Laura, Ashley, Kim, and Whitley
They say your purpose is borne from your pain. I was a child deeply influenced by the media, specifically television. I loved TV! The characters were regulars in my life I could count on every week. I loved the stories and how it shaped my imagination of what the world was really like outside of Metro Detroit where I grew up. Oh I used to pretend to live out the opening sequence of TV sitcoms. Before the TikTok trend I was in the mirror pretending to do something turn and smile to myself earnestly. The joy! My earliest memories of Black girl magic on TV were Laura Winslow, Ashley Banks, Kim Reece and Whitley Gilbert. These girls, the first two in particular, were slightly older than me and I definitely wanted to be like them. I wanted to be as cool as Laura, I wanted Ashley’s hair (we can get into hair politics later), I wanted to be as brilliant as Kim, and as obnoxious as Whitley was there was something I loved about her. My first visions of young Black womanhood came from these characters. While they represented a range of shades and experiences the one thing they all were was skinny.
I realized I was abundant in body (shoutout to Amber J. Phillips) when I was in 3rd grade. The kids in school were talking about how much they weighed. I remember coming home, going into my parents blue bathroom closing the door and stepping on the scale. The number on the scale was bigger than everyone else’s. 100. That was the first moment I knew I was different. I then began to learn what being Black and fat meant. What did my life mean if I was also fat? I wasn’t seeing any fat girls with love interests on tv, let alone on TV period. When they were on TV they were loud, aggressive, and boy crazed. For this shy, sensitive nerdy, romantic, empath none of that resonated. I internalized all of that imagery of abundantly bodied Black girls and it did a number on my psyche.
It was in college that I started learning more about the different tropes of Black folks in media that I really started the process of excavating where my own internalized self hatred came from. I did my senior thesis as a comparative analysis of both film versions of Imitation of Life. I was in deep. I loved (and hated) understanding the journey of how WE ended up on the screen. I was constantly analyzing the characters on screen and seeing how those old categories of characters still lived on. I thought my career was going to be in academia and even considered graduate programs to keep studying. I somehow ended up in LA working as a lawyer and later a media founder actively working to bring more authentic stories to the screen.
I recognize how lucky I am to have had Laura, Ashley, Kim and Whitley when such a relatively short time prior the only one of us you could see on TV was Claudine. I’m grateful for the continued evolution of us on TV from Living Single to Insecure, indie darling Sexless to Harlem. I do still long to see more stories that all versions of me resonate with. That’s the work I’ll continue to do.