S. is a right now phenomenon. 

I'd love for others to send me statistics, recent ones that we might explore, unpack or debunk to help us grapple with the ways others view us through the lens of facts that may or may not be valid. Facts change. 

Here is one statistic about hair care to get us started from Dr. Morris that I found on YourBlackWorld.net. 

More than one-third of Black women do not use chemical straightening products to alter the texture of their hair—a growing trend that is extending to Black girls.  36 percent of Black women do not use hair straightening products, up ten points since 2010.

WHO WRITES THIS BLOG?

I am Kyra Gaunt, Ph.D., a professor, ethnomusicologist, and digital media scholar devoted to the study of black girlhood from double-dutch to hip-hop to YouTube. I will begin managing this site and hopefully others will join me. I want to bring sociological data and ethnographic interviews together her so we can begin to understand the complexity and nuances of the plethora of black girls in our world. 

By black girls I mean females of African descent and those who self-identify as "black" who are under 18 as well as "emerging adults" (Arnett 2010) moving into their interdependent twenties.

Many adult women refer to themselves affectionately as "girls" short for "girlfriends" perhaps. But as Executive Director and Founder of The Black Girl Project and I were discussing recently, it's time to be sure the youngest amongst us do not get overshadowed by the elder demographic. We women need to learn to call ourselves by our names and begin to examine what that means and let girls examine what childhood and adolescence means to them. 

All this makes me think about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a charter the US and Sudan have refused to ratify which confers full agency to the child in ways that every other country feels is to be valued. 

The Black Girl Project is a grassroots organization that leverages both traditional, and new educational formats and media platforms to assist young women and girls in attaining personal freedom, liberation, and self-actualization. We do this via a multi-pronged approach, utilizing interdisciplinary artistic modalities, primarily Media and Literary Arts, to engage our core audience in creating, remixing, and narrating their own lives. Through on-site workshops and labs, our Leadership Academy, as well as our annual Sisterhood Summit that serves 100+ young women from the Metro NY, and Mid-Atlantic regions, we use the arts to empower, transform, and mitigate inter-generational trauma and cultural/historical grief.

MISSION

Our mission is to transform individual lives and whole communities through reclaiming, rewriting and remixing narratives. Narratives, are just stories; stories that are written, vocalized, photographed, filmed, painted, and more. They have the power to uplift, redirect, and bring balance to individuals and communities, small and large.

We do this work through our Leadership Academy, Sisterhood Summit, Workshops + Labs that focus on issues specific to women and girls throughout the Diaspora.

VALUES

Our work is rooted in three core values:

Truth:  Your truth, your voice, your reality matters. When we are engaging one another from a space of truthfulness, only then can transformation begin.

Hustle:  To hustle is to do the work required for transformation. It involves creativity, the shifting of paradigms, and ingenuity. Hustling reclaims the self.

Liberation:  Personal liberation begets community liberation. We cannot wait to be liberated, it all begins with self.

Go to our website to learn about our upcoming Sisterhood Summit. Submissions for art, presentations, and more are due August 15, 2014.