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A
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A
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan. Real United Airlines customers.
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We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew.
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A
I got to sit in the driver's seat.
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B
I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
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A
That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain.
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Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way.
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C
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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A
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I'm so pleased to be joined by Dr. Aria Holiday, who is the author of Black Girls and How we Fail Them. Welcome to the show, Dr. Halladay.
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B
Hi, Christina. Thanks for having me.
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A
I am so glad that you're here and that we get to learn about your book from you. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
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B
Sure. Let's see. Today.
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I am Associate professor and Marie Rich Endowed professor in Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky. My academic home, in many ways, is gender and women's studies, American studies, cultural studies, history. I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that popular culture teaches us about black girls and women. What images and ideas are created when they are put into perspective. So when we see them, what happens when we don't see them? What happens? How are they talked about? How are they referenced? How do they talk about themselves? How do black women directors, producers, artists, actors create and then also kind of narrate their own creation and how that has shaped what we know as US popular culture from the early 20th century to the present?
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Yeah, I think that's what I'll say today. I mean, there's lots of other things, but maybe we'll get to that later.
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A
At the academic life, we're always curious about how people found their path forward. When you think back to younger you, do you remember what you thought you wanted to do and how close is where you are now to that?
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B
Absolutely. When I was young, I wanted to be a professor, or that's not true. Whoa. I did not want to be a professor. I wanted to be a lawyer. And.
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You know, in many ways, it's not that far. I spend my time arguing things, looking for evidence, sometimes spending hours and hours to find a sentence to prove my point.
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That's not too unlike a lawyer. But I don't really spend time in the judicial system, although, you know, educational spaces sometimes can feel very judicial or legal. I also thought at one point I wanted to be a psychologist, which, knowing myself now, sounds right, but I don't think I would ever spend that much time in someone else's head or emotions.
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And if you've ever seen the show Living Single, and the main character is Khadijah James, she was the editor of a magazine called Flava. I thought I wanted to do that for a while.
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Yeah. Just generally very ambitious of all the things I could possibly do. But in undergrad, I was in a class with. I think his name is Dr. Patrick Mahoney, and he teaches.
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Like, Hinduism and Buddhism at Davidson College. I don't even. He might be retired now, but at the time, I remember sitting in his class and he was like, waxing on about Sufism and how we understand the world around us through religion. And, you know, something was like, you know, maybe I could do this. You know, maybe I could be a professor. And that was my freshman year. And, you know, everything up to this point has lined up to make me create a career out of it. But that isn't without my own doubts and questions about whether I should be doing something else.
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A
You let us know in this book that you have previously published articles and you previously previously published a book. This book, in some ways seems to be a bit of a departure from that, that you're reflecting now on what you've done, and you have this real concern about the topics that we start unpacking in Black girls and how we found them. How does this book fit with your previous work?
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B
So in my first book by Black How Black Women Transformed Us Popular Culture, I talk a bit about how black women are creating, you know, for the black girls that, you know, are their daughters or they wish they. You know, the objects that they wish they had when they were kids. And I was thinking a lot about, okay, so how does Black girlhood kind of exist in the zeitgeist of popular culture discourse? Like, how do we talk about what black girls want? How do we talk about what black girls experience or know?
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And in many ways, this Black girls and how we fail them. This book feels like the book I always wanted to write, but maybe didn't have the information or the confidence or both to write it. I say kind of in the book proposal that this book came from Rage. I thought a lot about the fact that many of these films and shows and discourses that I talk about in the book, you know, use black girls as, you know, a. As a kind of pivotal evolutionary marker. They're objects to people rather than actual people. And I just kept being disturbed, especially in, like, 2020. I was watching a film called Project Power, which I talk about in the book that has Jamie Foxx and Dominique Fishback. And Dominic Fishback's character is a young black girl trying to figure out how to pay for her mother's surgery. And.
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In the first two minutes of the film, we don't really have information about why she's doing what she's doing or what, you know, her motivations are. But she's kind of assaulted by two older boys, men, in the first two minutes of the film. And I was aghast. I was just so confused about how this could be kind of pivotal. And there's kind of no conversation or moment to talk about why she's being assaulted. There isn't really an apology. You know, a cop shows up and then lets the two boys go, and she's getting arrested. I mean, it's just. And then later she gets kidnapped. Later she gets, you know, kind of disrespected, mistreated, you know, talk poorly down to. And I was, you know, like many people during the pandemic, was just watching a film, trying to, you know, think about other things to watch. And, you know, this film just. It just stuck with me. And I just continued to think about how are we talking about black girls in such a way that we could allow a film like this to even exist? Let alone be celebrated for its cinematic beauty or for a storyline or any of this other stuff. And I kept finding that same idea over and over and over again.
