‘As Black girls, we have to maintain a sisterhood’: How a literacy project encourages girls to love themselves

Sophia Parker looked at the array of photos of Black women in front of her, thinking carefully. The 16-year-old from North Philly picked up one of a middle-aged woman dressed to impress, and another of a younger woman with her family. Parker then told the other girls participating in the Black Girl Literacies Project last fall why she was drawn to those images, she recalled.

“When I get older, I want to see myself being a classy woman with my pearls and just being happy with life, knowing that I succeeded in some type of way,” she said. “One day, I would like to have a family and see [them] grow and be successful.”

The other girls did the same that day, using the photos to talk about how they saw themselves and what they wanted out of life. It was a different kind of practice than Parker had ever heard of, but over the course of several weeks in the program, she came to understand herself better.

“It gave me a new outlook on ways to love myself,” she said.

“Black girlhood really focuses on celebrating the humanity of folks in ways that schools don’t often honor.”

The Black Girl Literacies Project is a free program for Black girls in Philadelphia, where participants explore different ways of loving themselves. Registration is open for the project’s Spring cohort (https://www.barrettrosser.com/bglp), which begins on Feb. 15 and meets every other week. The program is for Black Philadelphia girls ages 14 to 18, and meets at the Penn Women’s Center, but also holds additional sessions at places such as the Colored Girls Museum in Germantown.

Barrett Rosser, the creator of BGLP, is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania after previously working as a Philadelphia school teacher for over 10 years. She started the project in 2020 as part of her doctoral dissertation. “[Black girls] sit at the intersection of racial and gender [oppression],” she said, explaining why it is essential for Black girls and women to practice self-love.

When Rosser talks about what she means by self-love, she refers to a definition of love authored by bell hooks, who wrote: “[It is] the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. … Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action.”

Rosser dealt with her own trauma as a high schooler, and believes this age group experiences that intersection most acutely. “Navigating [trauma] and schooling and the politics of life was very challenging for me,” she said.

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When most hear the word literacy, they think of someone’s ability to simply read and write. But Rosser uses a more expansive definition for her project.

“It is meaning making,” she said, explaining how reading, writing, dancing, and painting are all just some of the ways someone can create and understand meaning in their life. Rosser learned about the concept of “Black girl literacies” in her doctoral program, which refers to the unique and multifaceted literacies that Black girls use and respond to best. She interwove that concept with other Black feminist thought to build her program.

“[In the group,] we really just think about how we can use literacy ... to love ourselves. We talk about our identities, we talk about Black girlhood, we talk about representations of Black girls in the media. We talk about how to read our bodies and trust ourselves and our knowing,” she said. “So we’re on TikTok, we’re dancing, we’re writing, we’re singing.”

Having a tight-knit community of other Black girls to laugh with, dance with, and have intimate conversations with is one of the key reasons that Parker is coming back for this upcoming cohort.

“I feel like as Black girls, we have to maintain a sisterhood. We can grow together and we can learn from each other because we deal with some similar experiences,” she said.

According to Rosser, that community also includes those who may not identify neatly as “girls”.

“I hope to continue to make it a safe [and] brave space for young folks who aren’t identifying as girls in the way society expects. ... Black girls are not a monolith, and I think Black girlhood really focuses on celebrating the humanity of folks in ways that schools don’t often honor,” she said.

Rabiyatu Jalloh, a teacher at West Philadelphia High School who helps lead the program with Rosser, said that she struggled with these same issues when she was a girl herself. “I still struggle with that today as an adult. And I think that it’s important for [Black girls] to think about these things because [there’s] so much negativity coming at [them] from several different angles, and developing a practice [of] self-love can really save these girls from a lot of distress on not fitting into what normal, ‘femininity’ looks like,” she said.

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“Sometimes we internalize these stereotypes and then we push them onto the girls, which is not fair. [And we] try to mold them into what society says they should be instead of giving them the tools to let them decide.”

Rosser hopes that ultimately, the research she draws from the Black Girl Literacies Project and her dissertation can be used to inform new education practices in schools, so that educators can better reach students. But in the meantime, she just wants girls like Parker to learn more about loving themselves and how to navigate the difficulties in their lives.

“I [used to] see self-love as just doing like face masks and stuff, I thought that’s what self-love was ... but [Rosser] let us know that self-love can be anything. You can show that you love yourself by taking a walk and just giving yourself a chance to take a breath,” Parker said.

“I just think that it would be better if a lot of [girls] would join and come and learn things. Because it is really, really helpful.”