“Through the Urban League, I started Girls League of the West to liberate, celebrate and motivate Black girlhood. Sometimes we have a whole curriculum, or sometimes we just need a space to let it out or to get silly or to dance. We go to the park. The girls wrote a book that should be coming out once everything gets back into motion after COVID. It’s just the epitome of what it means to be Black and to be a girl and to love each other. Sisterhood, with Black feminism at the center of it.
(Breonna Taylor) brought in a lot of inner sadness, especially looking at the pictures and hearing the story. That’s a familiar story. We all want to be laid up with our boo. That’s 20s, just having this whole experience, being in a relationship, having fun in life. I get a little choked up when I think about it. Just seeing her outside her apartment and in her going-out clothes, and sitting at the vanity at some bar. Those are very familiar poses that a lot of Black girls, Black women, do when they go out and look super-cute. That’s where it got real personal because I saw somebody I love right there.
There’s a picture of her that says, ‘Say no to fuck boys,’ or something like that. And she has this long, cute hair. And she has on something red, and every time I see that picture I just imagine myself walking up next to her, puttin’ on the lip gloss.” (Gets choked up.) “Sorry. I just imagine myself walking up and being like, ‘Oh, you look so cute.’ Because she looks so cute. It’s just messed up, not to see the beauty in our lives.
Yesterday I cried. In Atlanta, my yoga teacher friends — one of them is a doula and one was having a baby. I got to witness on the internet her being in a pool of water and giving birth. Just powerful stuff that women can do. That transition of becoming one person and being attached to that person inside of you, and then that part of detachment once they’re born — it’s some powerful stuff, and it always draws me to tears.”
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