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And I should say, too, that, you know, the book only covers maybe 12 specific objects. But every time I talk about it, you know, people find other things that I don't. Other objects that I don't discuss that have the same narrative. That black girls are, you know, pivotal to someone else's evolution. That black girls are dispensable. That black girls, you know, are mean and therefore are, you know, worthy of the mistreatment that they experience.
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That black girls don't have the language or narrative to talk about themselves. So we should talk about them from our own ideas about who they are. And the book really is an outgrowth of my own discomfort and personal feelings of disrespect, the ways that people have treated me over the course of my life that kind of come together in this piece.
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A
The book opens with a poem that you wrote, and for people who haven't had a chance to get the book yet, I invite you to set aside time to really sit with that poem. The introduction is called Failure Is Everywhere. And right away, you start taking us into what the book is and what it's going to do, and you start bringing us into different spaces where there is discourse. And you bring up two right away. One is the Breakfast Club and one is Red Table Talk. And you. You unpack what they do, and you grapple with the idea of the presented authenticity of Red Table Talk. How did you land on these two cultural examples?
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B
Well, at the time, you know, 2122, there was a lot of talk about the ways that, for example, the rapper T.I. showed up on Red Table Talk after, you know, there was this kind of controversy about his daughter's gynecological examinations and whether or not her hymen was intact. And there was so much conversation that Red Table Talk invited him to talk about, you know, where this idea came from. And it just all seemed like a joke to him. Like, it was entertaining or even.
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You know, interesting in ways that.
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I found deeply problematic. And, you know, I was like, how is it that this Red Table Talk, which is really, you know, a space that black women have created to, you know, discuss life and culture.
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How is it platforming this deeply problematic person?
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And, of course, there's been investigations into kind of sexual assault allegations against him at this point, too. And so I'm like, what is going on that we would platform this discussion? I have a personal just disdain for The Breakfast Club. I think it sucks. I think Charlamagne is terrible. And over the course of the last, you know, 10 years, has been platformed to be kind of the popular cultural voice of black America. And he's a terrible person. The things that he says on the show for entertainment are Terror is terrible. The way that he interacts with his guests is, you know, antagonistic at best. And I think that, you know, the Breakfast Club shouldn't exist. That's the short of it. But.
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You know, I was kept seeing that they, you know, would do interviews with, you know, the actress Monique or with Kiki Palmer or these other people. And, you know, they kept finding the most kind of antagonistic ways to talk about.
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Their engagement. You know, what are you. What's going on in your life? Oh, I heard that, you know, so and so cheating on you. What do you want to say? You know, and it always felt kind of disingenuous compared to the ways that they treated black men, especially on the show. So black women and queer people were being treated with such disrespect that I. I think my brain was like, there must be something happening where this is the way that we want to interact, right, with people that we call our community. There has to be some kind of connective tissue that allows us to go from.
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You know, poems and shows and movies to this kind of public discourse platform that's getting circulated millions of views all over the world that still has the same, you know, underlying idea that, you know, it's totally okay and even expected for you to disrespect black women.
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A
And girls as you go through the book and you're unpacking things for us and analyzing them. One of the key terms that you need us to keep in mind is what's called misogynoir. Can you define that for listeners?
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B
Yes. So misogynoir is a term coined by Dr. Moya Bailey and along with the blogger Trudy. And Dr. Moya Bailey specifically talks about misogynoir as the hatred and disdain or disrespect of black women.
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And in her case, she was specifically thinking about.
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The ways that black women are disrespected in healthcare spaces. And so we know kind of the history of black maternal health outcomes at this point, but also thinking about how that gets picked up in popular culture. So I tried to expand Dr. Bailey's term misogynoir to think specifically about black girls, because in all of my work, I try to make the distinction that we need language and theory that applies to the specifics of black girlhood. Right. That doesn't kind of move backward from black womanhood to girls, but that starts at black girlhood and the experiences of black girls. And so I use misogynor or this idea that there's a specific hatred for the intersections of race and gender, and in my case, age, that allows us to see black girls as people who are not worth defending, who are not worth protecting, and who are kind of pivotal to other people's evolution, even if they're harmed in the process.
