Professional Black Girl: Video Series Celebrates ‘Everyday Excellence’ of Black Women
Episode 1
DURHAM, N.C. — Dr. Yaba Blay, renowned activist, cultural critic, and producer, launches Professional Black Girl, an original video series created to celebrate everyday Black womanhood, and to smash racist and “respectable” expectations of how they should “behave.”
Seventeen Black women and girls ranging in age from 2- to 52-years-old were interviewed for the series. Each episode features a candid discussion with personalities such as Grammy Award-winning recording artist, Rapsody; Joan Morgan, author of the Hip-Hop feminist classic When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost; and 13-year-old world traveler Nahimana Machen, sharing what it means to be a “Professional Black Girl.”
“‘Professional Black Girl’ looks like Taraji P. Henson at the 2015 Emmys jumping up to hug Viola Davis. It looks like Mary J. Blige and Taraji and Kerry Washington in that Apple commercial. It looks like me rolling up to a room full of people in Berlin to speak with my bamboo earrings on,” explains Tarana Burke, a non-profit consultant and fashion blogger featured in the series.
Limited edition Professional Black Girl merchandise, created in partnership with Philadelphia Printworks, is available now onphiladelphiaprintworks.com. The first full episode, featuring Dr. Blay, will air September 9, 2016, with an episode airing each Friday onYouTube and yabablay.com until December 23, 2016.
“The terminology that is often used to describe and define Black girls—such as bad, grown, fast, ghetto, and ratchet—are non-affirming and are words that are intended to kill the joy and magic within all Black girls,” says Dr. Blay. “We are professional code-switchers, hair-flippers, hip-shakers, and go-getters. We hold Ph.Ds and listen to trap music; we twerk and we work. We hold it down while lifting each other up, and we don’t have to justify or explain our reason for being. This is us.”
Follow #ProfessionalBlackGirl across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to celebrate and affirm the everyday excellence of Black women and girls.
For more information, or to interview Dr. Yaba Blay, please contact Shakirah Gittens at 718-687-6231 or by email at info@DynamicNLyfe.com.
The Battle for Equality Is a WIRED Issue
Serena Williams isn’t just a tennis champion and singularly great athlete; she’s been a leader in the fight for equal representation and pay in her sport.
Cuteness & Blackness: Video Podcast
Earlier this month, Fayetteville State University’s internet radio station, Bronco iRadio, asked me to come in and talk about cuteness and blackness to help kick off Black History Month. Needless to say, this is my favorite subject and I had plenty to say (even during commercial breaks).
Since it was a live broadcast, a few folks (mostly family, friends, and students) asked if they could listen to the show on their own time, so I thought I’d do one better and post this video of our uncut, on-air conversation. Because we spent so much time discussing rhetoric and its connections to professional writing, we ran out of time before I could draw more connections to civil rights and anti-black racism. So I’ll be sure to post another video podcast dealing more directly with cuteness’ relationship to mass incarceration and racial profiling in the near future.
Leave your comments and share your thoughts.
Blowing Up or Selling Out: Carol’s Daughter & Scents of Nostalgia
A Black Cosmetic Company Sells, Or Sells Out? : Code Switch : NPR.
I remember when she started as an apothecary in Brooklyn on Atlantic Avenue. It was in the early 90s… She used heavy mason jars, essential oils of ylang ylang, bergamot, sandalwood with *actual* jasmine flowers — all made to order and combined to heal. Her potions and balms were an indulgence and were more than affordable considering the quality. I used her baths and oils to pamper my young babies and spoil myself whenever I could and could not afford it. (She was artisanal before artisanal was a “thing” and the originator of what Joan Morgan’s doing nowadays.)
Fast forward a decade and a half
==>> Department stores began carrying Carol’s Daughter after word caught on. Once time had passed I noticed a decline in more than just the packaging and now I can’t tell the difference between Tui Oil and Hot 6
Though to be perfectly fair, I’m not the same hand-dyed-gele-headwrap-wearing-radical-vegan these days, m’self… I’ve made more than my fair share of personal adjustments over the years trying to pay bills just like everybody else.
