Confronting Raced, Gendered, and Aged Expectations of Girlhood in Black Youth Advocacy

• In Event: Black Girlhoods

Abstract

When a global pandemic and racial uprisings swept the United States in 2020, they revealed for many the immense depth of American inequality. In cities, the condition of black youth has become representative of this inequality and a focal point of recovery efforts from both local governing initiatives and grassroots organizations. Yet for black girls, whose struggles can often be erased or mischaracterized by institutions and organizations alike, it is not always possible to depend on either environment for survival or care. This paper illuminates the strategies of self-preservation and systemic interrogation made possible from black girlhoods through an in-depth exploration of black girls’ experiences in racial and gender justice advocacy organizations. Drawing from histories of intersectional black youth organizing and ethnographic study with three cohorts of black teenage femme-identified youth in two organizations from 2024-2025, I show that 2020’s disruptions have exposed important raced, gendered, and aged contradictions in societal treatment that they must confront even in their spaces of resistance. I focus on the importance of age in these contradictions through a framework of “maturity” which links values they are expected to take on as emerging adult women with racialized values about ‘mature’ political strategy. While they endure immense pressure to perform these values in both their personal lives and organizational practices, they also find ways to interrogate and disrupt these values by confronting the fragility of the grown expectation.

Author

• Sophia Lindner, Yale University