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A
You outline how the book is going to go in the introduction for us. You lay out what's going to happen in all the six chapters. And the epilogue then takes us into a lot of food for thought and reflecting on what we've just learned as we start to understand what the book is taking us into. You talk about there's been a complicity in depicting black girls as unwanted and disposable. And after you open with your poem, you take us into another poem that's about missing girls. There's an ongoing theme throughout the book of girls being missing. Can you talk about that poem?
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B
Yes. So my poem that opens the book is inspired by poet Jasmine Mann's Black Girl Call Home collection. And she has a poem in her book that is called Missing Girls and is a word search. And you're supposed to be actively looking for black girls who have gone missing in this word search. And I was just so.
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Kind of deeply impacted by this idea that, you know, if we looked for black girls, we could find them, like words in word search. But if we don't know to look for them, if we don't know their names even, how can we possibly find them? And so.
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Jasmine Mann's poem really made me think about what ways that we encourage black girls to disappear, what ways that we, you know, encourage black girls to disappear from themselves, right. In service of other people's advancement, especially emotionally. And her poem also made me think about how we all are complicit in not searching, how we specifically don't know, don't care, ignorance is bliss kind of experience to the really.
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Harmful experiences that black girls have every day. And, you know, the murder of Micaiah Bryant, it's a little black girl who was murdered by police when she was in an altercation with another girl. And the ways that people talked about her.
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You know, really just disturbed me. And, you know, I think, like I said earlier, that this book came out of rage, but also came out of a deep sadness that, you know, how many lives have we lost? How Many, you know, people don't know themselves because we encourage and even celebrate their kind of distancing from themselves, from kind of an acknowledgment of harm, an acknowledgment of vulnerability.
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And, you know, ways that we can kind of call people to task about the ways that we don't stick up for black girls in the same ways that we do for other people. And I should say, like, this is not, like, anecdotal, right? There's the Georgetown Law Center's research about black girls. And they've said, you know, as soon as the age of five, black girls are expected to be or assumed to be older than other children at the same age. And that includes black boys. That includes white girls. White boys.
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And, you know, the implications of that is not just, you know, they're not being protected or respected as children, but they're also being adultified. That's, you know, Dr. Monique Moore. She talks about the process of adultification and the fact that black girls are not just being treated like. Not as children, but they're expected to be adults in any situation, and they're therefore treated as adults. And I think Micaiah Bryant's experience is a great way to think about how that happens.
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A
Chapter one is called Hip Hop's Daughters. Hip Hop's Misogyny Problems Revisited. In that chapter, there's three key people that you're considering. Jay Z, Diddy and Clifford Harris. And you open by taking us into the album 444, which is sort of this autobiographical.
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Reckoning that Jay Z does. Can. Can you talk about how you selected these three people and about why 444 is an important piece to be considering?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, all three of them in the past decade have kind of made this really large transition in their public Personas to being fathers and how we might understand them as, you know, these men who were.
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You know, as Jay Z would put it, big pimpin. Or they are, you know, known to have multiple partners and multiple children to kind of like re seeing them as, you know, fathers who are, you know, devoted to their children and devoted to their experiences. I mean, Clifford Harris or T.I. has, you know, the show called Family Hustle, which, again, you know, puts family at the middle of that discussion.
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But I think, you know, irons out all of his narcissistic behaviors. Diddy, who has been in the news recently, I don't think I really need to discuss, but I talk about in the book that he was on the COVID of Essence magazine for Mother's Day, talking about, you know, the passing of his partner, Kim Porter. But, you know, also what it means now to be a, as he says, a full time mom.
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And what that might mean. And then also Jay Z, I think it's. I start with him because, you know, his.
