Do You Know Who You’re Talking To?: Effective Messaging for Young Women of Color

We have some great women on this panel, which is discussing ways to reach out to and communicate with young women of color. Mary Mahoney from the Pro-Choice Public Education Project is moderating, with Nicole Clark from Helping Our Teen Girls in Real Life Situations (HOTGIRLS) and Candace Webb from the AIDS Alliance for Children, Youth & Families as presenters.
One resource they gave that I really want to check out is this study, “Representin’ in Cyberspace: Sexual Scripts, Self-Definition, and Hip Hop Culture in Black American Adolescent Girls’ Home Pages� that was released this month in the international journal Culture, Health and Sexuality and led by Dr. Carla Stokes, the founding Executive Director of HOTGIRLS. While the study challenges the generalization that black teen girls aren’t tech-savvy and shows ways that they use the internet and hip hop to express themselves in creative ways, it also showed that much of the time, they actually choose to emulate the hypersexual, negative stereotypes of black women that are depicted in the media. All the more reason to have more online activism and outreach to these young women.
Oh gawd, they just put on “A Girl Like Me.� Great film, but I so do not need to be crying today.