“Celebrating Black Women and Girls: 50 Years of Black Women’s Studies”

Celebrating scholarly inquiry that centers Black Women and Girls is a political act; and, for me as editor of this essay series, an act of love. Loving Black women and girls in today’s political climate is also necessary. Black women have always been engaged in the fight for racial and gender justice, sexual freedom, and as Alice Walker reminds us in The World Will Follow Joy, environmental and planetary humanism and survival. However, Black women and girls are often maligned and entrenched by institutions of oppression that labor to bury and deny not only their existence but for their value and contributions to every single notion of “progress” the world over. In other words, we suffer from historical amnesia, or, the tendency to ignore and forget Black women’s histories of activism. Such historical amnesia is maintained today by the institutions of patriarchy, racial capitalism, and political oppression.