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Public relationship with Beyonce Knowles, Carter and their children, and their children specifically, you know, Blue Ivy. There's a way that they were kind of and still are celebrated as like, this family that, you know, can have it all. Like, both parents are, you know, high earners and the mom is, you know, phenomenal in all these ways. And look at their daughter who's now in this space and like, you know, dad gets. Is basically retired from his career and he can be a stay at home dad. We both know they're both millionaires. They are not staying at home to do anything with their children. But, you know, the book specifically is thinking about how these kind of narratives of black fatherhood have been folded into our kind of cultural discourse about these three people, but also the ways that being a father has supposedly shifted their public Personas. So much so that we don't name or talk about the harm that they've caused to the women in their lives, to the children in their lives. And so the book tries to think about how kind of these discourses of fatherhood that arrive in hip hop are then being dispersed through listeners and through these kind of narratives of fatherhood that these three men represent.
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C
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Now AI is here and Chevron is working to power it. We're aiming to develop multi gigawatt power plants near data centers designed with future pathways to lower carbon intensity. AI gets the power it needs, communities get the jobs and the grid stays strong. Powering AI today builds America's next superpower in the introduction in chapter one are really laying the foundation for how girls are talked about and seeing that none of this is being generated by the girls themselves. Chapter 2 is called Hypervisible Black Girlhood. Black Girls in the Obama Hopeland and this. You look at Sasha and Malia Obama specifically after they've left the White House and you're considering things like surveillance and control, public concern about their bodies, their future, their parents, how the parents are parenting. And you talk about how people are looking with both fascination and horror into their private lives. While this might seem like an extraordinary case because hardly anybody is in the position to be the daughter of a president, this public surveillance and control and discourse about is is foundational to what you're saying here. And you also point out that it puts the girls friends in this bizarre position of reporting on them. Would you like to talk about how this this case study, if you will, really exemplifies what you're doing in the Book.
- [25:40]
B
Yes. So, you know, I think when President Obama was elected, you know, we start to see his family in, you know, constantly being talked about. His wife regularly is, you know, part of scathing commentary about womanhood, about blackness, about masculinity. Even. Even now, right There's. I'm still talking to reporters about whether or not Michelle Obama is a man. Right. There's this, you know, ridiculous narrative that keeps being spun about her, but then also, by extension, their kids. And I think, you know, in many ways, after their first year in the White House, they kind of did a revamp of Michelle Obama above the children and trying to present them as kind of quintessential, you know, family and American family. And the daughters, therefore, are talked about a lot. And in terms of how they are responding to being in the White House, how they are responding to, you know, meeting famous people at state dinners, how are they responding to this life? And Michelle Obama regularly says that her mother was involved in, you know, giving them a kind of stable household, but afterwards, they're kind of, you know, they've become private citizens again. They're not necessarily in the camera's eye. But, you know, I talk about in the book that they are being harassed basically at every turn.
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They go to college, and their classmates are being interviewed about, you know, did you sit next to her? What does she say? What does she wear? What is she doing?
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In ways that, you know, we would expect of maybe somebody like the Kardashians, but they have not put themselves in that kind of position. Right. They are private citizens who just happen to be the daughters of the president. And, you know, I talk about. This kind of fascination is definitely about race and gender, but also age. And that social media allows us to.
- [27:48]
Cultivate and curate these kinds of surveillance cultures that, you know, we want to know everything about what Sasha and Malia are doing at any given time. We want to know who they're dating, what their hair looks like, how black are they, how black are they not, you know, how are they representing Chicago, where their mom is from, how are they, you know, able to integrate themselves like their father, how are they. Right. There's all these kind of narratives about, you know, who they are as black girls, how they're presenting themselves, but also their parents are actively participating in this conversation by saying, you know, in interviews, oh, this is who my daughter is. This is how she's participating. This is the conversations that we're having in ways that we don't actually see. The girls, you know, consent to being discussed or dissent, you know, consent to their conversations being part of public information. So, you know, I kind of transitioned from this conversation about hip hop fathers to thinking about how parents are actively cultivating narratives about their daughters in ways that maybe they think are perfectly okay, but create this kind of narrative and culture of surveillance that, you know, helps us control them, helps us, you know, think specifically about how they need to present themselves to us. And so that chapter is a great example of what I'm doing in the book to illustrate how these kind of pop culture narratives and are, you know, having an impact on private lives, but also how we all are kind of complicit in these narratives about black girls, how they're spread, how they're articulated. And then, you know, we resurface them to our friends in our group chats or online. You know, that complicity is, you know, as simple as, you know, a repost or a retweet.