Who am I to criticize? And if I really think about it, it’s been Carol Daughter’s — whether it be her originally sourced ingredients or outsourcing to L’oreal — that has inspired me to get back into my kitchen with my butters, mixers, and essential oils to indulge the scents and sensuality of my personal beauty routine and grooming habits.
So I say, Play on playa! Go on with yo’ bad self, Sista Lisa and tua u. That last part means “thank you” in early 90’s Black Brooklyn speak. (And if you have to ask, you’ll never understand!)
Cut-Pasta Scrolling as Literal Tactic for Computer Writing & Composing
Whew! Almost done!
My cutting, pasting, and scrolling with Word.doc is a literal tactic for composing with a computer. After stealing whatever time I could throughout this summer for this particular writing project, it took me only 3 hours with paper, scissors, tape, and stapler to assemble my fragmented rants of cut-pasta into something meaningful and cohesive.
You should have seen my living room floor — scraps and scribbles were scattered everywhere. Rudimentary, for sure. Not cute; just cut. I need to hold and manipulate the printed-out letters inside my hand to process my words and lay out my ideas into an actual verbal horizon.

Even the president’s speeches go through a messy stage before they become a final published product.
True true. The virtual world is cool and all that, but give me a kinetic activity over staring at a computer screen any old day. Do I feel trepidation about so honestly revealing my writing process? Sure I do. Though if I were truly brave I would post video. (Let’s file that one under “never gonna happen” M’kay? :~)
So many act as though good writing can only occur through some special, innate gift or pretend as though they’re picking up on frequencies from some sort of otherworldly copia. Have I ever experienced the metaphysical phenomenon of feeling as though I was possessed by writing? Yes. I have on occasion. To be honest, I envy those people who have the writing bug and can’t ever seem to quit. For my part, I struggle to make regular blog posts at times!
Writer’s block can set in at any time, but it can be helped. When it comes down to it, the real world requires us to write when sometimes we just don’t have time (or think we don’t have time). It could happen during a period of life when you’re falling in love or maybe you’re dealing with difficulties related to your job and family. And then there are those times when we would all rather be at the beach. The thing about writing is you have to make the time to simply do it in whatever way it wants to be done — with the hopes that you’ve made the right de/cisions for re/visions.
Being Mary Janes or Being Moral Mules?
While partaking of various items in my websurfing diet I often find myself struggling not to get sucked too deeply into the veritable smorgasbord of mind-numbing, click-through slideshows. At the same time, I value and congratulate sites like Madame Noire and the constellating blogosphere within its close orbit. I like how it provides a viable platform for young black women to cultivate their voices and share opinions. So let me borrow a quote from one of the blog’s contributors when I say there’ll be no stank face over here.
Anyway, having recently found myself in the throes of binge-watching BET’s newest dramatic series, Being Mary Jane, I came across this blog post in today’s newsfeed. And as hyperlinking would have it, I found myself clicking to one content contributor waxing blogosophical about the social import of Being Mary Jane as somehow representing a cultural leap for black women. (Of course, I’m all too aware of the debates surrounding the applicability of “social import” when speaking of popular television shows and other trending media; that’s a blog post for another time.) The assertions about the show’s dramatic realism regarding the title character’s character match the general commentary made about the Kerry Washington vehicle, Scandal. For instance:
I understand the sentiment behind such perceptions, but beneath the accolades lies a flawed logic. The impulse to praise any opportunity in which black women can see their lived realities portrayed on screen, projected as multi-dimensional, nuanced leading characters is a temptation to be sure. However much beyond that, claims about cultural groundbreaking are farfetched. The concept of an educated black woman emotionally supporting her parents and extended family by succeeding through hard work and tenacity all while looking fabulous breaks new ground — really?
