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Tag: zeba blay
Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture by Carefree Black Girls Zeba Blay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Read more book reviews like this on my blog shelit.com
Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture by Zeba Blay examines how a viral hashtag focused on Black females living their truths forces the author to revisit periods of pop culture history where the notion of being a carefree Black girl actually comes with some hard truths.
Yet the culture that Black women pour talents and their creativity into, the culture that emulates Black women, steals from Black women, needs Black women, is the same culture that belittles Black women, excludes Black women, ignores Black women.
Culture critic Zeba Blay coined the phrase #carefreeblackgirl in 2013 as “a way to carve out a space of celebration and freedom for Black women online.” She studies how the hashtag evolved in the chapter “Free of Cares,” starting with a phrase of the early twentieth century: “I’m free, white, and 21!” This phrase became a Hollywood catchphrase between the 1920s and 1940s with Black journalists at the time criticizing the phrase as perpetuating White supremacy since being White equates freedom, which is the untrue experience to groups who are not considered White. Though the term falls out of vernacular, the author sees the phrase still play out today from Sex and the City to the modern-day Karens quick to call the police on anyone who’s Black. And even the phrase “carefree Black girl” takes a life of its own where it seems to easily be bestowed upon lighter-skinned, thin Black actresses such as Zendaya and Yara Shahidi while Black critics argue Black females will never have the comfort to be carefree in a Eurocentric society. The phrase even derives from fellow Black writer Collier Meyerson’s Tumblr blog called “Carefree White Girls” that featured White female celebrities from Taylor Swift to Zooey Deschanel who epitomize the “deification of white womanhood.”
The first chapter “Bodies” explores how the Black female body is berated constantly from the Middle Passage to the present. Lizzo and her body is the highlight of the chapter, particularly a moment in April 2020 when the pop star was twerking for a charity “dance-a-thon” hosted via social media by Diddy to raise money for people affected by COVID-19. Once Lizzo begins twerking, Diddy tells her to stop because the watchers need family-friendly entertainment, especially on Easter Sunday. Later in the Instagram live special, reality TV star Draya Michele, who’s thinner and lighter-skinned, begins twerking without any protest. Many think it’s fatphobic for Lizzo to be told to not twerk in public. Others berate Lizzo all the time for revealing her body on social media every chance she gets. The author also shows how Lizzo announced she would be participating in a smoothie detox and points out how White female fat-positive bloggers accused Lizzo of being fatphobic.
The conversation on Lizzo turns to the 1990s portrayal of Countess Vaughn on the hit show Moesha about a Black girl growing up in South Los Angeles. Countess played opposite pop star Brandy’s Moesha as best friend Kim Parker. Her weight becomes a constant punchline, many realize after reliving the show twenty years later when its August 2020 debut on Netflix alarms Black Twitter as tweeters share the collective disgust. The author even calls out the desexualization of fat Black women in entertainment. She points to the portrayal of Kelli, played by Natasha Rothwell, on HBO’s Insecure, where explicit sex scenes are a constant but never feature Kelli. The character talks about her sexual romps, but we never see them or meet her lovers. In the recent series finale, Kelli announces she’s having a baby with a character the audience barely knows because her romantic love growth is never shown on screen compared to the other three main female leads.
The author puts a recent moment like Lizzo’s twerking for COVID-19 relief under a microscope and another moment from a generation ago about Kim Parker’s treatment from her so-called friends on her weight. Then there’s self-reflection as the author views how hard it is to accept her own body thanks to the Eurocentric beauty standard where her body, Lizzo’s body, Countess’ body are unacceptable, and the fact that they are living in their body is too much for many people to accept.
In “Strong Black Lead” playing on Netflix’s name for Black programming, the author details her mental health struggles including suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts. (The book comes with a trigger warning in the beginning.) What she was going through materialized in her writings at the time as she pondered how she was really helping readers then with sharing her draining experiences. It makes her think of other Black women in her life who have struggled but are determined to “stay strong.” The strong Black female trope is examined with calling out somewhat beloved characters such as Kerry Washington’s Olivia Pope on the Shonda Rhimes-helmed political TV drama Scandal to Viola Davis’ Aibileen Clark in the film The Help that many view as problematic with the White savior theme.
Overall, the book is like reading viral pop culture tweets coming from Black Twitter and getting the context that you may never think to reference as the reason why you would like such tweets. The content dives deeper with making comparisons between famous Black women living the height of celebrity now to those who lived at the height in yesteryears. The author shows how the battle is the same, rooted in underappreciation for the Black female’s talent whereas a non-Black female’s talent may receive better treatment over her weight, her age, her appearance. It’s amazing to see the author tie in so many current events with past events and pick them apart to study the relevance and the definition of being a carefree Black girl.