- [29:38]
A
Chapter three is called Loving Fast Hill Girls, Queen Sugar, Southern Black Girlhood and Theological Abuse. In this chapter, you're really considering how black girls are treated in spaces where they should be safe. You're looking at the construction of what it means to be a quote unquote, fast girl. And three key themes that seem to be informing that idea that there even is such a thing as a fast girl are theological. They're rooted in white supremacy, and they're rooted in misogyny. Can you talk about this idea that there is such a thing as a fast girl and how it's used?
- [30:12]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think. I don't know that there is a thing called a fast girl. Let me be clear. But in our discourse, we are, you know, kind of fascinated with the idea that there could be a girl who is, you know, taking control of her sexuality, who is, you know, actively, you know, participating in sex with different suitors, who is knowingly, you know, anticipating the ways that people want to interact with her around sex and sexuality and. And whether that exists or not, you know, in our mind, it does, you know, partially because of theology and the way that we are oriented to think about.
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Women'S and girls sexuality in general. Right? Like women and girls need to cover up so they don't tempt men. That kind of idea.
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But how that also has implications for how we understand girl sexuality at all.
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And in Queen Sugar, we have this character called Kiki, who, for all intents and purposes is a young black girl going to school. She's a dance troupe leader.
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And she's enjoying her life. And a young boy, Micah, who's a main character of the parents.
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In the main story, the Borderland Family, he is interacting with Kiki. And the way that people talked about her online is that the fact that she told him, you know, there's not gonna be, you know, a Netflix and chill. There's not gonna be some, you know, kind of untoward sexual interaction without acknowledgment of who I am and what I'm worth, that she's the one that is quote, unquote fast. And I found that deeply problematic because, you know, ultimately, don't we want girls to dictate how they're going to be, you know, courted, how they're going to be talked about or talked with in their interactions with men or boys? You know, shouldn't we encourage girls to have an understanding of what their sexuality is and, and how they want to use it, protect it, curate it? And I just was really disappointed with the ways that people interacted with this fictional character, but also the ways that, you know, they then extrapolated to how we think about other girls sexuality. You know, we can go backwards to thinking about the Obama girls. We can go backwards to thinking about, you know, whether or not Ti's daughters hymen is still intact. You know, we can. You know, I mean, there are so many ways that this kind of conversation about a girl potentially being sexually active, and not even just sexually active, but sexually interested, sexually liberated, and how that is some kind of indication of her character, you know, that's everywhere. I mean, everything from, you know, the Scarlet Letter, right. It plays out in many different cultures. And so this idea of the fast girl, I think is fake, right? But she exists in the kind of zeitgeist of culture. So much so that we have language to talk about black girls or, or girls in general who are sexually active, even, you know, slurs to that effect. But we don't really have language to talk about boys in that way.
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A
Early on in the book, when you're defining misogynoir for us, you tell us that it's a malignancy, that it has infected everyone and everything, and that this is part of the.
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Foundational work in the beginning with the poems of, of women being missing and specifically of young girls being missing. And importantly, even when they're here, they are missing to themselves. Can you talk about how this malignancy has caused this lack of being there for yourself?
- [34:11]
B
Absolutely. I talk about with my students all the time that, you know, all of us are swimming in the same racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist water. Right? I tell them all the time. It's not like, you know, because I'm somehow quote unquote, enlightened because I read more books or whatever, that I'm not also a victim to this conversation. But it, it does mean though, that all of us are privy to the same information in that if the world is supposed to be, you know, white and male and heterosexual and able bodied, then all of us in some way or shape or form don't fit that narrative. And so we are complicit in upholding it, right? That the quintessential American ideal is a white family, for example, blonde hair, blue eyed, two kids, whatever, and a dog. There's a way that, you know, we are all complicit in this kind of idea that black girls and all of us really are subject to this narrative. We have to participate so that, you know, the quote, unquote, American dream lives on.
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But the fact that we in that participation, we give up something, right? We give up allegiances to ourselves. We give up acknowledgment of the truth. We give up our ability to advocate for ourselves and for other people who don't fit into these narratives. And ultimately that is the.
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Center of this idea, that misogyny, war, this specific hatred towards black women and girls extends to everyone. And that all of us have in some way.
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Participated in this idea, whether it's by aligning ourselves more with whatever is considered pretty or right or white.
