Please Purchase this Report on Black Women and Girls

This past Thursday, I drove to Brooklyn, NY to attend a press conference about the first comprehensive national study on Black American women and girls.

Hosted at a black art museum, I was joined by about 50 black women of all ages and walks of life, who were just as curious about this report as I was.

From what I understand, this report synthesizes information about black women from a host of recent governmental studies, and puts it all in one place. Because I have been researching these same studies, I already knew most of the information in it -- but still, I truly appreciate this report for a few reasons:

1. This report attempts to tell the whole story about us. It is the first report ever on black women that does not define us as a meaningless bundle of pathologies tied together with a paternalistic ribbon.

2. Black women are truly the subject of the report. WE are described FIRST, and all other races and genders are compared to black women, who are the baseline. For those of us who regularly read reports, this new perspective will be a little disconcerting at first. Usually, reports compare everyone to white men, who serve as the 'gold standard' of normalcy.

I find this new perspective refreshing and critically important. Black women are just about always defined as a subset of a larger, 'more important' group: often a footnote on a Black report or bullet point on a Women's report. Not so in this report.

3. The researchers fought to present the good news as well as the bad. Apparently, many scholars are so brainwashed into thinking that all things black are pathological, that they simply can not accept the truth of positive statistics concerning black women. The authers described how they were routinely challenged when they presented statistics that didn't jibe with many scholars beliefs about black women.

Example: The researchers were challenged over and over again about the statistic that asserts that 82.6% of graduation-aged black girls finished high school in 2007.

Academics simply could not believe that black girls finished high school at those rates, and seriously challenged that number. The researcher said that she had to repeatedly return to the Dept of Education to garner more and more evidence to support that statistic.

The 82.6% number is correct.

There was a question and answer session at the end of the presentation, but I was a little disheartened by the kinds of questions that were asked by the audience. It showed me that some of the sisters who were in the audience with me really weren't getting it.

For example, the very first question was asked by an attractive 24-ish college student. She noted that the report cost $14.95 and wanted to know why the researchers were charging for the report. Shouldn't it be free? Even after the contributors explained the expenses involved, she just couldn't let it go of the fact that they were charging for it.

SISTERS: We simply MUST stop doing this! Why do so many black women expect freebies from other black women for things that they need, but gladly pay top dollar to Polo, Baby Phat, and Nike for the things that they don't? I really wanted to sternly speak to that girl after she went on and on about it, but I just had to keep whispering to myself: "This is not my house. This is not my house..."

As a favor to Shecodes, please do not email these women asking them for a 'complimentary copy' of the report. Let's support our sisters financially!

In the upcoming weeks, you will be able to talk directly to the researchers on our The Queens' Council podcast. The report is the first annual one, and it is a good start.

I mentioned that I hoped that this group will become better funded so that they can conduct their own sampling and questioning in the future, instead of needing to depend on mining long and obscure governmental reports. They hope to move in that direction in the future as well.

Please consider purchasing and downloading the report. It was commissioned by a think tank for black women entitled The Law and Policy Group... it's about 39 pages long, and can be read in one sitting.

We are going to discuss the information and arm ourselves strategically with data like this on The Queens' Council podcasts. You can purchase the report by clicking here. Tell them Shecodes sent you!