Abstract
In Black Girls and How We Fail Them, Aria S. Halliday tackles how Black girls are seen yet misrecognized and misunderstood in political, social, and cultural contexts, including popular culture. The book opens with a poem penned by Halliday, and inspired by poet Jasmine Mans’s Black Girl, Call Home (2021), especially her poem “Missing Girls.” In Halliday’s poem “Sometimes I Go Missing,” she situates her personal experiences with harm—from abuse, misogynoir, and silencing—even from the people and systems that claim to love and care for her, including her own self, in a broader context of harm that Black girls experience interpersonally, institutionally, and in popular culture. This widespread missing of Black girls is what Halliday names, calls out, and calls in as a series of failures throughout the book.
Across six chapters, Halliday frames multiple societal failures toward Black girls: (1) a failure to hold Black men and fathers accountable, which creates a culture of mistrust and abuse and contributes to a culture of misogynoir; (2) a failure to protect Black girls and a failure to allow Black girls to have private lives; (3) a failure through popular films’ depictions of Black girls and Black girlhood; (4) a failure through mistreatment of Black girls and Black girlhood in fictional contexts, which leads to real-life mischaracterization and mistreatment; (5) a failure through not protecting Black girls in communities, which leads to them becoming dispensable; and (6) a failure through misrecognizing and misrepresenting Black girls’ insecurities as meanness. Halliday engages in autoethnography as well as in-depth critical analyses across media—music, talk radio, digital presence, news, television, film, and literature—to uncover how society has failed Black girls.
Halliday begins her analysis of failure with a genre that she loves, and therefore which deserves her loving critique: Hip-Hop. The persistent misogynoir of Hip-Hop music and culture in its more than 50-year lifespan continues to fail and harm Black girls. Halliday frames this failure through the public and private personas of three Black male Hip-Hop moguls, who are all fathers—Jay Z, Diddy, and T.I.—and reveals their treatment and discussion of their own Black daughters. Halliday argues that the misogynoir performed on and off the stage of these “ultimate rap dads” (p. 17) with their Black daughters, as well as the female romantic partners in their lives—from infidelity, to intimate partner violence, to promotion of chastity—not only fails these men’s daughters but also “Hip-Hop’s daughters” (p. 17), meaning Black girls as a whole. Overall, Halliday urges these men to recognize their moral impact and responsibility as role models and potential protectors of Black girls and Black girlhood.
Halliday argues that obscuring Black girls in this way leads to a hypervisibility of Black girls and Black girlhood. Throughout the rest of the book, she details how surveillance and hyper-surveillance, abuse of theology, and tropes such as the salvific, dispensable, and mean Black girl are all forms of harm to Black girls as a whole. Halliday analyzes society’s real-life depictions of former president Barack Obama’s daughters, as well as fictional depictions of Black girl characters in the television show Queen Sugar and in films such as The Girl with All the Gifts, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Project Power, A Wrinkle in Time, Selah and the Spades, and Cuties, and finds that they have all worked to cultivate anti-Black girl environments in our homes, schools, faith-based institutions, neighborhoods, politics, and consciousness.
Halliday ends her book with an Epilogue as a map toward healing these failures. She reminds readers that Black girls do not have to remain missing in our recognition and treatment; we can collectively work to locate them and bring them back home, so to speak—home to safety and care—just like Mans’s and Halliday’s poems in the beginning urge. Halliday leans on Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and bell hooks’s Sisters of the Yam as blueprints for Black feminist theories and praxes of healing. Lorde, hooks, and now Halliday remind us that self-love, self-determination, embodied knowing, reclaiming of voice, and community-building are critical to not just self-recovery, but also collective resistance, recovery, and liberation. Halliday ends the book with a list of “Resources for Failing Less” (p. 161)—books and podcasts to read and listen to in order to move from solely theory to praxis. Overall, Halliday desires to make society safer for Black girls.
Through Black Girls and How We Fail Them, Halliday charts a large map of some of the spaces in popular culture where Black girls exist. Moreover, she argues and provides detailed analyses for the pervasive spreading of misogynoir through mass-produced popular culture that misrecognizes and mistreats Black girls. Halliday does not just discuss the over-consumption of anti-Black girl images, but also anti-Black girl public discourse. Her discussion of “twelve failures” (p. 3) across media throughout the book is a tremendous undertaking. At times, in trekking along in the journey to the sites of failure, the reader can get a bit of whiplash from Halliday’s discussion of music, talk radio, politics, television, film, literature, and autoethnography. Relatedly, it is not always clear who the “we” is who have failed Black girls, nor the “we” that can aid in correcting the failures and supporting multilevel recovery. If in fact the “we” that is complicit in failing Black girls is all of us, then perhaps more attention could be lent to the practices, resources, and levers of healing in the book. Overall, with Lorde as a lodestar, Halliday uses her anger at how we have failed Black girls as “productive” (p. 145) in this critical charting of the multiple sites of harm and possible practices of individual and collective healing.