Mary Jane’s agonizing over the health of her living and unborn nieces, reciting the Lord’s Prayer on behalf of a terrified nation on live television, and baking awesome cakes from scratch for her mother’s birthday somehow makes her a villain of the highest order. Clearly, this assessment provides further evidence that assumptions about black female malfeasance have become so pervasive in our culture that other black women are themselves actively engaged in the vilification of black femininity. The logic doesn’t hold; black women having normal human appetites and unapologetically striving toward the fulfillment of those desires does not a monster make. As a black female character looking for love, good sex, and professional status, is Mary Jane an antihero? Does the shoe actually fit?
Yeah, okay. Mary Jane is evil because naughty noogy is exactly the same as being a meth-cooking, neo-nazi affiliated child-killer à la Walter White. I’ll buy that.
No, really I am buying it… every single month through DirectTV on demand. ”She pulled up her black fishnets and called in Verizon to come and watch…” It’s possible that I may not have gotten that quote absolutely correct. Oh, Zora, you were so wise! (I don’t care one bit about Richard Wright calling you a handkerchief head opportunist.) Indeed, “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world” as far as I can see too — especially when it comes to shouldering America’s social and moral burdens. Oh well, onward and upward! Episodes 4 through 8, here I come! And please, dear mother-goddess Afro-d!te, I promise I’ll be good if you don’t let Gabrielle Union kill anybody this season.
Ayy-Man!
Quvenzhané Wallis and the Sad Truth
If you’re like me, the way you watch tv has shifted and your consumption of movies and television is now heavily mediated through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. More and more of us are likely to be in the know about the latest infotainment buzz through trending tweets and the latest status feeds. In fact, since I haven’t been too gung-ho about pricey visits to movie theaters these days, I hadn’t even heard of Quvenzhané Wallis until last week. I learned of the precocious child actor like most others when she became the youngest person ever to earn an Oscar nomination for her lead acting role in the critically acclaimed fantasy drama, Beasts of the Southern Wild.

In a ceremony on the night of November 14, 2012, Quvenzhané was acknowledged and honored with the key to her hometown, Houma in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, for her work in Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Of course, though not too surprisingly, the media commentary that followed in regards to the young actor’s breakthrough film performance was heavily burdened by the usual laziness of poorly thought-out racist mainstream media tropes in the form of celebrity gossip, ignorance, and out-and-out refusal to pronounce Wallis’s first name correctly. No surprises there. This sort of thing happens like clockwork and is understood as par for the course among even the most casual African American media watchers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB8CGNbrI4c But I admit that I was taken aback and was quite unprepared for the social media firestorm that ensued on Oscar night when the satirical news organization, The Onion, issued a tweet referring to this little girl as a cu*t. Now let’s get this straight: that’s the “c” word that rhymes with “hunt” and not “hoot” and is definitely not the type of descriptive one would normally expect a decent human being to use in the labeling of a small child, not even in the most extreme circumstances. Likewise, the Onion tweet was not a hoot – wasn’t in the least bit funny. And as though on the hunt, the Onion’s slur of choice (along with the fake news organization’s snide and snarky follow up apology) was issued in the same mean spirit as the sexually predatory racial politics that black women in this country have faced for centuries. Though unlike the verbal attacks that many black women have come to expect and subsequently learn to live with, few of us were ready for this particular incident because… well… because Wallis is a child. And children, we thought (hoped?), are supposed to be off limits when it comes to show-business’ usual racism and misogynistic feeding frenzies. But then again, she is a girl… and a black girl at that. Unfortunately, violence against women is normal in our culture and youth exploitation is ordinary. It continues to be the case that for most African Americans – whether child or adult – neither cuteness nor the genuine innocence of childhood will fully provide our folk refuge from the casual viciousness of racism. The basic ideas of merit and the routine presumption of innocence in the case of black folk hold little sway in the history of US politics and culture. Because the fact still remains, no matter how smart, how talented, or how earnest you are or strive to be, in the eyes of far too many white adults, if you are both female and black you can only ever be nothing but a c-word(even if you’re an adorable, Academy Award nominated prodigy). And that’s the sad truth.