Sisterhood

The short film "A Girl Like Me" by Kiri Davis breaks taboos by giving voice to young black women's feelings about being black. Instead of puberty resulting in "many girls leaving adolescence with no voice with which to articulate their thoughts and beliefs," Davis uses film to speak out and reach a large audience (Schilt). The issues she raises of skin, hair, asses, are part of the female concern with appearance and identity. I think one reason boys pass through adolescence with more confidence and girls emerge with less self-esteem is due to the bodily changes women go through. If identity is appearance, young women are suddenly transformed by puberty into aliens in a male dominated world that doesn't value their way of communicating. Black women as historically the other other may struggle even more than white women with their identity.

I am going to enter realms where I have no expertise, but here I go. bell hooks alludes to black women being subjugated by white men in "Holding My Sister's Hand."  While white women are objectified, and in a sense then considered valuable for consensual sexual relations,  black women's historical sexual relations with white men were through force and coercion. Therefore subjugation is further from the power center then objectification.  hooks states that freedom came to be seen as black men having sexual access to white women's bodies.  This further left black women's identities outside the norm.  Sexual fears and competition estranged black and white women in the feminist movement. Although this may seem to have little to do with the film, I think some of the issues being raised carry over from these traditional roles.

When the children are asked which doll they like and which doll is good, their choice is based on generations of lived experience, and, sadly, they choose the white doll.  As one Girlhood Remixed participant responded to the child in the film who chose the black doll as bad, "That's you. Don't you know what you're doing?" It would be easy for me to say the parents of those children need to counter society's messages. Remember the girl in the film whose mother didn't like her hair natural because she looked African? Instead of holding black mothers responsible for all the messages their daughters are receiving, the reality is that society fermented these issues and we need to keep working on solving them. This will be accomplished though dialogue and active choices about defining beauty.  bell hooks cals for a "woman space where we can value difference and complexity" (110).  I applaud Davis for bringing her voice and her sisters' to the conversation.