But if I dug a little deeper I would have arrived at a more honest answer to that question, which would have been yes. I was tired, yes. But mainly tired of the explaining. I was fine minding my own business doing things I enjoyed, working to create opportunities for myself so that I could in turn provide opportunities for younger people like me and eventually for my kids. But I was also tired of feeling the weight of responsibility to help fill a crucial gap in an entire industry. Tackling microaggressions on the job while supporting other Black women who were the Firsts and the Onlys to do the same. I was willing and ready to do the work, I just wished there weren’t so much of it to do.
What underlines all of this is privilege. The privilege of being able to afford the childcare that allows me to do a job I love that has raised my profile enough to be able to do projects, like this book, that I find personally fulfilling.
But increasingly I’ve discovered the real personal growth happens in the ordinary day-to-day moments rather than the big, life-defining ones. The un-newsworthy and unremarkable but no less meaningful. It’s in the one-to-one exchanges with my closest girlfriends about the banalities that don’t make the highlights reels—the pushing through and the figuring it all out, the winning and the fucking it all up. To me, this is where the magic is.
The origins and the ownership of the phrase Black girl magic have been subject to much debate in recent years. But most agree that writer Joan Morgan was one of the first, if not the definitive first, to put it out into the world through her 2000 book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, a cleverly titled collection of writing that excellently chronicled and interrogated the rise of hop-hop feminism. Interestingly, she wrote of a Black girl’s magic in an essay about rejecting the unrealistic notion of the Strong Black Woman, the original Bad Bitch.
In a passage describing how she left New York to seek a slower pace in California, she wrote:
In Frisco I did a few wonderful things. I fell apart regularly in the arms of two deliciously brown men (one a lover, both friends) who faithfully administered the regular doses of TLC I needed to breathe again—unafraid of my tears or fragility. I wrote. Spent lots of time near the water. Heard Oshun’s laughter twinkling like bells, urging me to recapture the feminine and discovered the fierceness of a black girl’s magic. I did and had what I now know to be a powerfully feminist time. Back then though, I was just saving my life.
Thirteen years later, CaShawn Thompson, a mother, wife, and specialist in early care and education based in the Washington, DC, area, began using the hashtag #BlackGirls AreMagic as a source of uplift. “The hashtag was born of a childhood understanding of how wonderful Black women are. I first used it in a tweet in response to someone saying that Serena Williams looked like a man and that is why she was a superior athlete,” she told me. In an interview with the writer Feminista Jones she explained, “The difference was, I was the first person to use it and reference Black girl empowerment. Other times it was used before, it was always something about Black girls’ and Black women’s hair. I was the first person to use Black Girl Magic or Black Girls Are Magic in the realm of uplifting Black women. Not so much about our aesthetic but just who we are.”
The phrase spread in her network, and a friend suggested she put it on a T-shirt. Within weeks she sold over three hundred. The hashtag, which Black Twitter eventually abbreviated to #BlackGirlMagic, grew from there, becoming a global phenomenon that transcended borders, rousing generations of women around the world. It spoke to me, and the women I knew, as well as an entire world of people—of all races and backgrounds—who I didn’t. The hashtag became a cultural moment in itself, even as it celebrated a series of cultural moments. And in the process the phrase became associated with the superlative: the record breakers and the history makers.
Simone Biles wins five Olympic gold medals #BlackGirl Magic
Dina Asher-Smith becomes the fastest woman in the world #BlackGirlMagic
Beychella #BlackGirlMagic
Rihanna becomes the first Black woman to launch a fashion label funded by LVMH #BlackGirlMagic
Google dedicates an ad to BlackGirlMagic #BlackGirl Magic
It speaks volumes about the trajectory of BlackGirlMagic that the Google ad about #BlackGirlMagic failed to include the woman who popularized the phrase, a move that devastated Thompson.
“Because women like me have always been erased or taken out of stories, one way or the other,” she told The Root. “Women like me—poor women, poor black women; women that—like I do—work at daycares, women that work at CVS; women that wear their hair a certain way, women that talk a certain way; women that didn’t go to college, or didn’t finish. You know, those of us that exist on the margins, even within black communities; those of us that aren’t traditionally looked at as ‘black excellence.’”
Thompson wasn’t the only one who felt left out.
My friend Amy is a woman who on paper has all the qualities of a bad bitch (law degree, gorgeous Brooklyn loft, Morehouse alum husband, and a Gap ad–gorgeous son). Those gleaming, inspiring women I described from university? She was one of them and to this day is at the center of the group of women who make up my safe space. Amy, a woman who our mutual friends routinely refer to using the word goals, admits to feeling displaced by #BlackGirlMagic. “I feel like I’m surrounded by all these unicorns with these colorful manes, everyone killing it. But I feel like this idea of Black girl magic doesn’t always leave room for the ones who are just trying to figure it all out, and that’s because we don’t always get to see the fallible as powerful.”
Issa Rae voiced similar concerns when doing the press rounds for her show Insecure. “We don’t get to just be boring,” she said about her show, which stands out in the television landscape for depicting Black women as being ordinary. The great irony: critics hailed the simple act as revolutionary.
To be clear, this is not an anti-BlackGirlMagic treatise. It’s a commentary on the celebrification of it and a case for steering the movement back to where it originated, a place that highlights the magic in the regular-degular, whether that be figuring out a way to get your child collected from summer camp at a moment’s notice when your husband drops the ball or managing to roll out of bed, step into the shower, and resume a job search when a string of demoralizing phone calls from a debt collector has you wanting to do otherwise. A space where the okay bitch is a bad bitch and the bad bitch can just be. Free.
Epilogue
The Way We Grieve
Words are no match for death. When Eric Garner gasped “I can’t breathe” as New York City Police officers choked him to death on a busy Staten Island street on a summer day in 2017, his cry fell on deaf ears—as did the very same words when George Floyd uttered them in May, three years later, as a police officer choked all the life out of him in front of a food shop in Minneapolis.
And yet words help keep the dead alive, enshrining the memory of a life in history. This ritual, the practice of memorial, has historically been left to the eulogy and the obituary, pieces of writing normally authored by family members and friends—a highlights reel of one’s milestones, achievements, and deeply personal, pivotal moments. But what happens when the Internet and social media do the eulogizing? What happens when the tributes stop being about the dead and are instead about the people processing the news of the dead? One day you’re alive, living, breathing, and full of promise as 19-year-old Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau was. The next day, you’re not. Life cut short and memorialized in grid form. One day, you’re known among your immediate family and friends. The next day, you’re a hashtag, a headline, and a Wikipedia page. A google trail that has sprung up overnight as word of your death spreads on social media and digital press outlets race to rank first on your name.