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But also that, you know, in our conversations with ourselves, the way that we talk to ourselves, you know, through fat phobia or.
- [36:26]
Able, ableist ideas about, you know, what we should be able to do and when, you know, you're lazy for doing this or whatever. Like all of these ideas, right, are part of this conversation of massage noir and that ultimately, you know, we continue to participate and makes it more difficult for us to kind of align ourselves with our own well being, right? If I can't say that, like I'm not lazy, maybe I'm just really tired, right? I'm not lazy. I'm just, you know, I haven't eaten enough. I mean, maybe I'm not lazy. I'm exhausted from kind of performing for everybody else and what they expect me to be. That, you know, it actually, you know, harms us, right? Every kind of utterance of that is a harm to ourselves and our self worth and our self being. And you know, in the case of black girls, that means that they have very little space to actually articulate, articulate who they are, what they want and how they want it because they're so interested in participating in what other people think. Right. I mean, Bill Hooks calls it oppositional gaze. But I would go even further to say that, you know, it's not a gaze. It is a constant pressure to perform for, you know, outward expectations, outward beliefs about who we are. And that forces us to distance ourselves from who we really are and what we really want.
- [37:50]
A
The exhaustion of presentation is also touched on in the introduction when you talk about the code switching. And then there's more in the epilogue.
- [38:02]
B
Audre Lorde, you know, is kind of disgusted by this idea that she must wear this fake breast that doesn't feel like her, that doesn't feel like it's a part of her body for everyone else's morale. That, you know, this idea that, you know, by doing something for other people, that means she doesn't do something for herself or vice versa. Right. That and what I love about.
- [38:26]
Her work is that, you know, she is constantly trying to get us to think about where, you know, silences and self negation and performances for other people, especially, you know, under this umbrella of white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, which is a bell hooks term. You know, all of that actually encourages us to lessen who we are, to lessen who we believe we are, you know, what our self truth is. And it gets us to the point, you know, in the point of, you know, missing to yourself, it gets you to the point where you don't actually know who you are or what you want because you're so invested in the needs, the wants, the desires of other people and helping them get to, you know, their evolutionary point of self actualization.
- [39:13]
A
And that's referring to Audre Lorde's cancel cancer journals in the section of the epilogue called How Do We Approach Healing? When you're naming through these failures that you've identified throughout the book, at the end, you're talking about how there has to be this reckoning with. With these failures in order to get to healing and that you're not positioning them as bad things for each other. Often we think of failure as a shame place. But for you and the.
- [39:45]
Theory that you're borrowing from bell hooks and building upon there, it's essential that we look at the failure in order to heal, and we can hold both at the same time. We won't have time to get into chapters four, five and six. Those take us through specific examples from the film industry and three different.
- [40:06]
Sort of archetypes that are held up for the black girls to play in These one is the Salvik black girl. And the examples there are the film, the girl with all the gifts and beasts of the Southern wild. Then there's the dispensable black girls, which we see in Wrinkle of Time and Project Power. And then chapter six takes us into the notion of this mean girl. And we look at Selah and the spades and the cuties, and you unpack what those very narrowly prescribed roles are for these girls and how they're enacted. And you, you bring us into the idea that even if there's a black director or a black writer in the project, that does not mean that these tropes or these constrained roles for the girls are not going to be written into the script. And again, those are more examples of the infectious cancerous malignancy of a misogynoir and the need to really examine how this bias is everywhere. How do we find healing in failure?
- [41:06]
B
I think first I talk about the need to acknowledge that failure exists, right? So one of the ways, if you've been to therapy at all, right, One of the ways that they talk about how to get better is to acknowledge, you know, what is the truth, right? Because we spend so much time kind of covering the truth, covering it with lies or, you know, compartmentalizing the truth from, you know, what our everyday experiences or whatever, right? First, the first step is acknowledgement, right? Like to remove denial is to acknowledge the truth and also means that healing is possible because you actually know where the problem lies, right? At the, at the kind of most basic level, we talk about theory as being language to name a problem, right? That's Sara Ahmed. And you know, once we're able to name it, we're able to kind of see that a problem exists, identify maybe ways to make it better, to address it, or, you know, at least to say, like, you know, I didn't show up for myself in this moment, you know, I definitely let myself down. I thought better of myself in this experience, and I could have done better that alone, right? That acknowledgement of, of where fault happens, where failure happens, is the point where healing can, can absolutely step in because it is a point of vulnerability. And vulnerability allows us to make connection with other people.