Well-Read Black Girl marked five years with its annual book festival on Saturday centering on the theme of Black girlhood.
On Girlhood is the name of founder Glory Edim‘s second anthology released this week from the W. W. Norton & Company imprint Liveright featuring works from the literary organization’s library by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove.
The daylong event started with a prerecorded surprise message from former First Lady Michelle Obama, who opened up about the support she received from the Black female audience for her record-shattering memoir Becoming.
Keynote speaker Gabrielle Union discussed in-depth the themes underlying her latest autobiographical story collection You Got Anything Stronger?: Stories with Glory in a prerecorded conversation.
The collection is a follow-up to Gabrielle’s 2017 best-seller We’re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True. She said she learned from the “overwhelming” response from readers that there is a “desperate need for community and to be seen and understood and to be embraced by one another.”
“I left out a lot in the first book,” she said. “And as brave as folks thought I was and as revealing as folks thought I was, I knew that there was a lot I hadn’t healed enough from to include in that first book.”
Brene Brown’s podcast and TED talks on shame and vulnerability along with therapy helped her cope with the stories she wanted to share in her new book, she said.
“It logically just clicked; it made perfect sense. Then to see a shaman who said very similar things, and he was like, ‘Yo, Gab, what if what if your vulnerability is actually your superpower?” she said, adding, “You associate vulnerability with being weak and you feel that it is counterintuitive to just expose your full self to challenges, struggles, joys, all of it, random feelings. You feel like that’s giving the opposition the ammunition to take you out but really it’s sharpening your sword to tackle the world.”
Feeling more comfortable with the situations that made her who she is, Gabrielle said she has adopted a “zero fucks given” philosophy with age when it comes to sharing her stories and battling the haters. She turned 49 on Friday.
“When the chatter gets little louder and the folks around me are like, ‘Did you hear what so-and-so said?’ No one with a hot take on my family or me has ever been anyone I’ve admired or whose life I wanted to emulate,” she said.
She discusses in length the backstories behind some of her new book’s chapters. The she lit book review can be found here.
On Girlhood
For the On Girlhood panel, WRBG scholar-in-residence Bianca Williams moderated the conversation with Glory and Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature published by W. W. Norton.
“Nikki Rosa” a poem by Nikki Giovanni in the The Black Woman: An Anthology and Sula by Toni Morrison were the titles Farah said became inspiring Black girlhood works. Toni and Zora Neale Hurston defined the Black girlhood subgenre, she added.
“They both handled girlhood so well. They both gave us unforgettable Black girls,” she said. “Toni gave us Pecola and she also gives us Claudia and Frieda [The Bluest Eye] and Denver [Beloved], all of these Black girls. Janie [Their Eyes Were Watching God] is a girl, so we see ourselves as girls for the first time, fully dimensional in the work of Black women writers.”
Zeba Blay was the featured author for the On Carefree Black Girls panel. Her book Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Popular Culture came out Oct. 19 from Macmillan imprint St. Martin’s Griffin. In conversation with Marjon Carlos, Zeba said she had to revisit her younger self who depended on the internet to collage images of Black women and inform her cultural understanding that led to her pop culture writing career.
“In writing this book, I was thinking a lot about my childhood, that younger Z who created the life I am living now and didn’t even know it,” she said. “I went through my old LiveJournal because that Live Journal was my life and I was astonished to see I was posting very similar mood boards in a different format.”
#BlackGirlMagic creator CaShawn Thompson discussed her children’s book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Real-Life Tales of Black Girl Magic edited by Lilly Workneh in partnership with edutainment publisher Rebel Girls. The book features stories for girls ages six and up on groundbreaking Black women like singer Aretha Franklin, tennis player Naomi Osaka, and presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm.
“Girlhood is a universal experience, but even in that, it happens in so many ways, so I had a real keen understanding after doing the work of putting this book together is that girlhood, much like womanhood, looks like a lot of different things, but it all leads us to who we eventually will become,” CaShawn said. “I felt like having a book that exposes the girls to the many ways that we show up would give them a wider and deeper breadth of what they can possibly become when they grow up.”
Festival sponsors include Rebel Girls, 4 Color Books, The New York Times, and HarperCollins Publishers along with partner indie bookstores Reparations Club in Los Angeles, Mahogany Books and Loyalty Bookstores in D.C., Café Con Libros in Brooklyn, and Semicolon Bookstore & Gallery in Chicago. Brooklyn-based Center for Fiction provided the space for the festival events.
WRBG announced this week it has partnered with podcast and audiobook producer Pushkin Industries for a podcast to debut in February 2022.