This study speaks to Black women who are intentional about utilizing their voices on digital platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Social media and blogging are used as resistant tools which allow Black women to carve out spaces to express themselves authentically, build community with other like-minded Black women, and counterattack negative narratives of Black women across mediums. This analysis of Black women’s healing practices looks through a 21st century digital framework. A part of Black women’s survival tactics has always included the interpersonal relationships with other Black women, this is especially true in digital spaces. This study draws from historical, cultural, and socially relevant pedagogies to speaks for, about, and to Black women. The use of AAVE, black feminist texts, theories, and methodologies rooted in Black women’s interests and best explains the necessity of these paradigms. Although Black women are using digital spaces to reclaim their narratives, black oral traditions to mind yo’ bidness, negatively impact Black women because it suppresses their voice and upholds the black male patriarchy.
It’s a common theme for a marginalized group to question their worth in the United States. Black women carry a deeply rooted ideology that they are undeserving. Tamara Winfrey Harris’s desire in her book, The Sisters are Alright is for Black women to be seen. Harris wants Black women to reorient their own self-worth in their own interests and away from the validation of the larger white society. Harris writes, “even if the world won’t love us, I want black women to love themselves and to love each other”. Harris expresses why Black women need to reaffirm themselves in the United States because their constantly told their unlovable.
Harris is not the first work which reaffirms Black women’s worth. The new spin on Harris book which is followed from other Black feminist who’ve critiqued the way Black women are seen (bell hooks (1993) Sisters of the Yams, Audre Lorde’s (1984) Sister Outsider, Alice Walker (1983) In Search of Our Mother’s Garden). Harris includes the current state of Black women’s identity and how it’s situated in the 21st century. Although critiques of Black women’s positioning can be traced as far back as Ida B. Wells.
Harris fresh take includes relevant commentary which positions itself in the current political climate. Harris new work allows millennial Black women to connect to themselves, Black Feminist Studies, and their history in a whole new way. Her writing serves as a middle ground for those entering the filed or connecting the dots for Black women reaffirming that they’re not alone. Harris sentiments echo in my own life and I also resonate with her personally. From different directions, Black women are told they aren’t good enough, including research studies, the news, television, and music. Harris claim is that Black women are reduced to caricatures, stereotypes, and negative tropes. While the portrayal of Black women in the United States as sub humans is not a new concept. It is Harris particular voice which adds to the conversation, positioning a Black woman in front of these claims. Harris writing a book on what “they said” is the equivalence to celebrities candidly addressing rumors about themselves.
There’s a different perspective on the text when a Black woman unpacks the years of social abuse faced, in a structured way. My study analyzes the way in which Black women are reclaiming their narratives through digital story-telling, specifically blogs and social media. I’m interested in the ways in which Black female readers perceive and receive reflections of themselves online. I check in with my own blood sisters and what digesting black digital media means or looks like for them. The intersectionality of my study addresses diverse voices within the academy and the importance of marginalized groups speaking for themselves. Although it’s important that Black feminist scholars exists, one voice does not speak for and represent the ideologies of all Black women. At the same time, I understand that we’re more similar than we are different. The way that Black women congregate online are based on their different interests, ideologies, and incentives. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s uplifts the voices of marginalized women by collaborating with them and supporting their claims
Harris, T. W. (2015). The Sisters are Alright changing the broken narrative of Black women in America. Retrieved February 5, 2018, from The Guardian.