- [42:35]
It allows us to kind of reinvigorate our self worth and self understanding. And it also allows us to seek out help for the areas where maybe we need more support. But without that acknowledgment first, right, it's really hard to find not only where the problem is, but how to get help for it. And so I start with saying that, you know, healing starts with acknowledging that failure exists. Where you failed, how you failed, and, you know, for yourself and for whom you failed. And then after that, I think, you know, it's about finding community, right, that other people acknowledging, like, oh, we failed in this similar way. How can we, you know, create solidarity, organize, you know, discuss, read books together, you know, group therapy, our way to, you know, healing this thing that has unmoored us.
- [43:28]
And, you know, the. The. The idea ultimately is that black girls, in all of the ways that we have failed them, there is a pathway forward. And first it is to acknowledge, right, that there are these moments of failure, which is what my book tries to do. But also there are these moments of healing, right? We see black girls show up with these moments of agency where they decide, oh, you know, I know that you can say these things about me, you can do these things to me, but I won't allow you this space. I won't allow you this point of connection that you think you should have or control that you think you should have. Savannah Shange calls it black girl opaqueness, right? That there's gonna be a space that you can't connect to or know even if you try to control everything. And I think that all of us have that. And we have to encourage, you know, this idea, especially in a world of constant surveillance. Anytime you're interacting with anybody, it could be on camera, it could be uploaded to the Internet. It can go viral. That, you know, opaqueness, meaning, you know, we're not posting everything. We're not talking about everything. We're not, you know, existing only through this technology that's in our pockets.
- [44:45]
That, you know, that allows us some freedom, right, To. To kind of disentangle ourselves from this idea that we always have to be connected in these kind of false, externally celebrated ways that we can, you know, by connecting to ourselves and using that connection to connect with other people, that that is where true liberation and healing can happen. And that's, you know, ultimately Audre Lorde's whole point, too.
- [45:15]
A
On page 146, you tell us that you found that whether discussing fictional or real black girls, their US Pop culture representations depend on our collective dismissal of their pain. It seems in this discussion about healing and acknowledging failure, it's a. It's a time to open this collective dismissal of pain.
- [45:40]
B
Absolutely. And I think that. I'm sorry, I think. No, I was just gonna say that I think that, you know, what we've seen from 2020 to the present is kind of A acceptance of that. Right. That, you know, Me too, or Black Lives Matter or any kind of acknowledgment like that that harm has existed. Right. Is a way that we can move forward. And right now we're in a moment where we're seeing kind of a backlash to that. And I think that is exactly, you know, what this book is trying to encourage us not to.
- [46:15]
Go back to. Right. That ultimately, you know, when we acknowledge we can heal. But this constant, you know, denigration of the truth, this constant dismissal of pain and harm where it was caused.
- [46:31]
You know, in service of, you know, fake bravado or ego, you know, it actually harms us and makes us more divisive and more.
- [46:42]
It's just more difficult to. To really get to the root of it or end, you know, end the pain. Right. And so that's really what, you know, my hope is for what this book does that people can finally acknowledge that, you know, there is harm and there's something that we can do about it.
- [47:04]
A
On page 161 listeners will find something called Resources for Failing Less. And that's a list of resources for people who want to do the work.
- [47:13]
B
Yes.
- [47:14]
A
We're starting to come to the close of our time together, so I'd like to ask you, what do you hope this episode sparks for listeners?
- [47:21]
B
I hope this episode sparks, one, the idea that you should read and buy this book. And. And two, I think, more importantly, that this episode would encourage you to think about the ways that you have failed yourself.
- [47:39]
You know, not showing up for yourself in the ways that you really think you should or, you know, that you should, and how you can do better. And if, you know, this, this particular episode does anything beyond, you know, encouraging you to buy this book or anything like that, I hope it encourages you to show up for yourself. And that means speaking your truth, naming when you've been harmed, and holding people accountable for how they mistreat you.
- [48:06]
A
Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Aria Halladay, and sharing from your book Black Girls and How We Fail Them. You've been listening to the Academic Life. I'm Christina Gessler inviting you to please join us again.
- [48:26]
B
Sam.