Black Girls Know Best

We are a Black feminist cultural institution and ecosystem for Black girls and gender-expansive youth.

Black Girls Know Best
Black Girlhood Archive
Black Girlhood Studies Institute

For

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Black Girls

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By

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Black Girls

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For ❤︎⁠ Black Girls ❤︎⁠ By ❤︎⁠ Black Girls ❤︎⁠

MISSION:

Black Girls Know Best is a Black feminist cultural institution and ecosystem for Black girls and gender-expansive youth. We build programs, archives, research initiatives, educational spaces, and cultural projects that position Black girls as knowledge producers and Black girlhood as a vital site of history, culture, theory, political life, and collective possibility. Through this work, we preserve and study Black girlhood, cultivate spaces for care and connection, and build the cultural, educational, and political infrastructure necessary for Black girls to shape their own lives, communities, and futures.

VISION

Black Girls Know Best envisions a world made more possible by Black girlhood. We believe Black girls carry innovative literacies, imaginations, and creativity that contains profound theories about how the world could be otherwise. We imagine Black girls with the freedom and material conditions to develop those theories into knowledge, culture, practice, and collective life; to inherit the wisdom of Black girls and women before them while refusing the boundaries of what has already been imagined. Our vision is a world in which Black girlhood is recognized as an integral site from which new worlds become thinkable and possible.

Guiding Frameworks

  • We draw from the diverse intellectual, cultural, and movement traditions of Black feminisms, including Southern, transnational, diasporic, queer, intergenerational, and cultural formations such as Hip-Hop Feminism. These traditions shape how we understand Black girlhood, power, knowledge, care, culture, and collective liberation.

  • We understand Black girlhood as a distinct site of knowledge, history, culture, theory, and political life, taking seriously the intellectual and cultural contributions of Black girls and the communities that shape their lives.

  • We approach reproductive freedom through the broader conditions that shape the ability to live, grow, parent, and make decisions about one's body with dignity, autonomy, and support.n text goes here

  • We draw on practices of accountability, repair, relationship, and collective care that address harm while creating conditions for Black girls and communities to heal, participate, and remain connected.

  • We understand preservation as a question of power, asking whose histories are documented, whose knowledge is preserved, who controls the record, and how Black communities can build and steward their own archives.

Our work is guided by Black feminist traditions of study, care, cultural preservation, and collective liberation.

Areas of Focus

The interconnected conditions, questions, and fields of inquiry that shape our work toward the flourishing and freedom of Black girls.

  • We nurture and train Black girls as thinkers, researchers, theorists, creators, and producers of knowledge - all while building educational spaces that take their intellectual lives seriously. This includes Black girlhood studies, political education, research, curriculum, scholarship, and inter/intracommunal learning.

    For more of our EDUCATION, KNOWLEDGE, & INTELLECTUAL LIFE work, explore ‘Black Girls Know Best’.

  • We work against the historical and contemporary erasure of Black girls by preserving their histories, stories, material culture, and ways of knowing. Our work considers who is remembered, who is documented, who has the power to preserve, and how Black communities can build and sustain their own cultural memory.

    For more of our ARCHIVAL JUSTICE & CULTURAL MEMORY work, explore ‘The Black Girlhood Archive’.

  • We address the conditions that shape Black girls' relationships to their bodies, health, sexuality, reproduction, and well-being. This includes reproductive health education, bodily autonomy, menstruation, access to care, and the broader social conditions necessary for Black girls to live with dignity and agency.

  • We examine the systems and social conditions that shape Black girls' safety, childhood, and freedom, including adultification, criminalization, surveillance, gendered violence, and institutional harm. We work toward environments where Black girls can experience childhood, belonging, self-determination, and collective care.Item description

  • We explore Black girls' relationships to land, ecology, food, agriculture, and environmental justice, with particular attention to Southern Black ecological traditions and land-based knowledge. This includes stewardship, food sovereignty, cultural foodways, herbalism, environmental justice, and intergenerational relationships to place.Item description

  • We engage with, honor, and study Black girlhood across borders, regions, and the global Black diaspora, attending to the distinct and interconnected histories, cultures, movements, and conditions that shape Black girls' lives. This work creates space for exchange and shared learning among Black girls and communities across the U.S. South, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and the broader diaspora.