Not New to This: A Genealogical Approach to Black Girls’ Media Production

Abstract

During the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, the Black press served as a cornerstone of Black social and political life in the United States. For Black Americans, newspapers and magazines functioned as both informational resources and philosophical spaces that engaged conversations of racial uplift, which often centered Black girlhood as an especially important site for assessing racial progress. Despite the evolving nature of media platforms themselves, the relationship between media and Black Americans continues to be a tool by which to measure the pulse of Black life; the role of digital media in the lives of twenty-first-century Black Americans mirrors that of Black magazines and newspapers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of particular note is the way that Black youth, especially Black girls, use digital media spaces to make themselves (and their experiences) visible and generate social discourse through the content they post on social media. In this article, I look at historical Black titles—the Woman's Era and the Brownies’ Book—as well as contemporary Black girls’ social media content to show how Black girls have historically developed a discourse of Black girlhood alongside their adult counterparts who were concerned with racial uplift and continue to author and theorize their lives through digital media.