Black Girl Crew

About 6 months ago, I got an email from a friend inviting me to a discussion on health and reproductive issues. She had this project that required her to host an educational forum in the community of her defining, and she chose to define her community as 20-40 year old black, professional women who live in Seattle. The discussion sounded interesting and also I was excited to meet other black women, so I went and it was fantastic. We stayed for hours and ate and talked. I met a lot of new people and I felt like I had walked right into something I had been searching for over the course of many years. I wasn't the only one to feel this way. We decided we wanted to get together again and thus the Black Girl Crew was formed and we have been meeting monthly since then.

My ex-roommate, L Boogie, is a Morehouse man. He once described going to a Historically Black College as being like a four year breath of fresh air. He explained as how being in an all black space was like taking a break from all the daily white black interactions that we have grown so accustomed to... and how refreshing it was not to have to deal with it. My mom also talks about her first trip to Africa and what it was like to be a black girl from Iowa seeing black people on billboards and knowing she was in a country where everyone was black from the street sweepers to the president and how amazing it was to, for once, not be in the minority.

Growing up in Wisconsin as a black middle class kid in a white middle class neighborhood, going to school with a bunch of people of all colors who lived to take chunks from my self esteem meant the only all black space I had that was comfortable and affirming was at home or with my extended family in Iowa. I didn't experience what it was like to have a group of loving and supportive black peers until I moved to Japan. There I met some wonderful people who also happened to be teachers and who I had a lot in common with, including a love of travel and learning. It was wonderful to come together in community, but kind of bittersweet that I had to go so far to find what I had been missing and that our time together was temporary.

Since then I have tried to recreate this kind of community. During grad school, at my stint on the Green Mountain, my friend DD and I created the Black Diaspora which ostensibly would have been a group of black people coming together to support one another during a difficult time. Unfortunately, this turned into a highly politicized venture with all kinds of unforeseen issues. First there was the question of how to define black at an International school. The international students who happened to be black had such a radically different culture and upbringing that they were often confused or disbelieving of the experiences of their US counterparts. And then there were some white students who were highly offended by being excluded from the group, which made some black students uncomfortable with taking part in it. It was complicated, rich, interesting, worth doing, but also uncomfortable and in many ways it missed the mark for me in terms of feeling like I was a part of a supportive community.

There have been other groups, formal and informal, but nothing quite like the Black Girl Crew. My girls are fierce. We are a community of young black women. Some of us are students, some are teachers, AIDS educators, insurance adjuster, social workers, business women, or film makers. We are poets, writers, singers, artists, story tellers, comedians, dancers, and activists. We are straight, gay, and bi-sexual and run the political spectrum from conservative to radical. We are all different shapes and sizes. Some of us have traveled, some haven't, some speak other languages, some don't. Some of us have children, some of us will never ever have children. Not all of us are from here, but we all live in the Seattle area and have our different versions of what that means. We come together in community. We share our lives, the good and bad, we support one another on our journeys. We don't always get along. The conversations are spirited. We talk loud, laugh long, and sometimes cry, bitch or get annoyed. But in this space I can take that breath. I see myself in the faces of these women, hear my voice in their stories, and for a few hours once a month, I am able to take that part of me that always feels "different" and put it aside, knowing that in this one place, I can be the "same". And even more importantly, I can be myself in my entirety without reservation, without being afraid that my light will shine too bright or that I'll make someone uncomfortable or that I won't be understood.

This weekend, we ventured out to Shelton for our first retreat which was themed Purpose and Passion. We stayed at the home of an elder, an amazing woman named Dr. M. When you first meet Dr. M, she seems like any other well dressed, Afrocentric, older black woman. Her home is spacious and light, covered in African art and books. It is out in the middle of the woods and overlooks the water. She doesn't believe in using over head lights so there were lamps and candles. We all introduced ourselves and talked and Dr. M really interesting, critical, and totally irreverent. I was in a car that arrived late, so we received a thorough dressing down, which at first seemed really intense. But for all her intensity (and over the course of the retreat she was biting and at times really harsh), Dr. M managed to bring to light a lot of different issues that have been affecting our groups. Though she talked about time and communication and seemingly "little things" she showed us how these so called "little things" that we were letting slide, had begun to build up into bigger issues. This made me reflect on some of the other groups I have been involved with and how, while we were productive or able to work together to accomplish things, we never developed a great deal of trust for one another because of the little things, like people's varying concepts of timeliness, or different styles of communication.

The retreat was really interesting and special. I felt like I had a wonderful opportunity to really connect with the women in the group and also that I learned a lot about what kind of work needs to be done to sustain a community. We had some intense conversations. We also laughed a lot. And after dinner we had an impromptu beat boxing free style poetry and song circle that was as beautiful and meaningful as it was hilarious and random. There are so many writers in the group that we have decided to form an offshoot group with the end of goal of either putting together some shows or possibly an anthology or both. There is something so powerful in simply being together. I'm looking forward to learning more about what it takes to really stand for another.