Black girl magic. You may have heard of it, maybe not. If you haven't, go ahead and look it up on your favorite social media site and prepare to be amazed by the sheer awesomeness you are bound to see. Black girl magic is a term that highlights the universal awesomeness in black women.
The phrase is meant to be uplifting to black women everywhere, yet Linda Chavers found a problem with it and deemed black girls to not be magical. In her article for Elle magazine, she struck down the cheerful and inspiring hashtag and said that black girls aren't magical because she is black, herself, and battles with the incurable disease multiple sclerosis. She then mentions that if black women are magical, then our bodies wouldn't be abused, stalked, and raped as they were by Daniel Holtzclaw or thrown across classrooms by police officers. This implies that they weren't magical enough.
Talk about a reach.
Courtesy of memegenerator.net
Black women are magical because throughout their trials and tribulations, they still manage to survive and be triumphant. This is imperative to understand in a world where the black woman is arguably more oppressed than anyone else. Black girls aren't magical because they possess some magical Afro-superpower -- this is what Chavers thinks.
CaShawn Thompson (@ThePBG) is creator of the phrase, black girl magic. In a phone interview with the L.A. Times, she said,
"I say 'magic' because it's something that people don't always understand. Sometimes our accomplishments might seem to come out of thin air, because a lot of times, the only people supporting us are other black women."
In her essay, Chavers completely missed this. She thinks that Black Girl Magic is a bunch of black women waving wands around and yelling beautifying spells. Maybe Chavers took "black don't crack" too seriously, I'll never know.
Black girl magic is about embracing the struggle that everyone else is oblivious to, except other black girls. Aside from the strenuous detangling of curls and trying to stay as natural as possible, being a black girl in America is hard. This phrase is uplifting, positive and very much needed. As Demetria Lucas D'Oyley eloquently wrote,
"It’s not about black women being exclusive or being superhuman; it’s about black women recognizing the humanity in one another that so many others often fail to see."
